Pictures And Power, By W. J. T Mitchell

In Pictures and Power, an essay about the forms of power of the images, W.J.T Mitchell described the image “not merely as instruments of power, but as internally divided force-field, scenes of struggle indicated by the hybrid term of the “imagetext.””(Mitchell 323) In another word, to Mitchell the image, itself a vessel for the creator’s voice (Mitchell 140), is almost a battlefield, one which witnesses a three-way clash between the voices of the image’s creator, the observer and the image’s owner, or the one who owns the mean to reproduce it. To demonstrate this clash, we will have a photograph by the French photographer Robert Doisneau titled Be bop in The Vieux Colombier, a club in Saint Germain des Près (Doisneau). Taken in 1951, Paris,
Since it was only six years after the end of World War II, he can say that the Be Bop… is misleading about the life in the period, self-denial about the country situation at the time, or at best, a mere acknowledgement of what was happening along sides the social and political changes. From these cases, the Be bop…portrays the clash between Illusionism and Realism. Mitchell describes realism as “the capacity of pictures to show the truth about things,” (Mitchell 325) which is opposing to the Illusionism that seeks to stimulate the viewer. Since the Be Bop… can be said to be both a documentary of 1951 Paris and a fraction of a fantasy, as portrayed above, the clash between illusionism and realism is portrayed. Mitchell claimed that “realism and illusionism are often used interchangeably,” (326) but it is not the case with the Be Bop. He gives some examples of such use, that we may call illusionist piece “realistic,” or dismissing a realistic piece as “illusory,” (326) however such use is only to describe the effectiveness of the object in question in exercising its power. The use of those two terms in the Be Bop… is not to assess its power, but rather to point out the existence of two contradicting force that may reside within the same