There isn’t a single overarching value that an image can be assessed by. Making even the most straightforwardly technical and illustrative of images involves numerous esthetic and technical tradeoffs. As a result, the activity of image-making is caught between competing demands, none of which it can fully satisfy. 

 

                    Neither can these tensions be resolved by technological advancement. For instance, a movement from illustration to photography is not necessarily progressive. A photograph can be both more realistic and yet less clear than an illustration. In favoring a single perspective and moment in time, it can end up producing a less representative image of the broad range of forms a phenomenon might take than an artfully executed illustration.

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                    Perhaps this lack of a clear path of progress explains why certain strains of esthetic debate have persistently tracked developments in visual technology. Arranging “classical” values of rationality, veracity, verisimilitude, and optical realism on one side, and the expressive forces that go by names such as the romantic, the gothic, and the grotesque on the other, they have connected the epistemological assumptions underlying evolving formal preferences to different moral, ethical, and material worlds that present stark choices. 

                   Today, there is widespread cynicism over the instrumental use of images and the effects of the technologies used to produce them. The extraordinary malleability, ubiquity, and speed of circulation of images make all images suspect. And image-making remains riddled with pitfalls.