At this point, it may be pertinent to ask – what exactly are images for? It is not just for art – used to manifest human experiences into tangible forms; road signs, logos, marketing posters, and family photographs are all images without generally being considered art. An image is not just for communication – used to transmit information from one person to another; national flags and wedding rings are both images that communicate very little information but symbolize a great deal.
An image, perhaps, is not even just for representation – used to compress something in order to serve as a stand-in – because while images are often representation, the creation and maintenance of images requires more active engagement. Unlike a map, a statue, or a diagram that represents something, an image acquires cultural force only through collective engagement. Representation depicts; images participate.
Consider flags. Ever since the turbulent takeover in 1979 by a hardline, theocratic regime, Iran has increasingly found itself isolated on the world stage. Decades of international tension culminated in the joint U.S. and Israeli military operations in the country in 2026. As a substantial portion of the Iranian diaspora does not support the current dictatorial regime, a resurgence of the old Iranian flag has adorned a multitude of shops, cars, windows in the West, in an expression of support for regime change. The old flag dates from the period of the Iranian Shah, featuring a saber-wielding lion in its center, instead of the Islamic Republic’s stylized calligraphic symbol.
The respective flags represent different political eras in Iran’s history, but it does more than that as an image – it is being used to express aspiration, identity, solidarity, and political leanings. For decades the Shah’s flag was unused, representing an out-of-circulation symbol, and an ecosystem that no longer existed. But the revival of the flag isn’t a linear wish for the reinstatement of the Shah – support for the Shah is deeply divided across those who fly the old flag, in fact, many advocate for a new, democratic Iranian government. The representation held by the old flag has thus been morphed, via social forces, into an image that unifies people who want an end to the current Islamic Republic regime.
In this way, we could perhaps think of images as symbolic technologies through which humans materialize significance, and a network of images become cultural infrastructure that allows those meanings to persist, spread, and coordinate collective behavior across time.
The description of images as a form of technology is not incidental. Every human technology tries to solve a human problem – writing tries to solve the limitation of memory; roads and transportation try to solve the limitation of distance; financial instruments try to solve the limitation of barter. Since images are deployed to materialize significance, perhaps it tries to solve the limitation of private consciousness, and allow the meaning that is internally experienced to manifest beyond the individual mind. This is not to say that sharing or evangelizing is explicitly the purpose of image deployment – sometimes, our own thoughts can be difficult for us to perceive, analyze, and even validate until we can see it in visual form. But certainly, the existence of such visual forms makes distribution and propagation more accessible.
If this is true, then image-making is not a peripheral cultural activity, but one of civilization’s foundational – albeit not exclusive – technologies. Every society, every group, regardless of geography or era, must continually manufacture images – not simply to depict their reality, but to externalize the beliefs, identities, memories, and aspirations that no individual mind can sustain alone. Images become the visible scaffolding upon which invisible social realities are constructed. Humans manufacture images not because we are visual creatures; we do it because we are meaning-making creatures. A pressing question, then, is, in the ocean of the high-speed, large-scale technologies available to humans today – from internet platforms to artificial intelligence – what kinds of symbolic worlds those new images are building.