An introduction to ways of understanding and evaluating the making, reception and theoretical understandings of images in our culture. Different cultures and historical periods have treated images in radically different ways with different ways of understanding the way images relate to their producer(s), viewer(s) and to the world. There is also a philosophical concern with the nature of the image, how it is able to have meaning, to represent at all. How are we able to read images? Is it a natural process or culturally determined? These issues will be addressed by critically examining the different ways of understanding the artistic image in Western and Non-western arts, and in crucial developments in Western art history (including Renaissance perspective; the invention of photography; photo-mechanical reproduction; Modernism and abstraction; and feminist critiques).