"The picture held us captive"...

What was meant by this, and how do you reconcile the "attack on images" (by whom?) with the current dominance of visual culture.
This is interesting.
I falso find thse pictures beautiful and restful. They make me wish to go to kangaroo island.

btw, I am holed up in a storm-induced blackout. Only the airport seems to work!

Fiona,
The Wittgenstein material re:

"A picture held us captive. And we could not get outside it, for it lay in our language and language seemed to repeat it to us inexorably" (par. 115) ...Philosophical Investigations

can be found here.

The cryptic phrase is generally interpreted thus:
a) language contains pictures
b) we are unable to avoid these pictures because, presumably, we are unable to avoid (using) language and c) we become entangled in our forms of speech at least in part because we are held captive by, entranced by, these pictures.
Step c) is not explicitly stated in Philosophical Investigations but it seems to many philosophers that Wittgenstein clearly implies it.

A good example of 'a' is the way Aboriginal art is pictured as primitive in a modernist art institution. It is entangled in the modernist art criticism and in exhibitions in the National Gallery of Australia.

The criticism about picturiing is largely about a picture as a window onto the world or as or mirror kind of reflection. We imagine ourselves somehow peering into another world...observe the behavior and characteristics of its
inhabitants, as if we are absent from the world as a foreign country. This kind of picturing can be found in the logical postivist conception of science tells us the truth about the world; or in the truth represented by documentary photography.

It is assumed that logical structure of language (words or images)will mirror the logically possible states of affairs. The logicvasl postivists helds that we must get beneath the confusions of ordinary language to find the true structure of language and construct the logically ideal language. In doing so, we will map the logical structure of the (empirical) world.

Wittgenstein is talkign about a way of viewing language as a whole. He says:

2....Let us imagine a language ...The language is meant to serve for communication between a builder A and an assistant B. A is building with building-stones; there are blocks, pillars, slabs and beams. B has to pass the stones, and that in the order in which A needs them. For this purpose they use a language consisting of the words 'block', 'pillar', 'slab', 'beam'. A calls them out; --B brings the stone which he has learnt to bring at such-and-such a call. -- Conceive of this as a complete primitive language.

The criticisms of picture from those who think of langauge as systems of meaning (structuralists) or as a plethora of meanings (poststructuralists) .

The image in the post explores the way that what we view is framed by language.