When literacy is the universal standard of cultural achievement in both nations and individuals, the ability to read a picture is so little recognized that we do not even have a name for it. On the contrary, the opposition between pictures and words commonly separates literate from illiterate, the educated elite from the barbarous idolators of the image. With examples ranging from the prehistoric cave paintings of Lascaux to the disturbing contemporary photographs of Sally Mann, James Heffernan seeks to complicate the cultural polarity by showing that pictures demand to be read quite as much as printed pages do, that we cannot "recognize" their meaning until and unless we learn to interpret their signs, which largely depend on the cultural conventions within which they are framed. But learning to read pictures also means listening to the questions they raise and the challenges they pose to authority of the word.