Death comes to everyman and it comes with the passage of time. Anonymity comes also with the passage of time and it is this that mankind are afraid of. The process of being forgotten is the consequence of death and something that all dread. When a life is extinguished how is it to be remembered and treasured unless some form of representation is used to preserve it through time and beyond death. Paintings are one way in which mankind has ultimately beaten the passage of time. Paintings act to preserve images and along with those images memories and stories of the past that would certainly have been lost without such ongoing representation.
Paintings are iconic in nature, that is , they represent a likeness of something. By painting a portrait of someone the likeness of that person is given a "form that endures"3 the passage of time. There is a balance in paintings between realism and symbolism4 which creates the form of a likeness rather than a complete representation. Time does not function at all within a painting, time acts as merely a state in which the painting exists. Paintings, in particular portraits, attempt to "vainly" preserve oneself through time, as an attempt at conquering death by making ones likeness as like an object that will last beyond death. Plastic realism is the term Bazin uses to describe this likeness or this imitation of real life, created to endure time. .
Bazin notes that the ambition of paintings changed through the centuries from creating images that represented an "expression of spiritual reality"5 to pure "duplications of the outside world"6. From the creations of illusionary images, a mixture of reality and symbolism, the art developed to include still life's and landscapes, presenting reality through likeness. This paved the way for the introduction of the camera which produced a complete replication of reality. "Photography freed the plastic arts from their obsession with likeness"7, in other words, no longer was only a likeness created of an image but a perfect duplicate or copy, or an indexical image.
