recognize or understand what a photograph represents. In his book Don't Sleep: There Are Snakes , Daniel Everett recounts his time spent living with and studying the Piraha people of the Amazon Basin. I seem to remember from the book that he was eventually able to make them understand what a picture was, and they were eventually able to realize what was being represented, but that at first glance it was essentially meaningless to them. It wasn't that they were cognitively unable to grasp the concept, but rather with no previous frame of reference the little square piece of paper with different colors on it just looked like a square with different colors on it, not like an image of a tree or jaguar or whatever. It took them time to learn how to perceive the patterns of color as a real object, not basically just an inkblot. I think part of the difference is that photos are excessively, mechanically realistic. For example, we get unwanted shading and lighting variations, inappropriate poses when captured in mid-motion, etc. A photographic portrait (normally) goes to great lengths to moderate lighting extremes, and remove unflattering highlights, bad contrast, or mis-poses. A painting will have smoothly lit skin except where the painter wanted highlights or shadows to be. The classic photos are either deliberately or accidentally also excellent compostions meeting the same criteria as good paintings. If you asked a renaissance painter to do a photorealistic painting and showed him, I suspect he'd ask