Pictures About Pictures

Mitchell's essay, "Metapictures" is an essay on pictures about pictures. Something that personally bothered me with this essay is the idea of self-reference. I still don't necessarily understand it. Is it trying to explain how if you're looking at a picture, all you need to do is look at it to understand what's going on and not have to venture and do further research? The idea of having everything you need to understand the image already present in one sounds like a plausible idea, but is it still applicable if one was to change the perspective---like from modernist to post modernist?  

This essay literally just breaks down what a metapicture is and the three types of it, so I felt that this idea, this term, self-reference, is something that you have to understand in order to see the bigger picture. Mitchell even says that "self-reference is a central issue in modernist aesthetics and it's various postmodern revisions" (Mitchell, 35). Regarding modernism and postmodern revisions, I wish that there were more examples that would show the difference in self-reference. It seems like metapicture is the term for the essay but self-reference is the base in which the term is built on, and because of that I would like to know more about the term.

I was curious if metapictures could be subjective as well. People grow up and customize their own tabula rasa's so to speak over time, people are unique. Being unique does that mean that two people will have the same understanding of a metapicture? Because, if a metapicture includes it's self-reference and everything one needs to appreciate the piece, then does it avoid subjective opinion?

Mitchell, W.J.T. "Metapictures." Picture Theory: Essays on verbal and visual representation. 35-82.