Visual rhetoric

Visual rhetoric is the fairly recent development of a theoretical framework describing how visual images communicate meaning, as opposed to aural, verbal, or other messages. Visual rhetoric generally falls under a group of terms, which all encompass visual literacy.[1] Purdue OWL defines visual literacy as one's ability to "read" an image.[1] In other words, it is one's ability to understand what an image is attempting to communicate.[1] This includes understanding creative choices made with the image such as coloring, shading, and object placement.[1] This type of awareness comes from an understanding how images communicate meaning, also known as visual rhetoric.[2] The study of visual rhetoric is different from that of visual or graphic design, in that it emphasizes images as sensory expressions of cultural meaning, as opposed to purely aesthetic consideration.[3] Visual rhetoric has been approached from a variety of academic fields of study such as art history, linguistics, semiotics, cultural studies, business and technical communication, speech communication, and classical rhetoric. As a result, it can be difficult to discern the exact relationship between different parts of the field of visual rhetoric.[4] Some examples of artifacts analyzed by visual rhetoricians are charts, paintings, sculpture, videogames, diagrams, web pages, advertisements, movies, architecture, newspapers, or photographs. Visual rhetoric seeks to develop rhetorical theory in a way that is more comprehensive and inclusive with regard to images and their interpretations.[5] Visual images and material objects have become more relevant in light of recent technological developments for understanding general communicative means.[5] Visual rhetoric is a conscious, communicative decision; the colors, form, medium, and size is chosen on purpose.[6] However, a person may come in contact with a sign, but if they have no relation to the sign, its message is arbitrary. Therefore, in order for artifacts or products to be conceptualized as visual rhetoric, they must have three characteristics: they must be symbolic, involve human intervention, and be presented to an audience for the purpose of communicating.[7]

History

The exact history of the field of visual rhetoric is difficult to trace, as it could be argued that "visual rhetoric" has been studied and practiced as long as images have. The term emerged largely as a mechanism to set aside a certain area of study and to focus attention on the specific rhetorical traits of visual mediums.[4] In the history of rhetoric, study has been geared toward linguistics.[5] Visual symbols were deemed trivial and subservient, thus were largely ignored. As a result, rhetorical theory has been created with a significant exclusion of visual rhetoric.[5] As visual rhetoric is studied, it catalyzes a series of challenges against linguistic rhetoric altogether. Linguistic rhetoric alone creates many boundaries, and the holistic picture emerges with the introduction of visual elements.[5] According to Sonja Foss, scholars of visual rhetoric analyze photographs, drawings, paintings, graphs and tables, interior design and architecture, sculpture, Internet images, and film.[5] From a rhetorical perspective, the focus is on the contextual response rather than the aesthetic response.[5] An aesthetic response is a viewer's direct perception with the sensory aspects of the visual, whereas with a rhetorical response, meaning is given to the visual.[5] Suddenly, every part of the artifact has significance in the message being conveyed; each line, each shading, each person has a purpose.[6]

Areas of focus

Sonja Foss states that while studying visual objects, rhetorical scholars tend to have three areas of study: nature, function, or evaluation.[5] Nature encompasses the literal components of the artifact.[5] This is a primary focus of visual rhetoric because to understand the function of an image, it is necessary to understand the substantive and stylistic nature of the artifact itself.[5] For Foss, function holds a somewhat literal definition—it represents the function (or perhaps purpose) an image serves for an audience.[8] The emotion an image aims to evoke is its function.[5] The evaluation of an artifact determines if the image serves its function3. For example, if the nature of an image is dark and edgy, and the function of the image is to instill fear in the audience, the evaluation would determine whether the audience was scared.[5]

Semiotics

As shown in the works of the Groupe µ,[9] visual rhetoric is closely related to the study of semiotics. Semiotic theory seeks to describe the rhetorical significance of sign-making. Visual rhetoric is a broader study, covering all the visual ways humans try to communicate, outside academic policing.[3] Visual rhetoric applies visual images to convey messages and images are composed of elements including “size, color, line, and shape.”[10] In images, meanings are created by the layout and spatial positions of these elements.[10] The entities that constitute an image are socially, politically, and culturally constructed. The same image may represent different rhetorical meanings to people from different societies and cultures. To achieve rhetorical effects and convey messages accurately, the choice of the elements in an image and the arrangements of them should fit certain audiences, societies, and cultures.[10]

In "The Rhetoric of the Image," French theorist Roland Barthes also examines the semiotic nature of images, and the ways that images function to communicate specific messages.[11] Barthes pointed out that messages transmitted by visual images include linguistic, coded iconic and non-coded iconic messages.[12] Phillips and McQuarrie (2004) categorize visual rhetorical images into two dimensions: meaning operation and visual structure. Meaning operation refers to the relations and connections between elements in visual images. Visual structure refers to the way that the elements are visually displayed.[13]

Art history

Visual tropes and tropic thinking are a part of visual rhetoric (the art of visual persuasion and visual communication using visual images). The study includes, but is not limited to, the various ways in which it can be applied throughout visual art history.

Science

Although visual rhetoric is more commonly linked with areas such as marketing, advertising, and art, it pervades in every medium in culture- even science. Critic, Nathan Stormer, offers such an analysis of visual rhetoric surrounding images of reproduction, using The Miracle of Life[14] as his scientific artifact. Although producer Lennart Nilson, rejects any responsibility for establishing “apparent truths” saying “I am not the man who shall decide when human life started. I am a reporter. I am a photographer”, Stormer argues that the portrayal of the reproductive journey found its way into political definitions of “life” exemplifying American people’s reliance on biology and science to understand all unknown human processes. Stormer argues that the film is deeply problematic because its effect “deems the creation of human life a value that supersedes cultural and individual considerations and that centralizes life’s worth in reproductive structures and practices.”[15] Nilson’s inspired images of the fetus became a central part of pro-life visual claims that life is real after conception. Stormer argues that his portrayal of the virtual body serves as the foundation for medical discourse about life versus death and supports a vision of the “normalized”, gendered, heterosexual individual for the public to consume as scientific truth.[15] He calls upon specific examples in the film such as the visual power given to sex hormones that appear to dominate the cycle of reproduction and create a gendered narrative. The sperm are “proactive agents” who “make rational decisions based on the economy and politics of the woman’s reproductive system” while the egg “waits” and then “nurtures”.[15] Stormer critiques the reproduction cycle as primal, based on gender, and beyond our control in the exterior world as well. He urges consumers of visual rhetoric, even if it appears to be absolute truth, to be aware of its construction as purposeful, bias, and reflective of culture. “When considering definitions of life and our bodily rights in terms of sexual practices, we should question established truths carefully because rhetoric such as Nilson's is often unwittingly accorded the status of absolute truth.”[15]

Composition

The field of composition studies has recently (re)turned its attention to visual rhetoric. In an increasingly visual society, proponents of visual rhetoric in composition classes suggest that an increased literacy requires skill not only with writing but also with visual communication. This skill relates to an understanding of the mediated nature of all communication, and to an awareness of the act of representation.[16][17] Visual rhetoric can be merged into a composition classroom to assist in writing development. Student writers can first be assigned an observation task, for example, observing a work of art in a museum. Based on the observation, instructors design a series of writing activities, from easy to difficult: a descriptive paragraph, an entertaining poem, a short essay on learning experience, a narrative, and a long essay on their own subjects. The writing activities can also be combined with in-class or off-class readings, guiding students through the process of writing.[18]

 

Graffiti

Graffiti is a “pictorial or visual inscription on a publically accessible surface.”[19] According to Hanauer, Graffiti achieves three functions; the first is to allow marginalized texts to participate in the public discourse, the second is that graffiti serves the purpose of expressing openly “controversial contents”, and the third is to allow “marginal groups to the possibility of expressing themselves publicly.”[20] Gross and Gross indicated that graffiti is capable of serving a rhetorical purpose.[21] In addition, Wiens' (2014) research showed that graffiti can be considered an alternative way of creating rhetorical meaning for issues such as homelessness.[22]

Classical rhetoric

The "canonical approach" to studying visual rhetoric relates visual concepts to the canons of Western classical rhetoric (Inventio, Dispositio, Elocutio, Memoria and Pronuntiatio). In the textbook Designing Visual Language: Strategies for Professional Communicators,[23] its authors list six canons which guide the rhetorical impact of a document: arrangement, emphasis, clarity, conciseness, tone and ethos. According to Kostelnick and Roberts these canons can be defined as:

These six visual cognates provide an extension of classical rhetoric that can be used as a starting point for analyzing images rhetorically.[24]

Visual rhetoric of text

Visual rhetoric is usually used to denote non-textual artifacts, yet any mark on a surface—including text—can be seen as "visual." Consider the texts available at Project Gutenberg. These "plain vanilla" texts, lacking any visual connection to their original, published forms, nevertheless suggest important questions about visual rhetoric. Their bare-bones manner of presentation implies, for example, that the "words themselves" are more important than the visual forms in which the words were originally presented. Given that such texts can easily be read by a speech synthesizer, they also suggest important questions about the relationship between writing and speech, or orality and literacy.

See also

References

Barthes, Roland. "The Rhetoric of the Image." Image, Music, Text. Ed. and trans. Stephen Heath. New York: Hill and Wang, 1977. 32-51.</ref>

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  1. 1 2 3 4 "Visual Rhetoric: Overview". Purdue Online Writing Lab. Retrieved 2013-10-21.
  2. ↑ "Visual Rhetoric/Visual Literacy: Writing About Photography" (PDF). Duke University. Retrieved 2013-10-21.
  3. 1 2 3 4 5 Kress, Gunther, and Theo van Leeuwen. Reading Images: The Grammar of Visual Design. New York: Routledge, 1996.
  4. 1 2 3 4 5 Hill, Charles, and Marguerite Helmers, eds. Defining Visual Rhetorics. Mahwah, NJ: Lawrence Erlbaum Associates, Publishers, 2004.
  5. 1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 10 11 12 13 Foss, Sonja. "Framing the Study of Visual Rhetoric: Toward a Transformation of Rhetorical Theory" (PDF). Retrieved 2016-02-19.
  6. 1 2 Foss, Sonja. "Framing the Study of Visual Rhetoric: Toward a Transformation for Rhetorical Theory" (PDF). Retrieved 2016-02-19.
  7. ↑ Foss, Sonja. "Framing the Study of Visual Rhetoric Toward a Transformation of Rhetorical Theory" (PDF). Retrieved 2016-02-19.
  8. ↑ Foss, Sonja. "Framing a Study of Visual Rhetoric: Toward a Transformation of Rhetorical Theory" (PDF). Retrieved 2016-02-19.
  9. 1 2 3 4 Groupe µ. Traité du signe visuel. Pour une rhétorique de l'image. Paris: Le Seuil, 1992.
  10. 1 2 3 Kress, Gunther (2010). Multimodality--a Social Semiotic Approach to Contemporary Communication. New York: Routledge. ISBN 9780415320610.
  11. 1 2 3 Barthes, Roland. "The Rhetoric of the Image." Image, Music, Text. Ed. and trans. Stephen Heath. New York: Hill and Wang, 1977. 32-51.
  12. ↑ Borchers, Timothy (2011). Rhetorical Theory--An Introduction. Long Grove ILL: Waveland Press. pp. 271–272. ISBN 978-1577667315.
  13. ↑ Phillips, Barbara; McQuarrie, Edward (2004). "Beyond Visual Metaphor: A New Typology of Visual Rhetoric in Advertising". Marketing Theory. 4(1/2): 113–136.
  14. ↑ name= "Nilson1983"
  15. 1 2 3 4 5 6 7 Stormer, N. (1997). Embodying Normal Miracles. Quarterly Journal of Speech, 83(2), 172-191. National Communication Association.
  16. 1 2 3 4 Hill, Charles. "Reading the Visual in College Writing Classes." Intertexts: Reading Pedagogy in College Writing Classrooms. Ed. Marguerite Helmers. Mahwah, NJ: Lawrence Erlbaum Associates, 2003.
  17. 1 2 3 4 George, Diana. "From Analysis to Design: Visual Communication in the Teaching of Writing." College Composition and Communication (2002).
  18. ↑ Welsh, Kristen. "Teaching Visual Rhetoric in the First-Year Composition Classroom". Teaching English in the Two Year College. 37: 256.
  19. ↑ Hanauer, David (2011). "The discursive construction of the separation wall at Abu Dis: Graffiti as political discourse". Journal of Language and Politics. 10: 301–321.
  20. ↑ Hanauer, David (2004). "Silence, voice and erasure: psychological embodiment in graffiti at the site of Prime Minister Rabin’s assassination". The Arts in Psychotherapy. 31: 29–35.
  21. ↑ Gross, Daniel D.; Gross, Timothy (1993). "TAGGING:Changing Visual Patterns and the Rhetorical Implications of a New Form of Graffiti". Review of General Semantics. 50: 251– 264.
  22. ↑ Wiens, Brianna I. (2014). HOME IS WHERE THE SPRAY-PAINTED HEART IS: GRAFFITI AS RHETORICAL RESISTANCE ON SKID ROW. Master thesis. ProQuest.
  23. 1 2 3 4 Kostelnick, Charles, and David D. Roberts, Designing Visual Language: Strategies for Professional Communicators. Boston: Allyn and Bacon, 1998.
  24. 1 2 3 4 Willerton, Russell, “Visual Metonymy and Synecdoche: Rhetoric for Stage-Setting Images”. J. Technical Writing and Communication 35.1 (2005): 3-31.
  25. 1 2 3 Handa, Carolyn, ed. Visual Rhetoric in a Digital World. New York: Bedford/St. Martin's, 2004.
  26. 1 2 3 Rose, Gillian. Visual Methodologies: An Introduction to the Interpretation of Visual Materials. London: SAGE Publications, 2007.
  27. 1 2 3 The Miracle of Life. Dir. Lennart Nilson. Time-Life Video. 1983
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