6.1 Overview of Visual Rhetoric

As a link between images and meaning, visual rhetoric is crucial to media and communication studies. Visual rhetoric is the deliberate use of pictures, symbols, and other visual elements to communicate ideas and sway audiences. It acknowledges that images may be just as convincing as written or spoken words and are not just for decoration. Media practitioners may produce more interesting and successful content for advertising, journalism, or entertainment by mastering the fundamentals of visual rhetoric. A deeper understanding of how images function within cultural contexts and how they can be used to transmit intricate thoughts and emotions is fostered by the study of visual rhetoric, which permits the decoding of visual language.

Since visual rhetoric is a crucial part of effective communication in today’s visually-driven society, those who make media should understand how to master it. In addition to being an aesthetic activity, being able to create and decipher visual messages is a crucial talent for communicating thoughts, emotions, and knowledge. Media makers may use imagery more effectively, frame their material more effectively, and engage audiences more effectively if they are aware of the subtleties of visual language. This competence transcends purely aesthetic considerations; it calls for a profound comprehension of how visual components can be strategically matched with the intended message, audience culture, and context of media consumption. A proficiency with visual rhetoric in any media-related field, including advertising, filmmaking, and web design, allows content producers to create pieces that connect with viewers, improve comprehension, and eventually elicit the intended reaction or action.

So far you have examined how primarily written arguments work rhetorically. But visuals (symbols, paintings, photographs, advertisements, cartoons, etc.) also work rhetorically, and their meaning changes from context to context.

Imagine two straight lines intersecting each other at right angles. One line runs from north to south. The other is from east to west. Now think about the meanings that this sign evokes.

What came to mind as you pondered this sign? Crossroads? A first aid sign? The Swiss flag? Your little brother making a cross sign with his forefingers that signals “step away from the hallowed ground that is my bedroom”?

Now think of a circle around those lines so that the ends of the lines hit, or cross over, the circumference of the circle. What is the image’s purpose now?

What did you come up with? The Celtic cross? A surveyor’s target? A pizza cut into really generous sizes?

Did you know that this symbol is also the symbol for our planet Earth? And it’s the symbol for the Norse god, Odin. Furthermore, a quick web search will also tell you that John Dalton, a British chemist who led the way in atomic theory and died in 1844, used this exact same symbol to indicate the element sulfur.

Recently, however, the symbol became the subject of a fiery political controversy. The marketing team of former Alaska governor (and former vice-presidential candidate), Sarah Palin, placed several of these symbols—the lines crossed over the circumference of the circle in this case—on a map of the United States. The symbols indicated where the Republican Party had to concentrate their campaign because these two seemingly innocuous lines encompassed by a circle evoked, in this context, the symbol for crosshairs—which itself invokes a myriad of meanings that range from “focus” to “target.”

However, after the shooting of Congresswoman Gabrielle Giffords in Arizona in January 2011, the symbol, and the image it was mapped onto, sparked a vehement nationwide debate about its connotative meaning. Clearly, the image’s rhetorical effectiveness had transformed into something that some considered offensive. Palin’s team withdrew the image from her website.

How we understand symbols rhetorically, and indeed all images, depends on how the symbols work with the words they accompany, and on how we understand and read the image’s context, or the social “landscape” within which the image is situated. As you have learned from earlier chapters, much of this contextual knowledge in persuasive situations is tacit, or unspoken.

Like writing, how we use images has real implications in the world. So, when we examine visuals in rhetorical circumstances, we need to uncover this tacit knowledge. Even a seemingly innocuous symbol, like the one above, can denote a huge variety of meanings, and these meanings can become culturally loaded. The same is true for more complex images—something we will examine at length below.

In this chapter, we will explore how context—as well as purpose, audience, and design—render symbols and images rhetorically effective. The political anecdote above may seem shocking, but, nevertheless, it indicates how persuasively potent visuals are, especially when they enhance the meaning of a text’s words or vice versa. Our goal for this chapter, then, is to come to terms with the basics of visual analysis, which can encompass the analysis of words working with images or the analysis of images alone. When you compose your own arguments, you can put to use what you discover in this chapter when you select or consider creating visuals to accompany your own work.

Here is an overview of Visual Rhetoric from the OWL at Purdue: