Visual Rhetoric
Visual rhetoric studies how images, photographs, and visual designs persuade and make meaning, applying and reworking rhetorical theory for the pictorial.
Definition
Visual rhetoric is the study of how visual images and designs operate persuasively and communicatively, and the body of theory that analyzes images as rhetorical artifacts.
Scope
This topic covers the rhetorical analysis of visual artifacts—photographs, advertisements, diagrams, monuments, and other images. It treats Barthes's semiotic analysis of the image, the consolidation of visual rhetoric as a field in communication and composition studies, and frameworks for analyzing how images function rhetorically through composition, denotation and connotation, and context.
Core questions
- How do images persuade differently from words?
- How do denotation and connotation structure an image's meaning?
- What makes a visual artifact a rhetorical object?
- How does context shape the rhetorical force of an image?
Key concepts
- denotation and connotation
- anchorage
- visual argument
- composition and framing
- image and context
Key theories
- Rhetoric of the image
- Barthes analyzes how images carry a literal denoted message and culturally coded connotations, with linguistic anchorage guiding interpretation, founding the semiotic study of visual persuasion.
- Defining visual rhetoric
- Foss and the contributors to Hill and Helmers's volume distinguish visual rhetoric as both a set of communicative artifacts and a critical perspective, establishing criteria for treating images as rhetoric.
History
The rhetorical study of images draws on Barthes's 1964 essay on the rhetoric of the image and the broader semiotic tradition. From the 1990s, communication and composition scholars argued that rhetoric should not be confined to the verbal, consolidating visual rhetoric as a recognized area through edited collections such as Hill and Helmers's 2004 Defining Visual Rhetorics and handbook treatments of its theory.
Debates
- Can images make arguments?
- Scholars debate whether images can constitute arguments in their own right or merely illustrate and evoke, with some holding that propositional argument requires language and others defending genuinely visual argumentation.
Key figures
- Roland Barthes
- Sonja Foss
- Charles Hill
- Marguerite Helmers
Related topics
Seminal works
- barthes1977
- hill2004
Frequently asked questions
- What is 'anchorage' in visual rhetoric?
- Anchorage is Barthes's term for the way accompanying text—such as a caption—directs the viewer among an image's many possible meanings, fixing or limiting its connotations.