Summaries by Chapter/Article
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Introduction: Helmers and Hill introduce terms and concepts vital for understanding the articles to come. While succinctly defining such concepts as semiotics, signs, metatextuality, representamen and paragonal, the editors note the many obstacles involved in defining visual rhetoric. Included is an explication of Thomas E. Franklin's unforgettable photograph, Firefighters at Ground Zero, 2001. The photograph statis as a patriotic icon is examined as well as the specific elements not seen in the photograph and what this absence conveys to the American viewer.
Chapter 1: Charles A. Hill concentrates on the function of representational images and how these images "influence the beliefs, attitudes, opinions—and sometimes actions" of viewers. He presents these representational images in "persuasive contexts" and posits that photographs carry more presence than charts and graphs and are therefore more effective upon humans' emotions, but also says that those images must be relevant to the overall claim to be effective in supplementing an argument. He makes a compelling argument for unconscious mental associations with images using "affect transfer," and paints advertisers and politicians as perpetuators of what I'd argue Plato and Aristotle both would agree is the wrong way to use rhetoric.
Chapter 2: J. Anthony Blair begins where Hill left off by asking the question: "What does being visual add to arguments?" He defines persuasion and argument and links the terms to real-life situations, being careful to differentiate expression versus argument. He cites "television's evocative power" as one of the many reasons to supplement arguments with corresponding visual arguments because "seeing is believing." He even suggests that good advertising campaigns are "unconscious causation" moreso than persuasion in that our ability to avoid items we love is diminished.
Chapter 3: Marguerite Helmers rhetorically examines the rhetorical nature of fine arts, particularly through pictorialism. She defines visual rhetoric as "a frame of analysis for looking and interpreting." The three elements in painting she focuses upon are the spectator, the space of viewing and the object that is viewed. She agrees with Contemporary art historian Michael Baxandall's premise that viewing is a transactional process, and individual interpretation is crucial to this transaction. The time in which the painting is composed and the Curator's decisions as to how the art will be presented to the viewer define how the viewers will interpret the works, as well as individual applications.
Chapter 4: Maureen Daly Goggin ponders rhetoricians' tendency to separate visual (the image) from the verbal (the word) rhetoric of textual objects. In an attempt to represent some of the glaringly absent voices of less privileged and/or educated classes, she calls upon an examination of semiotic communication in needlework, which she cleverly refers to as text/iles. Her argument is compelling and clever, leaving the reader with little doubt that privileging words is the reason the semiotic nature of broadsheets have been underestimated.
Chapter 5: David Blakesley's modern look at Hitchcock's film Vertigo in terms of the recognition and use of psychological visual appeals spotlights the effects of voyeurism on the mind's ability to identify with characters in film. Blakesley makes the interesting point that it takes readers several chapters to identify and become comfortable with characters in a novel, whereas the moviegoer is able to immediately make such an identification because of the image-centered nature of the medium.
Chapter 6: J. Cherie Strachan and Kathleen E. Kendall dive right into politicians' successes and failures in image-making using convention films. They point out that certain backdrops convey potent messages about the candidate's patriotism, manliness and personal values. Specifically, they present the respective failure and success of effective visual imagery in Al Gore and George W. Bush's presidential campaign films. Strachan and Kendall use schema theory to explain why Gore's film, though effective, was not as personalized and therefore not as compelling as George W. Bush's film.
Chapter 7: Diane S. Hope shows no mercy to advertisers' persistence in encouraging overconsumption despite the progressing depletion of our natural environment. She accuses advertisers' gender appeals of presenting the environment as a still undiscovered and unpolluted land as the only means some city-dwellers have as exposure to the natural world. Feminine fertility and masculine ruggedness make the land appear to offer its abundance, misleading consumers about their ability to consume without environmental consequences.
Chapter 8: Janis L. Edwards focuses on the associations that iconic images provide and reinvent through memory. She supports her claim with the example of the famous photograph of JFK Jr. from November 1963 and its reintroduction upon the death of Jackie Onassis as well as JFK Jr.'s own untimely death. She uses ten of David Perlmutter's "eleven characteristics of outrage-provoking photographs" to demonstrate how the image of JFK Jr. induces feelings of sorrow in the viewer:
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Perlmutter's Outrage-Provoking Elements |
Chapter 9: Cara A. Finnegan presents the three elements of production, reproduction and circulation as viable elements for examining visual history through such media as the early 1900's magazine LOOK. She claims that the supplementation of visual elements offers a validity that is capable of communicating to the common people that no other method allows, especially for exploiting the less fortunate and privileging the white perspective, as LOOK often did.
Chapter 10: Charles Kostelnick picks apart the visual rhetoric of statistical graphs and experimentation with standards for such graphs in the Statistical Atlases of the United States during the period of 1874 through 1925. He asserts that these atlases "built a rhetorical bridge to contemporary information design" through trial and error. Pictures of graphs that seem oddly organized and rather strangely shaped pervade his article, proving that it took a multitude of tries to discover which graphs are more easily processed than others. Graphs seeking to visually represent such tasks as westward migration and assimilation of foreigners are examined for their structure as well as what the graphs lack in information.
Chapter 11: Craig Stroupe begins by reprimanding scholars who loosely throw around the terms media literacy and visual rhetoric as if they were properly and concretely defined, and instead examines the terms as metaphors "to understand electronic communication (media) as a kind of writing (literacy)." He asserts that "visual rhetoric" is an inappropriate combination of "opposed categories" which he prefers to call "rhetoric of irritation." He claims that the visual communication in such mediums as Web pages "irritate" the text's ability to communicate with certainty because of varied individualistic interpretations.
Chapter 12: Greg Dickinson and Casey Malone Maugh seek to show the power of place in everyday life as a rhetorical visual tool by taking readers through a Wild Oats Market in Fort Collins, Colorado. Dickinson and Maugh take the mundane task of shopping for groceries and examine the experience as a means of comfort to Wild Oats organic food store customers. They set up the Wild Oats store in opposition to the fragmented and ungrounded postmodern consumerism experienced at larger, more detached international chain grocers. Grounded in "locality, nature and community," the Wild Oats store provides a sense of safety and comfort. Produce in wooden crates, full-service butcher and fishmongers, a community-oriented "donation station" and even parking lot landscaping serve as models of rhetoric contributing to the overall marketed image of a space of comfort.
Chapter 13: Andrea Kaston Tange follows Dickinson and Maugh's examination of the rhetoric of space in Victorian England amid the heightened cultural importance of appearance and morality. Tange states and reiterates that the ideal middle-class home's domestic space needed to also maintain a sense of privacy in order to segregate the servants from the guests, which are proven in examining popular floor plans of the time. Numerous books on household decorating and furniture items were written during this time period, and "tasteful" ornamentation and hospitality practices helped to convey a proper image of domesticity fit to the female sex at the time. These formulas for domestic appropriateness spill over into modern day propensities towards Victorian ornamentation and stylizing of homes, but without the burden of needing to be visually conservative to prove one's morality.
Chapter 14: Sonja K. Foss, as the final author in this compendium, attempts to tie together all previous authors' definitions of rhetoric by categorizing the types of products, space, items, situations, etc. that authors feel function as visual rhetoric. Foss says that "They must be symbolic, involve human intervention, and be presented to an audience for the purpose of communicating." She differentiates between aesthetic (emotional) responses to stimulus and rhetorical responses, which result in attributing meaning to an item. She further seeks to classify the contributors' responses by separating the means by which they focused on visual objects of rhetoric. These categories are the nature, fiction or evaluation of the artifact addressed. Foss continues to separate the deductive applications from the inductive exploration of the visual elements discussed. Ultimately, she wraps up the book by echoing Helmers and Hill: "This framework is not simply a framework for an understanding of visual rhetoric, however, but also for transforming discourse-based rhetorical theory. As rhetorical theory opens up to visual rhetoric, it opens up to possibilities for more relevant, inclusive, and holistic views of contemporary symbol use.
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