48 Visual Rhetoric
What is visual rhetoric? To briefly answer this question, let’s first unpack these two terms. Rhetoric, as we defined earlier in this chapter, is the art of persuasion; we use it every day to communicate in ways aimed at convincing other people to go along with our ideas (or at least to consider them). By “visual,” we mean “the cultural practices of seeing and looking, as well as the artifacts produced in diverse communicative forms and mediums” (Olsen et al, p. 3). In other words, “visual” refers not just to what we see (“artifacts” such as cartoons, memes, movies, photographs, posters, fonts, symbols, icons, and colors), but how we see (for example, we may or may not associate red-white-and-blue with the U.S. flag and patriotism, depending on our cultural background and beliefs). By visual rhetoric, then, we mean the many ways imagery is used to communicate, create meaning, and compel us to think, feel, know, and act.
Let’s carry this thought a little further. In the study of visual rhetoric, we acknowledge that “images have power” (Sheffield), and we ask, “How do images act rhetorically upon viewers?” (Helmers and Hill 1). We explore the influence that visuals have on us and our audiences, and we recognize that visuals produce rhetorical effects; they use ethos, logos, and pathos appeals to influence an audience.
Visual rhetoric scholars Helmers and Hill, for example, mention a wide variety of examples: cave art, Egyptian hieroglyphics, stained-glass windows in churches, World War II posters, editorial cartoons, motion pictures, charts, graphs, and so much more. They point out the power or influence of some of these visuals, like Thomas E. Franklin’s 2001 photo, Firefighters at Ground Zero, taken the day after the World Trade Center collapsed. The photo shows firefighters raising a fallen flag on the rubble-strewn site. Helmers and Hill point out how such visuals communicate to us culturally and intertextually; that is, Franklin’s photo reminded some viewers of a now-iconic photograph and sculpture of the U.S. Marines raising the flag on Iwo Jima during World War II; even if some viewers did not “get” the reference, the centrality of the flag in the photo and the firefighters’ upward gaze communicated what the photographer called “the strength of the American people” (7). That emotional effect, Helmers and Hill explain, was reinforced by widespread distribution of the photo by news media as well as its cultural context (i.e., how many viewers connected it to the war-time, Iwo Jima photo).
Of course, visual rhetorics draw our attention to more than emotional responses and cultural contexts. In “Breaking Down an Image,” for example, Jenna Pack Sheffield outlines how such elements as fonts, arrangement, colors, and more relate to purpose, audience, and context—the rhetorical situation, in other words. To illustrate, Sheffield displays an advertisement for a men’s watch:
She points out such key visual elements as the arrangement