Rhetoric A–Z / Analysis / Visual rhetoric

Visual Rhetoric

Visual rhetoric is both the ability of images to persuade and the study of how they do it. It examines how photographs, advertisements, logos and other images create meaning and make arguments, often with concepts from semiotics.

A young field with old questions

Just as the word rhetoric stands for both the theory and the practice, rhetorica docens and rhetorica utens, visual rhetoric denotes both the images and the study of them. The field is relatively young and has therefore borrowed concepts from elsewhere: from argumentation theory, from Kenneth Burke and above all from semiotics, the study of signs.

But the question is old. Already in Plato’s dialogue Cratylus, Socrates discusses whether words are naturally tied to things or are mere conventions. Someone who believes in a natural connection sees the image as given and looks for the right words to describe it. Someone who sees language as convention asks instead why meanings are ordered as they are, and that is where visual rhetoric begins.

The sign: signifier and signified

The linguist Ferdinand de Saussure described the sign as a unit of two parts: the signifier, the expression or sound (“tree”), and the signified, the content or concept (something tall with a trunk and branches). The link between them is arbitrary. The sign gets its meaning not from reality but from its place among other signs: a tree is not a bush, not grass, not a stone. In another system, such as Norse mythology, the tree takes on an entirely different place and meaning.

Barthes and the pasta advertisement

In the essay “Rhetoric of the Image” (1964), Roland Barthes analysed a French advertisement for Panzani pasta: a string bag with pasta, parmesan, tomatoes, onions and peppers. He wanted to show that the image is neither poorer than language nor says “more than a thousand words”, but that it works like a language.

This is where the rhetoric of the image lies. No single thing is enough: a tomato and an onion are not Italian, but together with the pasta and the parmesan they become so.

Selection and order

The meaning of an image depends on two kinds of choice. The paradigmatic choice concerns what has been chosen instead of something else: had the pasta been replaced by rice or potatoes, the image would have meant something entirely different. The syntagmatic concerns order: “tomato sauce makes pasta tastier” does not mean the same as “pasta makes tomato sauce tastier”. In the image this is a matter of composition, where the logo is placed, but also of why we see this particular moment and not another.

Icon, index and symbol

The philosopher Charles Sanders Peirce distinguished between three kinds of sign, which can also be used in image analysis:

Tropes and figures in images

Images too can be metaphors, metonymies and synecdoches. The spaghetti in the Panzani image stands for the whole of Italy, the part for the whole. Read more about tropes and figures.

Analysing visual rhetoric

The concepts can be applied to almost anything, and that is both the strength and the weakness of visual rhetoric. Everyone can see what Panzani is selling. For an analysis to become interesting, it needs a problem: something that is not obvious, or a tension between what is said and what is shown. A speaker who says they are sad and looks sad seldom gives us anything to analyse. It is when word and image, or word and body language, say different things that it becomes interesting. Read more about rhetorical criticism and rhetorical analysis.

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