18 Aug Question: Analyzing And Using Visual Arguments We Live In A World Awash In Pictures. We Turn On The TV And See Not Just Performers, Advertisers, And Talking Heads But Also Dramatic Footage Of Events From Around The World, Commercials As Visually Creative As Works Of Art, And Video Images To Accompany Popular Music. We Boot Up Our Computers And Surf The Net; Many …
Analyzing and Using
Visual Arguments
We live in a world awash in pictures. We turn on the TV and see not just
performers,
advertisers, and talking heads but also dramatic footage of events
from around the world, commercials as visually creative as works of art, and
video images to accompany popular music. We boot up our computers and
surf the Net; many of the waves we ride are visual swells, enticing images
created
or enhanced by the very machines that take us out to sea. We drive
our cars through a gallery of street art—on billboards and buildings and on
the sides of buses and trucks. We go to malls and window-shop, entertained
by the images of fantasy fulfillment each retailer offers. Print media are full
of images; in our newspapers, for instance, photos, drawings, and computer
graphics vie with print for space. Even college textbooks, once mostly blocks
of uninterrupted
prose with an occasional black-and-white drawing or photo,
now often have colorful graphics and elaborate transparency overlays.
Like language, visual images are rhetorical. They persuade us in obvious
and not-so-obvious ways. As both readers and writers of arguments, we need
to understand the power of visual rhetoric and learn to use it effectively and
responsibly.UNDERSTANDING VISUAL ARGUMENTS
Visual rhetoric is the use of images, sometimes coupled with sound or appeals to
the other senses, to make an argument or persuade us to act as the image-
maker
would have us act. Probably the clearest examples are advertisements
and
political cartoons, a few of which we will examine shortly. But visual rhetoric
is everywhere. We do not ordinarily think, say, of a car’s body style as
“rhetoric,” but clearly it is, because people are persuaded to pay tens of thousands
of dollars for the sleekest new body style when they could spend a few
thousand for an older car that would get them from home to work or school
just as well.
“READING” IMAGES
Rhetorical analysis of visual rhetoric involves examining images to see how
they attempt to convince or persuade an audience. Pictures are symbols that
must be read, just as language is read. To read an argument made through
images, a critic must be able to recognize allusions to popular culture. For
example, Americans know that the white mustaches on the celebrities in
the “Got milk?” commercials refer to the way children drink milk; more
recently, the milk mustache symbolizes the ad campaign itself, now part of
our culture.
As with inquiry into any argument, we ought to begin with questions
about rhetorical context: When was the visual argument created and by
whom? To what audience was it originally aimed and with what purpose?
Then we can ask what claim a visual argument makes and what reasons it
offers in support of that claim. Finally, as with verbal texts that make a case,
we can examine visual arguments for evidence, assumptions, and bias, and we
can ask what values they favor and what the implications of accepting their
argument are.
However, many visuals do not even attempt reasoning; they rely instead
on emotional appeals. Such appeals are most obvious in advertising, where the
aim is to move a target audience to buy a service or product. In many advertisements,
especially for products like beer, cigarettes, and perfume, where
the differences between brands are subjective, emotional appeal is all there
is. Most emotional appeals work by promising to reward our desires for love,
status, peace of mind, or escape from everyday responsibilities.
Advertisements also use ethical appeals, associating their claim with values
the audience approves of and wants to identify with—such as images that show
nature being preserved, races living in harmony, families staying in touch, and
people attaining the American dream of upward mobility.
In evaluating the ethics of visual rhetoric, we need to consider whether
the argument is at least reasonable: Does the image demonstrate reasoning, or
does it oversimplify and mislead? We will want to look at the emotional and
ethical appeals to decide if they pander to audience weaknesses and prejudices
or manipulate fantasies and fears.
Advertisements
Advertisements are a good starting place for analysis of visual arguments
because they are aimed at a specific target audience and their purpose is clear:
to get the audience to buy a product, service, or idea. A classic ad for Charlie
perfume created quite a stir when it first appeared in 1988 (see Figure C-1 in
the color section). Although The New York Times refused to print it, saying it
was in “poor taste,” the ad proved irresistibly appealing to women because it
showed sexism in reverse. Why did it work so well?
In his book Twenty Ads That Shook the World, James B. Twitchell argues
that “Charlie is not just in charge, she is clearly enjoying dominance.”
She is taller than her partner. . . . Not only does he have part of his anatomy
removed from the picture so that the Charlie bottle can be foregrounded,
QUESTIONS FOR DISCUSSION
1. Figure C-2 may look like a poster but it is actually a “semi-postal” stamp,
so called because a percentage of its cost goes to the cause it advocates.
Depicting
a goddess of the hunt, it was issued in 1998. By 2012, this stamp
had raised over $76.3 million for breast cancer research. Why do you think
this visual argument has had such lasting appeal?
2. Figure C-3, from the Southampton Anti-Bias Task Force, depends for full
impact on remembering a crayon labeled flesh that was the color of the center
crayon in the photo. People in their forties and fifties or older remember
that crayon. What, then, is the ad’s appeal for them? What does it say about
skin color to younger people who do not remember the crayon?
3. Figure C-4 is an example of digital photography’s magical and often
deceptive
power. Photographs
of models and celebrities, both female and
male, are often digitally
enhanced, stretched, or altered in other ways. This
kind of manipulation is so common that researchers estimate the average
person sees six hundred altered images per day. On the Internet, you can find
many other examples of real and enhanced photographs. Discuss the effects
on the average
viewer’s self-image.
4. Figure C-5, an Adidas ad, ingeniously exploits how the eye can be fooled
by what it expects to see rather than what is actually there. Did you see the
shadow at first simply as the runner’s shadow? What made you reevaluate
what you were seeing? What is the impact of playing with perception in this
case?
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