Visual Communication

Understanding Images in Media Culture

Giorgia Aiello,Katy Parry

• Publisher: SAGE Publications Ltd
• Year: 2019
• ISBN:
  9781526417121
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Sozialwissenschaften
• Subtopic: Medienwissenschaften

Visual Communication: Understanding Images in Media and Culture provides a theoretical and empirical toolkit toexamine implications of mediated images.It explores a range of approaches to visual analysis, while also providing a hands-on guide to applying methods to students? own work. The book:

• Illustrates a range of perspectives, from content analysis and semiotics, to multimodal and critical discourse analysis
• Explores the centrality of images to issues of identity and representation, politics and activism, and commodities and consumption
• Brings theory to life with a host of original case studies, from celebrity videos on Youtube and civil unrest on Twitter, to the lifestyle branding of Vice Media and Getty Images
• Shows students how to combine approaches and methods to best suit their own research questions and projects

An invaluable guide to analysing contemporary media images, this is essential reading for students and researchers of visual communication and visual culture.

1 Introduction

‘We are now bombarded with images.’

‘We are living in a more visually led world.’

‘The internet has democratized image production and sharing.’

Students, journalists and scholars all too often make proclamations like the ones above in order to underscore the importance of paying close attention to media images. We have all read (and in some cases also written) endless essays, articles and books about visual communication that open with general if not sweeping statements of this kind. These are, of course, well-intentioned attempts to capture not only the abundance but also the vibrancy of media images in our daily encounters. In this book, we recognize the centrality of images in meaning-making processes as we continue to marvel at their unprecedented proliferation and pervasiveness. Our purpose is to unpack generalized assertions and examine how images communicate in distinctive manners across varied contexts – and through a range of media formats, genres and platforms.

In recent years, visual communication has become a regular feature of everyday activities for a wide variety of individuals, groups and institutions. Not only are visual images the bread and butter of how ordinary people and media professionals communicate, but the work of corporations, governments and activists is increasingly dependent on their ability to craft distinctive graphics and iconic imagery. The existence of multiple technological platforms for the production, distribution and consumption of media content has led to the proliferation of images in multifaceted communication environments such as journalism, branding and social networking. And while the visual has long been a substantial mode of communication, it has become all the more urgent to examine the implications of images in the light of the digital, global and multimodal characteristics of present-day media.

Although there is no dearth of books on visual images, this volume fills a gap in the literature. Most books on visual communication focus on particular theories and issues, or introduce the reader to a given methodology or collection of methods. Instead, this volume takes a rounded view of the various fields and perspectives that have become established in visual communication scholarship, offering both students and academics a comprehensive overview supported by empirical research.

In doing so, in the book we focus on the major contributions that media and communication scholars have made to the study of visual communication. We bring together important debates across media and communication studies in three key areas of enquiry – namely, identities, politics and commodities. We also use these three thematic strands to organize the book in three main sections. As we summarize below in relation to the book’s structure, another key distinguishing feature of this volume is the inclusion of 18 original case studies, which are equally distributed across its three sections. Through these case studies, we offer a wide range of compact analyses that are both visually led and richly contextualized. Within each of the case studies we apply a variety of research approaches and methods appropriate for answering specific questions about how aspects of the visual are imbricated in mediated encounters with contemporary social issues.

So how do we propose to enhance understanding of contemporary visual communication?

To say a little more about why this is a fascinating time to be studying media images, we would point to three trending concerns for visual communication. First, the idea that we are ‘bombarded’ with images in our daily lives is much repeated, and while there is a sense that it has become easier to produce, share and look at images, along with other visual information, we caution against generalized assumptions about the nature of attention and the emotional investment afforded in such characterizations of image abundance. It is only by conducting empirical work – ranging from gathering evidence on how visual images are framed or shared to talking to people who make or use imagery – that we can evaluate the significance of visual communication practices in different contexts. For this reason, in this book we use a range of approaches and methods in order to capture a rich understanding of perspectives, motivations and tensions across varied forms of mediated images.

Second, there has been intense debate around the diminishing authority of the image, and especially its truth-value when it comes to documenting social reality; manipulative practices are as old as photography itself, but the ease and accessibility of digital technologies offer a profound challenge to the evidential value of photojournalism and documentary film. However, in paradoxical fashion, more of life’s events have become worth recording and sharing, often via mobile devices, and with occasional (and even accidental) eyewitness journalism bringing attention to social and political injustices. This paradox means that we need to examine how images are valued, and through which means they acquire iconic status or become symbolic currency in a variety of communicative arenas, including but not limited to social networking, political communication and promotional culture. How are image-making activities and the resulting images spoken about, and what are the distinctive thematic or stylistic features of such images?

Third, images have become a fundamental part of how we communicate, self-identify and recognize our like-minded peers, especially via digital and mobile technologies. Online and especially ‘social’ media technologies have attracted a lion’s share of scholarly attention in recent years, with a focus on self-representation in digital culture (Thumim, 2012). To neglect the meaning-making potential of visual imagery in this environment is to disregard vital and complex representational practices in our ‘semiotic landscape’ (Kress and van Leeuwen, 2006; Iedema, 2003).

How are we defining visual communication and what do we mean by ‘understanding images in media culture’?

In its broadest sense, visual communication encompasses all forms of communication using the sense of sight. Theories of perception and vision investigate the physiology of the eye, and how psychological and social factors affect what we see. Shifting attention from the perspective of ocular perception to materiality, visual design, product packaging or physical space are also major aspects of visual communication. But our focus is more specifically on the images that circulate in the media, and by this we mean the non-linguistic pictorial elements that feature in cultural artefacts distributed via media technologies. Images are produced via various means (drawing, photography, animation, digital effects) and so their ‘content’ should be considered alongside their form and medium. The choices made regarding representational form and content work together to produce meanings through visual means (in interplay with other modes of communication). However, that is not to assume that meaning is completely fixed in the visual media object; rather, meaning potential is only realized in the specific social settings and through the discourses that contextualize the image.

Much has been written of the ‘polysemic’ nature of images or their capacity to have several possible meanings. This is often expressed in the distinction that images ‘show’ rather than ‘tell’, and that they are more ‘open’ as texts. But a plurality of possible meanings does not necessarily imply that the meanings of images are entirely free-floating or only determined in the eye of the beholder. Any effective form of communication relies on messages being understood in a particular context: sign-makers choose the most apt and plausible elements and forms in order to effectively represent the intended message (Kress and van Leeuwen, 2006). If images are so ineffectual in communicating ideas, knowledge and values, how do we explain their abundance in media culture? It is worthwhile, then, to examine how images convey certain intended meanings in the visual strategies employed by producers. But it is not only their intended meanings we are interested in; it is also the way in which visual images reveal latent values and underlying ideologies in their codes, aesthetics and rhetorics. However, to ‘make sense’ of the ideas, events and feelings expressed and exchanged through media images, a shared cultural understanding is needed at some level (Hall, 1997).

This said, as Raymond Williams (1976) famously claimed, culture is one of the two or three most complicated words in the English language, and different traditions of learning provide divergent understandings of the term. The concept is also often coupled with a prefix such as ‘popular’, ‘national’, ‘counter’ or ‘political’ to indicate ‘the meanings and values surrounding a given activity or sphere’ (Richardson et al., 2012: 4). As Richardson et al. (2012) further elaborate, the ‘leakage’ between the two broad meanings of culture (as associated with arts and expressive activity, or as delineating the boundaries of shared social values and meanings) can hold strategic convenience for those using the term. Indeed, there is a certain woolliness to ‘media culture’ that allows us to embrace a diffuse set of products, practices and technologies, while also encompassing a wide set of social values and aesthetic forms.

For our purposes, media culture refers to the sites, technologies and practices where meanings circulate within both traditional ‘mass’ media and personalized media forms (such as social networks). Media culture comprises the cultural artefacts that embody a series of representational choices made by producers, the manner in which they circulate via media technologies and the audience or user interactions when engaging with such media products. Finally, we should not forget that media culture also exists within certain economic and political structures, and that it is therefore shaped by patterns of ownership and platform dominance which undoubtedly produce imbalances when it comes to representational power.

In our quest to understand ‘images’ in ‘media culture’, we tend to privilege the site of the image as a trace or record of wider cultural values, activities and norms. So while the majority of our case studies focus attention on the formal characteristics and the patterns of representation of a selection of visual images, we also include interviews with producers and audience research (see Chapter 2 for further details). Even in narrowing down our perspective on visual communication to the pictorial elements of artefacts distributed via media technologies, the complex and multifarious nature of such media images requires us to be selective in what we are able to cover in this book. The next section briefly ‘maps’ the field of visual communication studies. We then clarify our own approach to visual communication before turning to the three main thematic strands we use to organize this book.

Mapping visual communication studies

In comparison to textual communication, and positioned within the broader discipline of media and communication studies, we can argue that visual communication has been understudied. But from an alternative perspective, there are a number of academic fields of study where the visual has long been a central concern: art history, film studies and photography theory being the most prominent ones. Even in such image-centred fields, scholars have relied on words in their efforts to describe and translate the qualities or essence of the visual form. Although visual essay formats have started to appear in a limited number of academic journals, we usually rely on words to talk and write about visual arts and media images.

In addition, there are disciplinary traditions where the visual has perhaps been considered a peripheral ‘wing’ to the primary research questions and modes of enquiry of a number of fields and subfields (sociology, anthropology, political communication, journalism studies, international relations, cultural studies, computer science). In some of those cases, visually focused research can now be considered a subfield in its own right. For example, both visual sociology and visual anthropology offer methodological instruments to conduct ethnographic fieldwork with the visual aid of photography and video, but also drawings and maps, among other types of imagery (Stanczak, 2007; Pink, 2013; Pauwels, 2015a and 2015b). These are typically images that are made by the researcher or research participants to address research questions regarding the social relations, identities or structures that set apart a particular research site. Sometimes pre-existing or ‘found images’ (e.g. family photographs or archival images) are also used to elicit memories and responses during interviews with research participants. In both cases, visual images are a means to an end, rather than the main research focus. While there are significant overlaps between this type of visual research and research on visual communication, in this book we do not consider approaches and analyses where images are used as ‘one type of data amongst others generated usually by interviews or ethnographic fieldwork’ (Rose, 2016: 307). Instead, here we focus deliberately on methods and approaches that contribute to an understanding of images as our main objects of study, and therefore also on visual communication as a transdisciplinary yet cohesive field.

It is possible to chart the recognition of visual communication as a field in its own right by taking a close look at the interest groups and divisions of major international associations. For example, the Visual Communication Studies division of the International Communication Association (ICA) was originally founded in 1993 as an interest group that brought together those already integrating serious study of the visual into their work in anthropology, politics and journalism in particular (Barnhurst et al., 2004). The European Communication Research and Education Association (ECREA) only gained a Visual Cultures working group in 2015, although this is a much younger association, coming into existence itself in 2005. As Marion Müller (2007) argues, the work of German immigrant cultural historians such as Erwin Panofsky, in designing standardized methods of visual interpretation, provided an early bridge between art history and the social sciences in the first half of the twentieth century. In her article, ‘What is visual communication?’, Müller argues that the transdisciplinary nature of visual communication is both a positive and negative quality: the heterogeneity of relevant traditions offers scope for visual researchers, but it has also meant that visual communication has suffered in terms of recognition for funding and curricula. Müller’s overview of visual communication as a research field follows an earlier mapping article by Kevin Barnhurst and co-authors (Barnhurst et al., 2004), and we recommend these detailed and vivid accounts of both Anglo-American and European contributions to the field.

Another marker of a maturing field is the development of academic journals. The Visual Communication division of the Association for Education in Journalism and Mass Communication (AEJMC) produce their own journal, Visual Communication Quarterly (since 1994), while the SAGE journal, Visual Communication, welcomed a new editorial team in 2018 – the first changeover since its launch in 2002. The new editors point out how ‘changes in technology have made more manifest and tangible the inherent multimodality of all communication’ (Ravelli et al., 2018: 398), thus also leading to important transformations in academic research agendas and theories of the visual. Since 2002, SAGE has also published the Journal of Visual Culture, with recent special issues covering diverse themes such as visual activism, internet memes and architecture. Possibly even more prone to existential angst than their visual communication cousins, visual culture scholars have provided critiques that question the very nature of the ‘field’, its objects of study, interpretive methods, boundaries and definitions (Mitchell, 2002; Moxey, 2008).

As with visual communication, the dropping off over the past 15 years of articles attempting to define the field could be read as a sign of growing intellectual confidence. We do not intend to mention all relevant journals here, but note a healthy scene of publication opportunities for critical analysis, creative practice and theory building across specific visual communication and culture journals, in addition to the more general media and communication or cultural studies publications.

It is, then, becoming harder to argue that there is a general neglect of the visual. There are still cases of book or article titles containing the words ‘visual’ or ‘image’ that do not necessarily examine the nature of the visual in any serious detail. But a scan of media and communication journals shows the attraction for articles about, say, the production of news photography, the sharing of social media images or the ways in which audiences respond to visual messages. Visual communication research appears to be much less ‘niche’ than it was at the beginning of this century. To some degree this follows the identified ‘visual turn’ across the humanities and social sciences – that is, an increasing willingness by scholars to pay attention to images and other visual forms, and to approach such images as socially constructed and as constituted dynamically through their relationships to other images, texts, viewers, users and contexts.

Our approach to studying visual communication

What we have selected to cover in this book undoubtedly stems from our own personal scholarly histories a...