Visual Communication

Insights and Strategies

Janis Teruggi Page, Margaret Duffy

• Publisher: Wiley-Blackwell
• Year: 2021
• ISBN:
  9781119227304
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Social Sciences
• Subtopic: Media Studies
• Index: Social Sciences

Teaches visual literacy, theory, scholarly critique, and practical application of visuals in professional communication careers

Visual Communication: Insights and Strategies explores visual imagery in advertising, news coverage, political discourse, popular culture, and digital and social media technologies. It is filled with insights into the role of visuals in our dynamic social environment and contains strategies on how to use them.

The authors provide an overview of theoretically-informed literacy and critical analysis of visual communication and demonstrate the ways in which we can assess and apply this knowledge in the fields of advertising, public relations, journalism, organizational communication, and intercultural communication. This important book:

• Reveals how to analyze visual imagery
• Introduces a 3-step process, Research-Evaluate-Create, to apply the knowledge gained
• Combines research, theory, and professional practice of visual communication

Designed for undergraduate and graduate courses in visual communication as well as visual rhetoric, visual literacy, and visual culture, Visual Communication: Insights and Strategies reveals how to apply rhetorical theories to visual imagery.

PART ONE
Understanding Visual Communication

Chapter 1
Making Sense of Visual Culture: 1000 Words or One Simple Picture?

“Pics or it didn’t happen.”

Source: http://www.dpreview.com/forums/post/58791114. Reproduced with permission of RetroClipArt/Shutterstock.com.

By 2015, this phrase had morphed from a meme to a catchphrase that seemed to be everywhere. If a friend tweeted that she'd been cliff diving in Acapulco, you might respond with that phrase suggesting that perhaps she was being boastful without any evidence to back it up (Whitehead, 2015). If your gamer pal claimed to have reached level 60 in World of Warcraft, you might demand some proof.

Other phrases call on our desire to tap into what Whitehead and others have called “visual authority.” You've all heard that “seeing is believing” and heard people say, “I'll believe it when I see it with my own eyes.” And consider the famous Chinese proverb, “a picture is worth a thousand words.” Here's the thing: it's not Chinese, and it's not a proverb. In fact, it was likely the creation of ad man Fred Barnard¹ in the 1920s. As William Safire (1996) writes, Barnard, trying to increase his agency's business selling ads on railway cars, came up with the phrase. He had it translated into Chinese characters with the caption “Chinese Proverb: One Picture is Worth Ten Thousand Words” and it passed into popular culture as “one thousand words.” Whether it is one thousand or ten, Barnard tapped into the notion that most people find visual evidence more credible and interesting than verbal or textual expression (Graber, 1990).

In entertainment, politics, interpersonal interactions, and at work and at play, we're all consuming, evaluating, and creating visuals. Our culture is increasingly suffused with images aimed at selling us something, persuading us, informing us, entertaining us, and connecting us with others. Your skills and capabilities in communicating effectively and critically evaluating what's around you are crucial to your personal and professional success and that is what this book is about. In the following chapters, we'll provide you with the tools to become an ethical and effective communicator in an era increasingly suffused with images of all kinds.

Key Learning Objectives

1. Understand visual culture and its transformation in the digital age.
2. Explore the fluidity of visual meaning.
3. Identify ways to research and analyze visuals.

Chapter Overview

In this introductory chapter, you'll explore five important issues relating to visuals in contemporary society. First, you'll be introduced to how visuals work and how we interpret them. Second, we'll review the astounding growth of visuals and video in recent years and how this trend is on a steep upward trajectory. Third, we examine the concept of visual culture and how changing technology relates to that culture. Fourth, you'll delve into how individuals can draw different meanings from the same visuals or video artifacts and how that process relates to social life and the meanings we take from our environment. Fifth, we preview ways to analyze visuals. At the close of the chapter we offer two vignettes illustrating how visuals work and provide an overview of the book as a whole.

HOW VISUALS WORK

LO1 Understand visual culture and its transformation in the digital age

Today almost every part of our lives is visual and visualized. We routinely use devices to see, to capture experiences, and to communicate. As suggested by Tavin (2009), visual culture is “a condition in which human experience is profoundly affected by images, new technologies for looking, and various practices of seeing, showing, and picturing” (p. 3, 4). We are now at a place of unlimited visual culture and thus how we understand media and visual literacy has changed.

Photographic Truth?

Among the things that strike us about images and photographs in particular is how they feel as if they are presenting us with a truth about reality. Sturken and Cartwright (2009) call this the “myth of photographic truth” (p. 24) because it obscures the roles of human beings who are creating the image. Those acts of creation include many factors such as the choices the photographer makes about the scene, lighting, and composition. Indeed, the photographer decides what subjects are worthy of their time or attention.

Even with technologies that make it easy and inexpensive to capture images of all kinds, the picture‐taker must choose those subjects, whether they are powerful images of war or funny pictures of grumpy cats. All of these will affect the tone of a photo and thus the interpretations people take away from it. Even though we may know intellectually that the photographer has chosen a certain subject at a certain time and framed it a certain way, a photo still carries a sense of legitimacy. Put differently, it involves the “legacy of objectivity that clings to the cameras and machines that produce images today” (Sturken and Cartwright, 2009, p. 18).

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FOCUS: A Historical Perspective on Visual Culture

Another way to understand visual culture is to look at it historically. This example illustrates the role of perspective. When we compare medieval paintings (1300–1500) to contemporary paintings, we see remarkable differences. People in today's societies are used to seeing two‐dimensional (flat surfaces) that depict three‐dimensional spaces such as a road receding into the distance. In medieval times, Christianity was the primary organizing principle of society and artists presented religious and historical images based on the importance of those portrayed rather than more realistic representations (Willard n.d.). The world depicted in the paintings was the domain of God, not the lived experience of people, as shown in this two‐dimensional artwork from 1295 depicting the Twelve Apostles receiving inspiration from the Holy Spirit:

Source: Art Collection 2/Alamy Stock Photo.

In fact, it's thought that the highly religious yet illiterate people in medieval times would have found 3D representations to be puzzling and even heretical. The Renaissance in the late fifteenth century led to the emergence of interest in science, intellectual pursuits, and the more realistic depictions of the ...