Visual Rhetoric: An Introduction

When I first learned about rhetoric and what it stood for, I understood it only to be writing and language. I never thought that rhetoric had another aspect, visual rhetoric. This is an age where nearly everything has some type of visual component . Think about when you are driving down the road, how do businesses catch your attention? Billboards. Massive pictures depicting what they want customers to associate with their name. When you’re watching television, commercials flash across the screen, each competing for viewer’s attention.

So what exactly is visual rhetoric? Sonja Foss, a professor at the University of Colorado, explains that

Visual rhetoric is the term used to describe the study of visual imagery within the discipline of rhetoric. As a branch of knowledge, rhetoric dates back to classical Greece and is concerned with the study of the use of symbols to communicate; in the most basic sense, rhetoric is an ancient term for what now typically is called communication. Visual rhetoric is a very new area of study within this centuries-old discipline...Visual rhetoric, like all communication, is a system of signs. In the simplest sense, a sign communicates when it is connected to another object, as the changing of the leaves in autumn is connected to a change in temperature or a stop sign is connected to the act of stopping a car while driving. To qualify as visual rhetoric, and image must go beyond serving as a sign, however, and be symbolic, with that image only indirectly connected to its referent (141, 144).

In a lot of ways, I believe visual rhetoric can be more powerful than, what I consider to be, traditional rhetoric (writing and speaking). Think of protesters, sure, they use their voices, but for the most part, when they can’t use their voices, they carry signs. These signs have the ability to reach millions of people. The protester’s audience not only includes the immediate people in their location, but they are able to reach millions more; pictures of their signs appear in newspapers and websites across the country and the world.

The point of this research project is to find and analyze protest signs and ask questions like: who is holding the sign(s), where are they, and what do the signs say? I want to look at the signs in context and find out how and why visual rhetoric can have the ability to be so powerful.