Visual Rhetoric: Not a new idea
23 Jan 2009 Leave a Comment
in Discussions Tags: visual rhetoric
As I was reading about visual rhetoric and the way how pictures are used to communicate different messages, I couldn’t help but think that none of this was new to me. I haven’t taken any advertising or sociology classes, but I have taken art history and I took art throughout high school. Therefore, trying to convey a message through a picture comes naturally to me, similar to common sense. I remember critiquing artwork in my classes; I had to try and analyze a piece of work and work to see what specific message it was sending me- something hard to do at times. For example, what would say a painting of just squares and striaght lines means to you? I know it’s a cliche, but the phrase “A picture is worth a thousand words” is true. However,no two people will pickthe exact same thousand words to describe a piece of art. Pictures of any typeare fundamentally art, and art has no definition and never speaks the same way to two people. But communicating through pictures is something that the human race has been doing since the dawn of time; go back to cave drawingsand you’ll see similar characteristics that you see in visual rhetoric today. Therefore, the idea of visual rhetoric is not new, but it may simply be that the art form has been brought to light due to the increasing use and dependency on technology and the speed that come with it. I believe the convenience of this technology allows us to view more visual rhetoric in a shorter period of time, and it is the shear amount of rhetoric that we see that causes us to stop and think about what it is we are looking at.
