Defining Visual Rhetorics.

• Author: Goins, Darren C.
• Position: Book review

Defining Visual Rhetorics. Edited by Charles A. Hill and Marguerite Helmers. Mahwah, NJ: Lawrence Erlbaum, 2004, pp. xi + 342. $36.00 paper.

The task of determining what makes a visual image rhetorical or persuasive is not a simple chore because every artifact is different. Each artifact also comes with discourse(s) related to the specific field that produces it. Without close attention to what makes an artifact persuasive, even defining the term visual rhetoric risks becoming an exercise in aesthetics. Charles A. Hill and Marguerite Helmers have assembled a fine volume that defines visual rhetorics through a multivoiced approach to the subject.

In their introduction, Hill and Helmers develop a vocabulary for analyzing visual rhetorics in relation to Thomas A. Franklin's 2001 photograph, Ground Zero Spirit. They compare Franklin's photograph of three New York City firefighters raising the U.S. flag with Joe Rosenthal's 1945 photograph of Marines raising Old Glory on top of Mount Suribachi. Hill and Helmers argue that the flag raising is at once a symbol, a field of "multiple projections" (9), and an intertextual rhetoric that draws on a previous image and its ensuing rhetoric. For Hill and Helmers, visual rhetoric is an "indiscipline" located at the intersection of intertextualization, Peirce's theory of semiotics, and Barthes' theory of signs. Justifying this multidisciplinary approach, they note: "It is important, at this point in the history of visual studies, to collect a wide range of such methods, examining the explicit and implicit theoretical stances behind them, before disciplinary conventions begin to restrict the kinds of work that disciplinary structures will reward" (20). This justification becomes a thesis that the remainder of the book explores.

In Chapter 1, Charles A. Hill examines the cultural and psychological drives that make images persuasive. Building upon Perelman and Olbrechts-Tyteca's familiar concept, Hill suggests that more vivid images retain greater presence for audiences. He posits that an image calls on associations with a value, and the emotions connected with the value persuade the viewer.

In Chapter 2, J. Anthony Blair distinguishes visual persuasion from visual argument. Drawing upon the Aristotelian enthymeme, he contends that arguments are distinguished by rational appeals and suggests that the best way to identify a visual argument is to articulate its corresponding literal argument, even though the...