Visual Materials, Analysis Of

The discipline of communication grapples with the paradox of simultaneously condemning and celebrating images, privileging words yet seduced by images. As a result, communication erratically engages images. These conflicting motivations only partially explain the trouble with analyzing visual materials. Another major explanation is the changing media matrix. With the emergence of photography and film and now video and the Internet and social media, there has been a seismic shift from a culture of words to a culture of images, from reading to viewing. Consequently, ways of studying images have varied greatly. This entry charts five major approaches for engaging images and suggests where the discipline is now. The bias in this entry is toward qualitative approaches, but these orientations are suggestive for quantitative analyses. Since by training and habit scholars tend to be lovers of words and books, they often neglect images or approach images with the mind-set and methods of print, ensuring logocentric readings that turn images into texts. This reflex is common but a more image-centric approach is emerging.

The traditionally dominant approach to images is one of disciplinary neglect. Communication scholars often work in a universe devoid of images. A paradigmatic example concerns analyses of the U.S. civil rights movement. In rhetoric, the civil rights movement is largely reduced to its linguistic manifestations—primarily the speeches of Martin Luther King Jr. and lesser luminaries, rarely accounting for the force of images of African Americans risking their bodies protesting in the streets. Political communication scholars remain committed to words, deploying computer-assisted word counting even as politicians spend their money on image advertising. Even when studying texts dominated by images, scholars often do not acknowledge the images. This trend is evident in the rhetorical treatment of television. In studies of sitcoms, television news, and commercials, critics engage television as if it were radio, studying transcripts and ideological content suggested by the words, leaving the images untouched. To ignore images mutates one medium, television, into another medium, speeches or writing.

[Page 1866]A second approach acknowledges the force of images, but subordinates images to words and deploys linguistic-centric methods. This recognition of images is an important advance, but privileging words and using old methods are limiting. In this approach, images are understood as anchored by words, so scholars focus on slogans and captions to explain the meaning of images. Scholars use familiar methods such as close reading, enthymeme analysis, ideographic analysis, and semiotic analysis. This approach assumes equivalence between words and images and transparency in the communication of meanings. It also assumes that the purpose of images is to represent reality. For example, Ansel Adams’s Yosemite landscapes are understood to represent the reality of Yosemite.

A third approach uses a moral response to images grounded in iconophobia or fear of images. This approach subordinates methods to condemnatory moral judgments. In a moralistic approach, scholars are motivated by ideology and/or politics to take a position that condemns images. This approach is common with respect to the study of television and video games, which are often seen as having denigrative effects on people, especially children and teenagers. Many of the studies on violence in television and video games are grounded in moralism. First-person shooter video games such as Halo are condemned for causing violence in real life. This approach often explicitly asserts that images corrupt reality and are a sign of a decline from a Golden Age during which print culture reigned supreme. For example, the Lincoln-Douglas debates are held up as the political gold standard by which contemporary image-based presidential campaigns are judged to be debased.

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