Visual & Multimodal Rhetoric

Classical rhetoric was built for the spoken word, then extended to writing. The late 20th century confronted the discipline with a challenge it could not ignore: most of the persuasion that actually shapes public life in the modern world is not primarily verbal. Photographs, films, advertisements, data visualizations, interface designs, and social media posts persuade through images, color, layout, and spatial arrangement as much as through words. Visual and multimodal rhetoric is the theory and practice of analyzing and constructing these non-verbal and mixed-mode forms of persuasion.

Can Images Argue?

The foundational question of visual rhetoric is whether images can make arguments — whether there is something analogous to the claim-evidence-warrant structure of verbal argument in visual communication. The classical tradition answered implicitly: no, images can move emotions (pathos) but they cannot reason (logos). An image might provide evidence, but it cannot by itself structure an inference.

J. Anthony Blair and other informal logicians challenged this view, arguing that images can indeed make arguments — not in spite of their visual character but through it. A photograph of a starving child, juxtaposed with a statistics-laden infographic about food surplus, makes an argument about distribution and justice that is not merely emotional but inferential: something is wrong that could be fixed. The argument is multimodal — it requires both visual and (implicit) verbal components — but it is an argument.

Roland Barthes and the Rhetoric of the Image

Roland Barthes's "Rhetoric of the Image" (1964) remains the most cited early analysis of how images make meaning and argument. Analyzing a pasta advertisement, Barthes distinguished three levels of meaning:

• Linguistic message — the words in the ad, which serve as anchor, constraining the image's potential meanings
• Denoted image — what is literally present in the photograph (pasta, vegetables, a bag)
• Connoted image — the cultural meanings the image triggers (Italianicity, freshness, domestic abundance)

Barthes's crucial insight: the connoted meanings operate as if they were natural — as if the photograph were simply showing reality rather than making a culturally coded argument about quality, authenticity, and desire. This naturalization is what makes visual rhetoric so powerful and so dangerous: it argues while appearing merely to show.

Sonja Foss and Visual Rhetorical Analysis

Sonja Foss's framework for visual rhetorical analysis provides a systematic method for analyzing images as rhetorical acts. Her approach identifies three primary analytic dimensions:

Multimodality: Beyond the Verbal/Visual Binary

Gunther Kress and Theo van Leeuwen's social semiotic approach to multimodality, developed in Reading Images (1996) and Multimodal Discourse (2001), extended visual rhetoric into a comprehensive theory of communication across all modes — image, writing, speech, gesture, sound, and spatial arrangement. Their key argument: meaning is always made with the full range of available semiotic resources, and the dominant mode (verbal, visual, spatial) varies by medium and context.

In digital communication, multimodality is the rule rather than the exception. A tweet is a combination of words, embedded images or videos, hashtag links, and metadata. A TED talk combines speech, slide design, bodily performance, and room acoustics. A news website integrates text, photographs, video, data visualizations, and interactive elements. Analyzing any of these as "primarily verbal" misses most of what is rhetorically operative.

Design Rhetoric

Design is rhetoric: every design choice — typography, color, layout, hierarchy, whitespace — communicates values and creates effects. Richard Buchanan's influential essay "Declaration by Design" (1985) argued that design is a form of rhetoric, not merely an aesthetic or technical practice, because its central function is to persuade — to guide users toward particular behaviors, values, and beliefs through the arrangement of visual and material elements.

The Iconic Image in Politics

Some images achieve what rhetorician Robert Hariman calls "iconic" status — they become reference points for collective memory, defining how a historical event or social condition is understood and felt. Think of the photograph of a Vietnamese girl fleeing a napalm attack, or the raising of the flag at Iwo Jima. These images are not merely documents — they are rhetorical resources that politicians, activists, journalists, and ordinary people invoke to invoke particular emotional and argumentative frameworks.

Hariman and John Lucaites's No Caption Needed (2007) analyzes iconic photographs as sites where public culture negotiates its values, anxieties, and ideals — showing how the same image can be appropriated by opposing political projects as its meaning is contested over time.

Visual Rhetoric in the Digital Age

The digital age has made visual rhetoric skills not just academically interesting but practically essential. Memes — a unit of visual-verbal combination — have become one of the dominant forms of political argument in social media environments. Data visualization makes statistical claims viscerally immediate and emotionally accessible (or misleading). Interface design shapes behavior on platforms used by billions. Understanding visual rhetoric is not optional for digital literacy.