What Is 'Rhetoric of the Image'?

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What is ‘rhetoric of the image’? Photographs are by their nature, ambiguous. Their meanings differ depending on who is viewing them, and the context within which they are being seen. The French literary theorist and philosopher Roland Barthes attempted to make some sense of this apparent lack of meaning in his essay titled ‘Rhetoric of the image’. He looked at images from the advertising world, as he believed the information that they contained was presented in a very frank manner ‘This image straightaway provides a series of discontinuous signs.’ (Barthes I.M.T p. 32) Advertising images are, at the end of the day, trying to convince us to do something. Whether it be buying a pizza or booking a holiday, they do this by signifying on several levels information that will provoke desire, attempting to persuade us. This is what rhetoric is, a persuasive argument. In this essay I will briefly outline some of Barthes’ theories on rhetoric, and then use them to deconstruct and analyse the different and considered messages behind two advertising images. Barthes chose an advertisement for pasta products made by the company ‘Panzani’ fig1. The photograph shows a string bag containing vegetables, 2 packets of pasta, a tin of tomato sauce and a sachet of Parmesan cheese, photographed against a bright red background and has two lines of text in the bottom right corner. Based on theories of language rooted in semiotics, Barthes devised a sort of framework with which he could unpick and study the relationship between image and language, and how they work together as a persuasive tool. It is broken down into three parts. 1. A linguistic message, which is any text in/accompanying the image. This itself is in two parts; denotational, such as the name of the brand on the tin of sauce, and connotational, which is what the name represents to the viewer, i.e. ‘Italianicity’.
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