Summary
Contents
Subject index
The pictures in television commercials, magazine advertisements and other forms of advertising often convey meanings that cannot be expressed as well, or at all, through words or music. Visual Persuasion is an exploration of the uniquely visual aspects of advertising. Because of the implicit nature of visual argumentation and the relative lack of social accountability which images enjoy in comparison with words, pictures can be used to make advertising claims that would be unacceptable if spelled out verbally. From this starting point, Paul Messaris analyzes a variety of commercial, political and social issue advertisements. He also discusses the role of images in cross-cultural advertising.
Pictures and Reality
Pictures and Reality
If there is one property that most clearly distinguishes pictures from language and from the other modes of human communication, that property is iconicity (to use the Peircian terminology that was described in the introduction). Through combinations of lines and shapes and colors on a piece of paper or a movie screen or a video monitor, pictures are able to recreate the kinds of visual information that our eyes and brains make use of when we look at the real world. Note that iconicity does not necessarily entail a precise match between the appearance of a picture and the appearance of reality. There are many kinds of pictures—for instance, cartoons, sketches, or black-and-white photographs—whose visual characteristics are superficially quite different ...
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