This week has been terrible as far as Americans are concerned. Countless times this week we have been faced with images of sheer sadness, whether it was about the Boston Marathon bombing or the fertilizer explosion in West Texas. However, the visual rhetoric in these news article images is quite amazing. Looking at a display of images on the homepage of USA Today pictured below, you see several different images that lead to articles and or video footage regarding the particular news story. Starting with the image of the Boston streets looking deserted, the picture gives the appeal that something strange is happening. It looks strange because everything is in place for a major metropolitan city except the people are missing. This image and title is much bigger and bolder on the page suggesting with visual rhetoric that it is a more important story to the audience then maybe some of the other articles. Next, The picture of the police officer on the top right gives the appeal of honor because the officer’s facial expressions look proud, but serious. The position of this picture in the top right quickly shows the audience that it is of greater importance than the picture below it. However, there is the most visual rhetoric in this bottom image. First, you see an image of a red cross universally symbolizing medical aid. Then, you see government officials moving an injured person to the ambulance to seek medical aid. The audience is unable to clearly see any faces of the people in this image which gives off the feeling of remorse to the audience.
Altogether the visual rhetoric of these images suggests that they must be related in some way because they all share the same rectangle on the very front space of the USA Today’s website. Visual rhetoric continues to evolve with the availability of software to the public. An art form like visual rhetoric must evolve with experimentation. By making graphic software more available to the general public, more experimentation is able to be conducted thus creating new innovative ways to use visual rhetoric in expressing the ideas of the creator to the audience. In what ways have you experimented with software to evolve visual rhetoric? What software did you use? Do you think you were successful in portraying your point to your audience?
I agree that the viewer's eye is drawn to the image of Officer Collier. An interesting juxtaposition of images and text is used throughout.
ReplyDeleteIts a good point you made about all the software available, and visual rhetoric can be easily added in by third parties to completely change the emotional appeal of an image. Tools as simple as Instagram can add emotion to an image, although I prefer Photoshop or GIMP.
ReplyDeleteI recently used a meme-generator to alter an image to portray the emotion and idea that I wanted my friend to see. Overall I think that meme as well as pretty much any meme are successful in getting the makers point across. I've also made use of Photoshop to change the look/appeal of the image for whatever reason and it normally seemed to turn out the way I wanted and give the feeling I wanted. I think this easy to obtain software to manipulate photos has really caused a big movement in the meaning of imagery, it's also caused viewers to be on their toes more than before because you never know what's real and what isn't.
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