Camera as Witness, Image as Sign: The Study of Visual Communication in Communication Research

Abstract

This chapter summarizes the state of the study of visual communication in communication research. The author outlines major themes and theories characterizing the study of visual communication and concludes by isolating key issues and current trends in the field.

Full text

Communication Yearbook 24
Camera as Witness, Image as Sign:
The Study of Visual Communication in Communication Research
Michael Griffin
Given the daunting, and perhaps unrealistic, task of adequately characterizing the
interdisciplinary terrain of visual communication studies, it is necessary to begin this essay with a
caveat. A truly comprehensive overview of the traditions of visual communication study would be
impossible even in a book length treatment. The study of visual communication comprises such wide
reaching and voluminous literatures as art history, the philosophy of art and aesthetics, semiotics,
cinema studies, television and mass media studies, the history and theory of photography, the history
and theory of graphic design and typography, the study of word/image relationships in literary,
aesthetic, and rhetorical theory, the development and use of charts, diagrams, cartography and
questions of geographic visualization (images of place and space), the physiology and psychology of
visual perception, the impact of new visual technologies (including the impact of digitalization and the
construction of “virtual realities”), growing concerns with the concept and/or acquisition of “visual
literacy,” and the boundless social and cultural issues embedded in practices of visual representation.
Amid such an eclectic field no consensus has emerged regarding canonical texts. Even the concept of
“imagery” itself seems to have no clear boundaries, encompassing concepts of the image that extend
from the perceptual process, through the mental reproduction of perceptions in eidetic imagery,
dreams and memory, to the realms of abstract symbols and ideas by which we mentally map
experience, and the physical creation of pictures and visual media. Consequently, the study of imagery
is as integral to the study of language, cognition, psychoanalysis and ethology, as it is to the study of
pictorial or graphic representation.
Here I attempt to address a few key themes and theories within the limits of a single chapter.
In doing so, I remain necessarily selective and incomplete. No doubt many readers will find fault with
chosen emphases and inevitable omissions. To those readers I offer my apologies. Hopefully, critical
consideration of this survey will encourage others to address gaps in my treatment.

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For purposes of manageability I have chosen to focus this discussion around the study of
pictures rather than the broader concept of the visual, and with a bent towards the study of twentieth
century mass communication media rather than the larger history of art and visual representation.1 The
choice to concentrate on the pictorial directs the emphasis toward the production and interpretation of
communication media and avoids the insurmountable problem of addressing a diffuse and boundless
range of the visual. The focus on recent history reflects the concern for contemporary media and
cultural environments that is such a prominent part of communication studies.
In this context the study of visual communication as an institutional interest area has grown
primarily in response to perceived gaps in the more widely established field of mass communication
research. The relationship to mass communication may not be readily apparent, for visual
communication study did not emerge within established traditions of mass communication research,
nor was it bound by the same theoretical or methodological paradigms. Yet the study of visual
communication (as opposed to the study of art, art history, design or architecture) has been defined in
relation to the mechanical reproduction of imagery that has characterized modern mass media
(Benjamin, 1936; Ivins, 1953; Berger, 1972).
Those intrigued by the role and influence of visual imagery in mass circulation publications,
television, and the entire range of commercial advertising have often been disappointed by the lack of
attention given to pictures in established traditions of mass communication research. None of the
prominent strains of mass communication research—public opinion and attitude research, social
psychological studies of behavior and cognition, experimental studies of media exposure, marketing
research, correlational studies of media effects, content analysis, studies of media uses and
gratifications, agenda-setting research, or sociologies of media organizations and media production—
have routinely incorporated the analysis of visual forms and their role in communication processes.2
Even studies of political communication, where one might expect a keen interest in the role of visual
images, focus overwhelmingly on rhetorical strategies, issue framing, and a concern for the tactical
effect of linguistic symbols and slogans, and lack a sustained attention to the contributions of the

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visual. A 1990 survey of political communication literature, for example, found that only five out of
more than 600 articles and studies actually examined the concrete visual components of televised
election coverage and advertising, and that when the term “image” was used it most often referred to
conceptual interpretations of the public ethos of political candidates rather than specific concrete
visual attributes of media presentations (Johnston, 1990).3
Against this background the growing interest in visual communication throughout the 1970s
and 80s was often perceived as a corrective response. The increasingly ubiquitous visual appeals of
advertising, both commercial and political, and the alarming number of hours most people spent
watching television, had certainly made media researchers aware of the potential impact of images and
triggered some interest to include visual analysis in their work. Yet, few examples of research
specifically focused on the visual mode could be found in the mass communication literature, and
those hoping to pursue such research needed to look beyond the boundaries of communication
scholarship for theories, templates, and inspiration. Often, this meant foraging purposefully among
literatures institutionally separated from communications: aesthetics, anthropology, art history, graphic
design, electronic and video arts, film theory and history, the philosophy of perception and knowledge,
literary theory, linguistics, semiology. Sometimes it meant opening the door to those developments
within communications more attentive to the impact of images: to feminist scholars, and others,
interested in gender portrayals (Tuchman, et. al., eds., 1978; Kaplan, 1983), to those concerned with
representations of homosexuality (Gross, 1988, 1989; Dyer, 1993), to those concerned with the
stereotyping of various racial, cultural and social groups (Miller, 1978; Turow, 1978; Gerbner, et. al.
1980; Shaheen, 1988; Lester, ed., 1996). And sometimes it meant reframing or redefining entrenched
areas of professional and technical training: in film and video production, photography and
photojournalism, broadcast journalism, typography and publication design (Barnhurst, ed., 1991).
By the 1980s this trend led to movements within academic communication associations to
provide expanded forums for visual communication research presentations. In the International
Communication Association (ICA) non-divisional paper sessions were organized around visual

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communication themes, eventually leading to the establishment of a Visual Communication Interest
Group. In the Association for Education in Journalism and Mass Communication (AEJMC) attempts
were made to encourage the presentation of scholarly research in the Visual Communication Division,
a division previously focused almost exclusively on professional training in graphic design and
photojournalism4. In the Speech Communication Association (SCA), an interest group on “visual
literacy” was formed. These developments have continued to influence, albeit unevenly, the place of
visual communication studies within the larger field of communication research. However, primary
sources of new theory and new research have continued to originate from outside these institutional
parameters. In the remaining pages I will attempt to chart some of the major influences in the
intellectual history of visual communication studies that led it to be identified as a distinct sub-field
within communications.
History and Theory
The rise of contemporary visual communication studies was, of course, preceded by centuries
of thought and writing concerning the arts and the visual image. Yet the last decades of the twentieth
century have seen a renewed philosophical concern with the visual that Mitchell (1994), following
Rorty’s (1979) notion of “the linguistic turn,” has called “the pictorial turn.” Mitchell argues that
“while the problem of pictorial representation has always been with us, it presses inescapably now,
and with an unprecedented force, on every level of culture, from the most refined philosophical
speculations to the most vulgar productions of the mass media” (p. 16).
The simplest way to put this is to say that, in what is often characterized as an age of
“spectacle” (Debord), “surveillance” (Foucault), and all-pervasive image-making, we still do
not know exactly what pictures are, what their relation to language is, how they operate on
observers and on the world, how their history is to be understood, and what is to be done with
or about them (p. 13).
More immediately pertinent to my discussion at this point is the extensive body of literature
exploring the ontology and epistemology of photography and the cinema, the foundations of
contemporary lens-based media. Writings on photography since the middle of the nineteenth century

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have continually explored, and revisited, the nature of the photographic image as art vs. science,
pictorial expression vs. mechanical record, trace vs. transformation (Sontag, 1977; Trachtenberg,
1981; Goldberg, 1988). Meanwhile, the practice of photography has been dogged by the ongoing
contradictions between the craft of picture making and the status of photographs as “reflections of the
real” (Bolton, 1989; Schwartz, 1992; Griffin, 1995; Brennen and Hardt, 1999). Similarly, the
extensive literature of film theory, going back at least to the treatises of Lindsay (1916), Munsterberg
(1916), Pudovkin (1926), Eisenstein (1942, 1949), and Arnheim (1932), has struggled with the nature
of cinema and its proper aesthetic and communicational development. A wellspring of analytic
concepts regarding the composition and juxtaposition of images have been applied to sophisticated
analyses of mise-en-scene (the construction of the shot) and montage (the structuring of sequences of
shots through editing). The synthesis of realist theories of mise-en-scene, formalist theories of
montage, and structural theories of narrative in the work of Jean Mitry (1963, 1965, 1972) and the
subsequent application of linguistically based semiotic theory to cinema by Christian Metz (1974)
pushed film analysis into new territories of narrative and syntactical exegesis in the attempt to identify
a “language of film.” We are still looking.
Film Studies
Film theory is such an important foundation for the development of visual communication
studies that one is nearly tempted to say that all contemporary visual media studies can be described as
the application of concepts from film theory to other forms of media. However, since film theory is a
body of concepts and tools borrowed from the study of art, psychology, sociology, language and
literature, and work in visual communication has often returned to these various sources for new
applications to photography, design, electronic imaging, or virtual reality, it would be more accurate to
say that film theory established central theoretical parameters of debate that still shape visual
communication research. These parameters primarily involve the distinction between formative and
realist theories (Andrew, 1976, 1984), a key issue discussed below, but also involve questions

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concerning the scope and centrality of narrative, an issue that has pre-occupied the philosophy of
representation across numerous fields (Rorty, 1979; Ricouer, 1980; Fisher, 1985, 1987, 1989; Marcus
and Fischer, 1986; White, 1987; Clifford, 1988; Rosaldo, 1989).
Formative theories treat cinematic presentations as wholly constructed visual expressions, or
rhetoric, and seek to build schematic explanations for the semantic and syntactic capacity and
operation of the medium. Realist theories argue that there is a natural relationship between life and
image. They assert that photographic motion pictures inherently mirror everyday perception and
moreover that the goal for filmmakers should be to employ that essential capacity to create the most
realistic possible simulations of actual experience. All film students learn about the concepts of film
art posited by early formalists such as Munsterberg, Arnheim, Kuleshov, Pudovkin, Eisenstein and
Balazs, and countered by realists such as Bazin and Kracauer. Many aspects of this theoretical
opposition have re-emerged repeatedly as visual communication studies have come to encompass
parallel issues in television, photojournalism, news, advertising, and most recently digital image
creation and manipulation.
The heart of the matter, and arguably the central question of all visual communication study, is
the precise status of the image as a copy or analogue. As Andrew writes of the work of Bazin and
Mitry, “…Bazin spent his life discussing the importance of the “snugness” with which the filmic
analogue fits the world , whereas Mitry has spent his life investigating the crucial differences which
keep this asymptote forever distinct from the world it runs beside and so faithfully mirrors” (1976:
190). Historically, film and photographic theory and criticism were absorbed with these questions as
they pertained to the properties of the image-text itself. As will be discussed at a later point, visual
communication studies turned the question towards the manner in which images were utilized and
interpreted by media production institutions and viewing audiences.
The key point here, to be revisited throughout this essay, is that the study of pictures brought
into even greater relief questions of reflection and construction in human representation. And although
these issues are not confined to modern visual media, and perhaps are questions that cannot be asked

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of pictures as if they were a purely visual medium, somehow outside of inter-textual contexts, they
have become defining issues for visual communication study in an era of constant photographic
reproduction when it is so often taken for granted that visual media technologically mimic reality.5
Various technical advances have seemed to provide an inexorable progression toward ever more
convincing recreations of the “real world” and have consistently raised the ante on illusion and
simulation. Yet film theory has persistently directed attention towards the processes of constructing
visual representations, constantly reminding us of the inherent tension between the craft of picture
making and the perception of pictures as records. Against the common sense assumptions so often
made hat visual media give us a window on the world with which to witness “reality,” film theory
from the beginning has interrogated the ways in which such “windows” are created and structured to
shape our view. Even in the practice of documentary film, theorists such as Nichols (1991) show us
the patterns or “modes” of representational strategy that make each documentary a formal and
rhetorical articulation. Writers on still photography, perhaps ironically, followed the development of
film theory in fully theorizing the ontology of the photograph, but in the last fifty years have also
contributed an extensive literature on the relationship of photo images to their subjects.6
The fact that film studies provided an important stock of conceptual tools for the study of
pictorial communication of all types was not lost on communication scholars who hoped to better
understand the growing prominence of visual mass media in late industrial society. British cultural
studies also borrowed freely from film studies (much of it centered around the British Film Institute
and its sponsored book and journal publications) and the resulting sensitivity to the culturally
constructed nature of visual representation in much cultural studies work made it attractive to visual
communication scholars in America. Writings on visual media by such British and Australian cultural
critics and scholars as John Berger (1972); Raymond Williams (1974), Laura Mulvey (1975), Richard
Dyer (1977), Judith Williamson (1978), Dick Hebdidge (1979), John Fiske and John Hartley (1978)
drew the attention of those tuned into what the British increasingly called “lens theory.” The influence
of this brand of cultural studies on the American scene fueled a nascent interest in semiotic analysis

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and the interpretation of media texts, and it was not a far leap to imagine the incorporation of visual
analysis into studies of representation, meaning and ideology.7 Moreover, the fast growing popularity
of cultural studies often helped to open up additional curricular space for addressing the nature of
visual symbol systems and processes of meaning construction. A convergence of interest in the study
of photographically mediated culture was building from several directions, including anthropology,
sociology and the psychology of art.
The Psychology of Art and Visual Representation
Along side film theory, another literature that contributed significantly to discussions of the
ontology of the image lies at the intersection of aesthetics, art history, and the psychology of visual
perception. The work of E. H. Gombrich serves to represent the essential themes of this tradition,
although its roots lie in the earlier work of Panofsky (1924/1991) and others. In his highly influential
book Art and Illusion: The Psychology of Visual Representation (1960) Gombrich makes a powerful
case for the conventionality of schemes for visual representation. Using an eminent art historians
knowledge of the traditions of Western art, and particularly the development of linear perspective in
Renaissance art, he argues that picture forms of all kinds are conventionally constructed according to
learned schemata, not copied from nature. Building from the idea that perceptual gestalts are not
necessarily innate but often learned (a concept fully developed in the perceptual research of R. L.
Gregory, 1966, 1970), Gombrich argued that perceptions of visual representations in art operate by
means of gestalts that are culturally based and that, in this sense, pictures are read based on prior
knowledge of cultural conventions.8
Gombrich develops the metaphor of “reading images” in his article, “The Visual Image,”
written for Scientific American in 1972. Here he reiterates the ways in which images are intertwined
within cultural systems of language and function and depend upon “code, caption, and context” for
understanding. Pictures rarely stand alone, and rarely communicate unambiguously when they do. The
mutual support of language and image facilitates memory and interpretation, making visual

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communication (as separate from artistic expression) possible. Without using the same structuralist
paradigm or terminology, Gombrich comes very close to reproducing the semiological notions of icon,
index, and symbol in his analysis. Concepts originally found in Pierce (1931), Gombrich, and others,
have found them to be as useful when applied to images as to language: the iconic aspects being those
that signify by resemblance, the indexical by causal relation, and the symbolic by arbitrary and
conventional agreement. Most images seem to combine all three qualities of signification in some
measure, although it is most often the iconic prevalence and/or limits of images that preoccupies
scholars of the visual, the iconic being that which most clearly distinguishes visual signs from lexical,
mathematical, musical and socio-gestural (Gross 1974).
Gombrich used the pictorial plaque placed on the side of the Pioneer space probe as a prime
example of the naivete with which even highly educated people assume that pictures communicate
naturally and directly, without prior knowledge of the message system. The plaque was designed by
NASA scientists as a universal greeting, “on the off chance that somewhere on the way it is
intercepted by intelligent scientifically educated beings” (NASA press release). Breaking down each
part of the pictorial greeting, Gombrich points out that outside of certain culturally specific
conventions of abstract line drawing, perspective, foreshortening, and symbols, such as an arrow
showing direction of flight and a hand waving to indicate “hello” (all uniquely specific to a tradition of
Western art practiced in only particular regions of earth), this configuration of lines looks “like
nothing on earth.” Without prior knowledge of the particular Anglo-American use of symbols and
visual forms, Gombrich writes, “Our ‘scientifically educated’ fellow creatures in space might be
forgiven if they saw the figures as wire constructs with loose bits and pieces hovering weightlessly in
between” (p. 257). Indeed, given the collection of highly conventionalized drawings and symbols that
make up this plaque, it would be a miracle if many people on earth, much less from other worlds, were
able to clearly decipher the message. Yet, the fact that it is visual seems to have masked this
realization from its creators.

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Although a substantial body of research by perceptual psychologists (Gibson, 1982;
Hochberg, 1978, 1983, 1984; Kennedy, 1984; Marr, 1982) contradicts Gombrich’s suggestion that
visual apprehension is culturally learned—providing evidence instead that visual perception is a
natural, hard-wired set of sensory, neurological and perceptual processes—the impact of Gombrich’s
analysis has still been enormous. His writings provide a strong case “against the equation of art and
communication” (p. 270), and help to lay a basis for the study of visual communication as distinct
from the study art. They also demonstrate the need to understand the history of art, and the various
traditions of depiction and symbolization that have influenced visual practices, before hoping to
explain the role of visual communication in modern media systems. Together with film theory,
semiotics, the social history of art, and anthropological concerns with art and visual representation, the
psychology of visual representation has contributed to an eclectic body of theory and research on
which communications scholars began to draw for conceptualizing approaches to visual
communication analysis.
Word and Image: Extra-textual and Inter-textual Influences
Other strains in the history of art and aesthetics that have contributed heavily to contemporary
thinking about visual communication include the social history of art, and aesthetic theories regarding
the relationship between pictures and language. The social history of art, particularly in the work of
writers such as Svetlana Alpers (1983), Michael Baxandall (1972, 1985), or Michael Fried (1980),
offers models for investigating relationships between the production of images and the social contexts
of their sponsorship, use, and interpretation. Alpers has explored the relationship of picture making to
description, from the ekphrastic tradition of the Sophists in which they used the subject matter of
paintings as jumping-off points for discursive monologues and storytelling, a model, she argues, for
Vasari’s famous descriptions of Renaissance paintings (Alpers, 1960), to the seventeenth century
tradition of Dutch painting, when Northern European painters broke with the narrative tradition of
Italian painting to create a new “descriptive pictorial mode.”

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Baxandall’s (1972) study of painting and experience in fifteenth century Italy provides a prime
historical example of what Gross (1974) called “doing the ethnography of visual communication.” It
demonstrates how patronage and contractual obligations, on the one hand, and viewer expectations
and understandings of convention, on the other, combined to make of painting a currency of social
communication, a socially shared system of conventions in which viewers could infer the social status
and wealth of the patron, the ecclesiastical and religious functions of the picture, the theological,
elemental, and even astrological messages encoded in colors, forms and symbols, and the institutional
ends to which paintings were attached. Becker’s Art Worlds (1982) applies a similar approach to
twentieth century social worlds of artistic production with specific attention paid to painting and
photography, among other arts. Gross’ On the Margin of Art Worlds (1995) follows in this vein with a
collection of studies explicitly devoted to the social definitions and boundaries that have emerged
among worlds of visual art and communication. The importance of the sociology and anthropology of
visual communication will be further explored in the next section.
Related to these extra-textual studies of visual communication practice and meaning is a long
history of attention to the intertextual relationships between word and image. Whether in studies of the
relationship between religious painting and scripture, pictures and narrative, or attempts to pursue the
study of iconology (the general field of images and their relation to discourse), the existence of
pictures within larger multi-textual contexts has led to several rich traditions of scholarship. Here the
dispersed boundaries of visual communication studies become especially apparent. Its coherence as a
field diffuses into myriad strains of philosophy, literary theory, linguistics, cultural theory, art history
and media studies—the concerns with the subject/spectator (the look, the gaze, the glance,
observation, surveillance, and visual pleasure) and with the interpreter/reader (decipherment,
decoding, visual experience, “visual literacy,” or “visual culture”) running through numerous
disciplines and theories from Panofsky (1924/1991, 1939) to Delueze (1986, 1988, 1989).
It is impossible for me to survey (or even briefly catalog) this expansive literature on “scopic
regimes” and the myriad historical attempts to investigate the interactions of verbal and visual

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representation in the study of the “Sister Arts,” painting and literature, ut pictura poesis, icon and
logos, image/text, languages of art, semiotics—all attempts to treat representation and discourse in one
master theory of pictures or science of representation. For those interested in a detailed and erudite
exploration of these traditions and their relevance to our contemporary “culture of images,” society of
the spectacle,” world of semblances and simulacra,” I recommend the companion books of W.J.T.
Mitchell, Iconology: Image, Text, Ideology (1986), and Picture Theory (1994). For those interested in
an extensive and provocative history of twentieth century French philosophy’s attempt to explain (and
subjugate?) the visual within structuralist and post-structuralist theory, see Martin Jay’s Downcast
Eyes: The Denigration of Vision in Twentieth-Century French Thought (1993).
Unable to give more than a passing nod to the vast traditions of image/text theory in
philosophy and the arts in so brief a precis, I will turn instead to a development that played a central
role in the growth of visual communication study within the universe of International Communication
Association research and activities, the growth of social communicational studies of picture making
and reception in the “anthropology of visual communication.”
The Anthropology (and Sociology) of Visual Communication
Research that came to be identified under this title emerged in the 1960s and 70s largely in
association with the work of Sol Worth, Jay Ruby, Richard Chalfen, Larry Gross, Howard S. Becker,
and their students. It was carried forward by scholars particularly interested in the cultural codes and
social contexts of image making within particular communities, sub-cultures, and social groups. This
movement was influenced by work in the psychology of art and representation, film theory, semiotics,
and the social history of art. For example, attempts to assess and compare the types of psychological
schemata suggested by Gombrich in image making and image interpretation across different cultures
suggested that processes of visual communication were not universal and needed to be explored within
specific socio-cultural settings. Hudson (1960), Deregowski (1968, 1973) and Cook (1981) compared
perceptions of depth perspective in pictures, and susceptibility to visual illusions grounded in

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expectations of linear perspective (such as the Ponzo illusion), across Western and non-Western
cultures. Hudson found a sharp difference in perceptions of conventional two-dimensional depth cues
between subjects with formal Western schooling and those without. Deregowski found that people in
Western cultures, where the use of linear perspective was common and normative, were much more
susceptible to such illusions than people for whom linear perspective was not a naturalized
expectation. Cook found much smaller differences among groups, seemingly providing evidence
contradictory to Hudson and Deregowski. There is also a history of anecdotal reports suggesting that
people in parts of the world isolated from industrial culture found photographic images confounding,
and needed to go through a process of learning to decipher the relationships between two dimensional
shapes and tones and three dimensional referents before they could more readily “read” the
appearances of photographic prints. Messaris (1994: 60-70) has reviewed this research on cultural
differences in pictorial construction and perception and suggested that the empirical evidence on this
question does not, in fact, support the idea that pictorial apprehension is a learned cultural skill. He
finds the position posited by philosopher Nelson Goodman in Languages of Art (1968), that all forms
of representation (visual, lexical, musical, architectural, and kinesthetic) require an understanding of
symbolic conventions and codes that must be culturally learned, to be overstated and contradicted by
evidence on visual perception. Nevertheless, the idea that people raised in different cultures may see
and picture the world differently provided a stimulus for expanding social research in visual
communication, and Messaris readily concedes that whether or not basic pictorial apprehension is
more natural than many cultural theorists believed, interpretations of meaning in pictures remains
heavily dependent on cultural experience and convention.
The anthropology of visual communication was also heavily influenced by new approaches to
the study of linguistics, not only by structuralist tendencies and the semiological theories and methods
that structural linguistics engendered, but in particular by the rise of soiolinguistics in the work of
Hymes (1964; 1967), Labov (1966), Bernstein (1971), and others. Sociolinguists had begun to
examine the differing uses of language across sub-cultures, social classes, and ethnic groups, and

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provided exemplars for the similar study of visual “languages” in varying social contexts. A key figure
in adapting these influences to the study of visual communication was Sol Worth. The collection of his
writings, Studying Visual Communication (1981), edited posthumously by his colleague and co-author
Larry Gross, is perhaps the best starting point for those interested in gaining a sense of the origins of
the field of visual communication research.
“The central thread that runs through Worth’s research and writings is the question of how
meaning is communicated through visual images” (Gross, 1981). Initially, Worth was fascinated by
novice filmmaking, particularly what he called the “bio-documentary” films made by his students, as
manifestations of individually subjective, psychological issues. Before long, however, he began to
shift the focus of his attention to the nature of film as cultural communication, both as a reflection the
of the world views, values, and concerns of a filmmaker’s cultural group, and as a reflection of the
codes and conventions of image making and film construction shared by that group—agreements
about the status of sign-events, syntax rules, rules by which we make inferences from sequences of
signs.
These interests led to the landmark Navajo Filmmakers Project, in which Worth collaborated
with anthropologist John Adair and graduate assistant Richard Chalfen to train Navajo students in
Arizona to make 16mm films and then screened and studied their film products, not as records about
their culture, but as examples of Navajo culture, “reflecting the value systems, coding patterns, and
cognitive processes of the maker” (Worth, 1972; reprinted as chapter 3 in Worth, 1981). They
reasoned that studying the filmmaking products of Navajos, rather than making films about them,
“would come closer to capturing his vision of his world” (Worth and Adair, 1972: italics in original).
But they were interested in the degree to which such visual creation would, in fact, exhibit culturally
specific vs. pancultural attributes.
Can anyone make movies? Can anyone understand a movie? How do you learn? What do you
learn? We will be discussing two things that are inseparable but nevertheless slightly different.
One is the study of images themselves in their cultural context, under the variety of constraints
that culture and its technology impose. The other is the study of the way the human mind in
general—panculturally—deals with images. The first would ask why a particular person, in a
particular culture, in a particular situation, made a particular image or interpreted it in a

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particular way. The second would seek to learn how these particular ways are related to ways
that all men use when they try to make sense of pictures (Worth and Adair, 1972:15).
The Navajo films (now in the collection of the Museum of Modern Art in New York), and the
published results of the project, including the book, Through Navajo Eyes: an exploration in film
communication and anthropology (Worth and Adair, 1972), were praised by such commentators as
Margaret Mead as a “breakthrough in cross-cultural communications” (Mead, 1977: 67). Inspired by
anthropological and symbolic interactionist concerns with the issues and problems of social
representation, Through Navajo Eyes came to be a seminal work for communications scholars that
increasingly questioned the use of film and photography as objective recording tools. Worth and Adair
directly challenged the established use of documentary film and photography as data collection tools
for social scientists, arguing that such taken-for-granted uses of mechanical devices for “objective”
representation were seriously problematic. Here, and in later writings and lectures, Worth vigorously
argued that filmed “records” of other cultures are more likely to reflect the perspectives and priorities
of the filmmaker, and his or her own cultural background, than to penetrate and reveal the culture and
worldview of the people in front of the camera.
Worth’s observations were met with annoyance and defensiveness by many in the
documentary film world, but were echoed by other anthropologists, such as Jay Ruby, whose
numerous articles throughout the 70s also questioned the naïve use of film and photography in
ethnographic and social science research (Ruby, 1981). Ruby’s edited collection, A Crack in the
Mirror: Reflexive Perspectives in Anthropology (1982) recapitulates this critical groundswell and
carries it from anthropology’s use of visual media to questions of written and narrative representation.
It is no coincidence, I believe, that the “crisis of representation” in anthropology that struck in the 80s
with such critiques of anthropological reporting and representation as Marcus and Fisher’s,
Anthropology and Cultural Critique (1986), Clifford and Marcus, eds. Writing Culture: The poetics
and politics and ethnography (1986), Clifford’s The Predicament of Culture (1988), and Rosaldo’s
Culture and Truth: The remaking of social analysis (1989) were preceded by challenges to the
neutrality of visual technology and its use in representations of culture.

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This critique of documentary practice led Worth to propose “a shift from visual anthropology
to the anthropology of visual communication” (1980) suggesting the need to abandon taken-for-
granted assumptions about the capacity of film and photography to portray culture from the outside.
Instead, he suggested, it would be better to study the forms and uses given to visual media by the
members of different cultures and social groups themselves. Worth vigorously distinguished this work
from traditional “visual anthropology,” much of which he considered naïve and unreflective in its
reliance on photographic records about culture, and increasingly became identified with the alternative
of studying all forms of visual communication as examples of culture, to be analyzed for the patterns
of culture that they reveal.
The Navajo Film Project inspired a stream of subsequent research on visual media as coded
cultural texts, keys to cultural concepts and symbolic systems. Worth’s idea of an “anthropology of
visual communication” dovetailed with the work of numerous students, colleagues, and scholars
working along cognate trajectories, leaving a fruitful legacy. These included, among other related
research: groundbreaking studies of family photography and home moviemaking (Chalfen, 1975;
1987; Musello, 1980), explorations of the nature and limits of documentary representation (Ruby,
1975; Ruby, ed., 1982; Ruby and Taureg, eds., 1987; Linton, 1992; Feld, 1985), the study of pictorial
perception, learning, and interpretation (Worth and Gross, 1974; Messaris and Gross, 1977; Messaris
and Pallenik, 1977; Messaris, 1982; Custen, 1982), the socialization of children to visual forms
(Pallenik, 1976; Messaris and Sarrett, 1981; Eadie, Sutton-Smith, and Griffin, 1983; Griffin, 1985),
the nature of visual rhetoric and persuasion and questions of visual literacy (Worth, 1969; 1975;
Carey, 1974; Linton, 1982; Messaris, 1994, 1997), the history of institutionalized standards and
practices in picture making and use—both professional and amateur (Worth and Ruby, 1977; Schiller,
1981; Hardt and Ohrn, 1981; Becker, 1985; Schwartz 1992; Griffin, 1992; Griffin 1995), the study of
social worlds of visual production and legitimization—from art, to advertising, to news (Tuchman,
1978; Rosenblum, 1978; Becker, 1974a; 1974b; 1982; Schwartz and Griffin, 1987; Gross, ed., 1995),
and the ethics of visual representation (Gross, Katz, and Ruby, eds., 1988).

17
A key theoretical path involved what Worth and Gross called “interpretive strategies,” an
approach to the study of communication events that they first fully articulated in an article entitled
“Symbolic Strategies” (1974; reprinted in Worth, 1981). In this article they clarified a set of important
conceptual distinctions: first between sign-events, events that provoke an interpretive response, and
nonsign-events, events that we ignore or code “transparently;” second between natural sign-events and
those they called symbolic. Natural sign-events are those for which we assume a natural cause rather
than an intended meaning. For example, a tree bending in the wind may be interpreted as a sign of an
approaching storm, but we usually do not assume that the tree has been bent by someone intentionally
to convey a message to us. Therefore, the tree bending in the wind would be a natural sign-event. This
could change if the observer happened to believe that a supernatural entity was intentionally bending
the tree to convey a message. A painting of a tree bending in the wind, on the other hand, would more
likely be seen by a viewer as a symbolic sign-event, a picture painted by an “author” with an intention
to convey some meaning or emotion. When we assume intention we look for some purposeful order,
pattern or sequence, and rely upon some shared system of rules of implication and inference. That is,
when we assume implicative intent we assume that we are meant to infer meaning, and if we feel
justified in investing some attention to the event we may even go beyond simple awareness of the
presence of order or pattern and recognize structural relationships among elements. Structural
recognition allows for even higher levels of inference, including the interpretation of tropes, narrative
structure, variations on a theme, etc.
Worth and Gross described the interpretation of natural sign-events as attribution; we simply
attribute existence to these events and respond according to our familiarity with related life
experiences. For instance, upon seeing the tree bending in the wind we might decide to take an
umbrella with us on our walk. They described the interpretation of symbolic events as inference; we
assume that an author/creator intends to imply a meaning so we attempt to infer one. When viewing
the painting of a tree bending in the wind we may look for details of subject matter that the painter has
chosen to include in the frame (or even notice that she has chosen to leave something out). We may

18
pay attention to the perspective of the canvas, the colors employed, the technique of rendering. At the
most complex levels of inference we may look for stylistic conventions that place the painting within a
particular era, or a particular school of work, and draw conclusions about intent based upon prior
knowledge of the concerns of painters employing those conventions and structures.
Worth and Gross, and others, found the attribution/inference distinction useful, not because
sign-events are stable and can be categorically sorted into one type or another, but because they
describe shifting interpretive strategies on the part of the observer/audience. An event that might be
treated as natural by a viewer in one situation might be treated as symbolic by a different viewer (or
the same viewer) in another instance. Of particular interest, are the examples that Worth and Gross
called “ambiguous,” when the stance of the interpreter shifts between attribution and inference, or
among levels of complexity in appreciation. This is especially common with photographs or film, and
the attribution/inference paradigm is perhaps most interesting when photographically mediated events
are at issue. It is then that we are most likely to slip into strategies of attribution, even as sophisticated
levels of inference are most needed to negotiate the complex worlds of media representation and
potential manipulation.
Worth addressed one aspect of the ambiguity in his article “Pictures Can’t Say Aint” (1975,
1981), where he attempts to clarify the specific types of implication/inference, or articulation
/interpretation, that are possible given the nature of visual forms. Here he was particularly interested
in the differences between what pictures and language can do with regard to propositions, negation,
conditionals, counterfactuals, past-future tenses, interrogatives, correspondence, evidence, or other
forms of logical syntax. As in many of his writings, he attempts to link semiotic concerns for the
systemic properties of form and syntax in pictorial construction and the social anthropologist’s
concern with the processes of reception, interpretation and use within specific socio-cultural contexts.
A point he emphasizes again and again is the inadequacy of the “reflection hypothesis” or
correspondence theory that pictures operate by simple, direct resemblance to “reality.” Echoing

19
Gombrich, he reiterates that the nature of pictorial “realism” is not visual correspondence with
“reality,” but rather visual correspondence to recognized cultural conventions of representation.
I have briefly outlined earlier why I think the notion of matching to the real world is
insufficient to explain how pictures mean. Now I can say that I don’t believe this is what one matches
pictures to at all. Correspondence, if it makes any sense as a concept, is not correspondence to
“reality,” but rather correspondence to conventions, rules, forms, and structures for structuring the
world around us. What we use as a standard for correspondence is our knowledge of how people make
pictures—pictorial structures—how they made them in the past, how they make them now, and how
they will make them for various purposes in various contexts. We do not se as our standard of
correspondence how the world is made.
Gross later addressed the issue in a similar way:
…the tendency to see films as objective records of events rather than as a filmmaker’s statement about
events derives from a confusion of interpretive strategies. Worth had attacked the naivete of many
anthropologists and others who were filmically unsophisticated, who assumed that filmed events could
be uncritically interpreted as “natural.” What such viewers fail to understand is that all mediated
events are to some extent symbolic. The mediating agent always makes decisions—about what to
shoot (and consequently, what not to shoot), and how; and having shot, about what how to edit the
footage (one rarely sees raw footage); and finally, about when, where, and how to exhibit the edited
film.
A sophisticated viewer will recognize that the persons, objects, and events in a film are there,
at least in part, because the filmmaker included them intentionally; that the sequence of events in the
film has been ordered by the filmmaker’s intention to say something by putting them in that order
(which may not be the order they actually occurred in); and that the overall structure of the film
reflects the filmmaker’s intention, and ability, to use implicational conventions in order to
communicate to viewers competent to draw the appropriate inferences (Gross, 1981: 29).
By the time of the posthumous publication of Worth’s Studying Visual Communication in 1981, then,
the issue of conventionality, and the exploration of properties of the visual mode with regard to the
natural and the symbolic, were firmly established as a central axis of visual communication theory and
research. The decade of the eighties saw an even broader range of scholars and institutional agendas
take up issues in visual communication, culminating in rising prominence of visual communication as
a formalized sub-field of communications.
Interdisciplinary Cross-currents
While it would clearly be an overstatement to credit Worth’s legacy alone with the emergence
of visual communications as a subfield within American communications, it is equally clear that by

20
the mid 1970s Worth and Gross and their students made the Annenberg School at Penn one of the few
key centers for the interdisciplinary cross-currents that came to define visual communications as a
recognized area of study. Interest in Worth’s notion of an anthropology of visual communication grew,
and became an important impetus fostering the growth of visual communication studies in general.
The journal Studies in the Anthropology of Visual Communication, started by Worth and Ruby in 1974
and housed at Penn, provided a forum for the publication of work on society and photography and
social worlds of art production by such noted scholars as sociologist Howard S. Becker at
Northwestern, studies of the history of photojournalism and the rise of a photojournalistic profession
by Hanno Hardt and Karen Becker at Iowa, work on aesthetic and symbolic education by Howard
Gardner and David Perkins of Harvard Project Zero, ethnographic studies of photography and film by
Jay Ruby and Richard Chalfen at Temple, reviews of children’s filmmaking programs in New York by
Brian Sutton-Smith at Columbia, and studies of visual and symbolic interpretation by Worth, Gross
and their students. Few are aware that the book Gender Advertisements by Erving Goffman, still
considered a foundation study of patterns of gender portrayal in American advertising, was first
published as a special issue of Studies in the Anthropology of Visual Communication in Fall, 1976.
After Worth’s untimely death, Gross and Ruby responded to the growing interdisciplinary
interest in visual communication issues by changing the name of the journal to Studies in Visual
Communication. In keeping with its new name, the journal published contributions from an even wider
range of disciplinary sources, representing the new critical histories of photography, work on the
visual languages of science and cartography, research on caricature and political cartoons, essays on
public art, new interpretations of the documentary tradition in photography and film, and a greater
emphasis on television and media events. For a time Studies in Visual Communication provided
impressive evidence that scholarly attention to visual imagery was growing across the social sciences
and humanities. It was a rigorous, well edited scholarly journal with an internationally eminent
editorial board and funding (for a time) that allowed high quality printing and picture reproduction on
large-format, quality-weight glossy paper. This was a high time for visual scholars, knowing that there

21
was a place for them to publish work complete with quality picture reproductions. Studies, as it was
commonly referred to, not only represented the expansion of this active research area but also set the
standard for what a visual communication journal could be. Unfortunately, in 1985 the journal lost its
funding subsidy and ceased publication. There have been repeated attempts to re-institute a new
journal to take its place. In fact, the organization of a Visual Communication Interest Group in ICA
was an outgrowth of discussions about the possibility of a new journal.
Looking back it is interesting to note the way that the emerging field of visual communication
research resonated with longstanding historical issues in film and photography, and paralleled
emerging interests in schools of art and journalism. As noted earlier, film theory has long been marked
by a rift between the “realists” and the “formative” theorists and filmmakers; those that believed that
the ultimate goal of cinema was to create more and more convincing reproductions of natural
perception vs. those that considered the cinema a new medium for the construction (through camera
and editing techniques) of entirely new modes of perceiving the world and commenting upon it. As
tools for exploring interpretive strategies, the concepts of attribution and inference echo that history. In
photography, the twentieth century has seen a long competition between those for whom the camera
represented a “window” and those that considered it a “mirror.” In his 1970s MOMA retrospective of
American photography John Szarkowski (1978) uses just this metaphor to describe predominate
approaches to photo work before and after 1960. Increasingly, he argued, photographers have
abandoned the idea of photography as a window on reality and have come to embrace the camera as a
reflexive tool, a means of mirroring the photographer’s own feelings or worldview. Worth’s challenge
to the documentary tradition in the human sciences paralleled the shift occurring in critical writings on
art photography during the same period.
By the 1980s traditional notions of visual media were being reevaluated across programs of
art, communications, and journalism. A few journalism schools attempted to recast their
photojournalism and publication graphics tracks into more integrated and multidisciplinary visual
communication curricula. Communication scholars increasingly pointed out that given the pervasively

22
visual nature of contemporary mass media it was no longer tenable to study mass communication
separately from visual communication (Griffin, 1991, 1992b), and that even a medium such as the
newspaper needs to be understood as an inherently visual phenomenon (Barnhurst, ed., 1991,
Barnhurst, 1994). Although most programs of journalism and mass communication continued to treat
photojournalism, publication graphics, and video production as little more than ancillary technical
support designed to enhance the delivery of written reports, a few schools actually began to integrate a
concern for the contributions of the visual throughout the professional and research curriculum.
Concepts from visual anthropology and sociology, the history of film and photography, and the history
of printing and publication design slowly and haltingly began to show up in core introductions to mass
communication and graduate proseminars on mass communication research.
The rise of visual communication studies, therefore, was also advanced by the creeping
realization within traditional mass communication programs that all media of mass communication
had become increasingly (and sometimes exclusively) reliant on visual imagery for their presentations
of entertainment, public ceremonies and spectacles, news reporting, and advertising of all sorts, and
that mass communications research and professional training could no longer legitimately ignore
questions of visual communication. It was in this context that the momentum for a Visual
Communication Interest Group in ICA began to build.
An Institutional Infrastructure
The first signs of the growing presence of visual communication scholarship within the
International Communication Association occurred in the early 1980s in the form of “non-divisional”
paper sessions organized around visual communication themes.9 These visual communication sessions
were distinctive for their particular attention to the forms of representation created by the intersection
of aesthetic and pictorial traditions, shifting industrial uses of visual media, and evolving visual media
technologies. To many it seemed that the movement toward visual communication studies in fact best
fulfilled cultural studies pioneer Raymond William’s exhortation to focus attention on the forms and
practices of media production and representation.

23
These developments were not exclusive to ICA but were occurring widely across various
networks of communications researchers and were reflected in the short-lived success of the journal
Studies in Visual Communication and the establishment of several thematic conferences on visual
communication throughout the 80s.10 These included the International Conference on Visual
Communication held in Philadelphia in 1985,11 an annual Visual Communication Conference that
began to be held each year at sites in the western United States, and a conference on the theme of
Visible Evidence: Strategies and Practice in Documentary Film and Video with periodic meetings in
the U.S. and Europe. The concerns of these meetings overlap to varying degrees with those of the
International Visual Sociology Association, sponsor of a journal begun in 1986 called Visual
Sociology, and the International Society for Visual Anthropology, sponsor of the journal Visual
Anthropology. At the same time, at least two different networks of psychology, education, and
communication scholars, one organized as the International Visual Literacy Association, another more
recently organized as an interest group within the Speech Communication Association, have
institutionalized an ongoing “visual literacy” movement responsible for frequent conferences on visual
literacy and media literacy training.
The early 90s saw a renewed effort to genuinely integrate visual communication studies with
mass communication research. In 1991 Barnhurst edited a special issue of Journalism Educator that
presented a group of articles addressing the prominent role played by pictures and visual design in
journalistic reporting and representation, and the glaring need for greater attention to visual
communication as a central issue in journalism curricula. Barnhurst continued his efforts to integrate
visual communication scholarship into journalism education with his 1994 book Seeing the
Newspaper. In 1992, a long-planned double issue of Communication appeared on the topic of “Visual
Communication Studies and Mass Communication Research,” (Griffin, ed.). In this special double
issue authors explored topics ranging from the roots of mass communication research in early motion
picture studies (Jowett), the movement of advertising to a central reliance on image association
(Craig), the inherent tension in photojournalism and television news between accepted myths of

24
unfettered realism and the actual artifice of routine image construction (Banks, Griffin, Linton,
Perlmutter, Schwartz,), specific techniques of visual metaphor (Kaplan), and the potential practices of
visual manipulation (Messaris). The following year a modest research journal, Visual Communication
Quarterly, was launched by journalism and mass communication scholars as an insert in the National
Press Photographers Association (NPPA) magazine with a primary goal to share relevant academic
research with practicing professionals photojournalists.
The desire to resurrect a more substantial scholarly journal modeled after Studies in Visual
Communication was part of the reason for a meeting of visual communication scholars held at the
1993 ICA Conference in Washington, D.C. At this meeting the Visual Communication Interest Group
in ICA was launched. Since then the group has continued to grow (roughly tripling in membership) as
visual communication has continued to receive increasing scholarly attention.
Key Issues and Current Trends: The State of the Field
The key issues for visual communication as we enter a new millenium are surprisingly similar
to those of 25 years ago. The major difference is that greater attention is being paid to these issues
within communications itself, and the application of these ideas is being made across an even greater
diversity of media forms and technologies, including digital ones. Several books in the last decade
have adeptly summarized and recapitulated the major issues and problems of visual communication
research at the end of the twentieth century. Reference to these books provides a useful map for
summarizing visual communication studies at the end of the twentieth century.
Visual Literacy: Image Mind and Reality (1994) by Messaris provides a sophisticated book-
length review and analysis of issues of picture perception and apprehension, drawing on a broad range
of research in the psychology of perception, film analysis, cognitive theories of spatial learning and
intelligence, and theories of interpretive strategies. The book has been widely cited, for Messaris has
laid out anew the chief ontological and epistemological questions concerning the distinctive status of
images as communicative signs, and challenged the prevailing opinion among contemporary scholars
that visual communication is as much a matter of symbolic convention as language or other sign

25
systems. Taking a fresh look at the degree to which pictures communicate as “natural” analogues of
human visual perception, and therefore verdical copies of our everyday visual impressions of the
physical world, he calls into the question the extent to which visual apprehension relies upon learned
cultural conventions or media specific schemata for representation. While never claiming that
convention plays no part in the process of visual perception, and recognizing the empirical evidence
for clear cultural differences in such areas as linear perspective, he concludes that there is a
preponderance of evidence to suggest that the iconic qualities of pictures do seem to mimic aspects of
natural human perception, providing many of the same visual and informational cues as real-world
visual experience. Furthermore many aspects of pictorial structure or visual syntax in still and moving
images (discerning figure-ground relationships and movements, for example, or inferring depth from
occlusion) seem to be shared across cultures. “Although the particular physical environment of one’s
culture may make one more or less sensitive to certain visual cues, a base-level set of common
perceptual processes is the shared property of all people” (1994: 171).
Messaris position is an extremely important one, for although he in no way argues for a return
to a naïve acceptance of the objective recording capacities of photographic media (quite the opposite)
he does challenge what he considers the “extreme” position regarding conventionality of theorists such
as Nelson Goodman (1968). Goodman argues that because the correspondence of pictures to their
referents follows no consistent rules the connections between pictures and the things they represent are
just as arbitrary as language; we see pictures as resembling “reality” not because they actually do in
any physical or natural sense, but because they conform to the expectations of realistic rendering that
we have learned and been culturally conditioned to accept. Because many visual scholars, following
Gombrich, have come to accept theories of conventionality that are sympathetic to Goodman’s
position, Messaris has been seen as something of an iconoclast. Yet, what he has done is to remind us
that the kinds of questions asked by Sol Worth decades ago have not been settled. His work echoes
Worth’s stated goal: “I should like to begin an exploration into how, and what kinds of things pictures
mean…and how the way that pictures mean differs from the way such things as ‘words’ or ‘languages’

26
mean” (Worth, 1975: 85). And by eschewing the comfort of accepted wisdom concerning visual
convention, he meticulously demonstrates that relationships between the natural (and perhaps
universal) characteristics of human image perception and the culture bound aspects of representational
schemata and connotative discernment are complex, ambiguous, and still at the heart of visual
communication studies.
Following his treatise on the nature of images and visual literacy, Messaris turned to the
cultural power of visual media, whose fleeting images mimic so convincingly the appearances of real
life. In Visual Persuasion: The role of images in advertising (1997), he argues that precisely because
pictures enjoy such a close resemblance to real-world visual cues, they have a power to influence,
persuade, or convince that goes beyond non-iconic symbol systems. He outlines and examines the
various means by which images operate to propose, persuade, and convince, providing a map for
future research on visual influence. He explores three major strategies by which images are employed,
and in terms of which images demand further investigation: employing the iconic qualities of images
to simulate reality, employing images as evidence, and employing reproduction, editing and
juxtaposition to construct implied propositions. These three categories of image use, and their
intersections, suggest key areas of ongoing research that help to define the current parameters of visual
communication studies.
Another recent book that provides an almost encyclopedic review of current issues in visual
communication is Barry’s Visual Intelligence: Perception, Image, and Manipulation in Visual
Communication (1997). Not as iconoclastic in its challenge of culturalist theories of visual perception
it explores many of the same issues surrounding perception and “visual common sense” and critically
relates the myriad theories of vision and imagery that underlie the role and power of pictures in film,
video, advertising, politics, and propaganda. Published two years before the school shootings in
Littleton, Colorado, she ends the book with a prescient discussion of the special power of imagery in
the “new violence” of contemporary media and call for heightened awareness about the potential
dangers of a media fueled culture of violence among the young.

27
Barthes wrote that photography, “by virtue of its absolutely analogical nature, seems to
constitute a message without a code” (1977: 42-43). The power of images to simulate reality, based on
many of the properties of non-conventionality that Messaris explores and analyzes, sidesteps
traditional rhetorical concerns with truth, falsity, or logical consistency. Instead, images simply imply
existence, the subject matter of images just is. This quality not only lends itself to the proliferation of
psuedo-events (Boorstin, 1961), and the ever new developments and consequences of virtual realities
(Barrett and Redmond, eds., 1995; Heim, 1998), but makes of images a kind of automatic evidence
that is rarely questioned. Therefore, the ontological questions regarding the status of images as
simulated reality blur together with epistemological questions concerning the validity of images as
evidence.
These compounded theoretical issues continually re-emerge in nearly every area of visual
communication studies. Recent studies of documentary representation (Corner, ed., 1986; Nichols,
1991; Winston, 1995) identify different “modes of representation” (or simulated reality) that take on
the role of evidence, and consequently rhetorical proposition, in different ways. The expository mode,
the observational mode, the interactive mode, and the reflexive mode—useful analytical categories for
studying the historical evolution of documentary representation—are often confounded, however, by
the “blurred boundaries” of ‘reality TV,” infotainment, and fictional non-fiction that dominate
postmodern television (Nichols, 1994). A great, but still largely unmet challenge for visual
communication scholars is to scan, chart, and interrogate the various levels at which images seem to
operate: as evidence in visual rhetoric, as simulated reality bolstering and legitimizing the presence
and status of media operations themselves, as abstract symbols and textual indices, and as “stylistic
excess”—the self conscious performance of style (Caldwell, 1995). Visual style itself, apart from
content-related denotation, connotation, and allusion, can be a powerful index of culture—subcultures,
professional cultures, political cultures, commercial fashion. Initial forays suggest that scrutinizing
visual forms of simulated “reality” tell us a great deal about the nature of media rhetoric, the limits of
veridical representation, and the self-conscious performance of style in newspapers (Barnhurst, 1994),

28
photojournalism (Schwartz, 1992), TV news (Hartley, 1982; Glasgow University Media Group, 1980;
Vidal-Beneyto and Dahlgren 1987; Ericson, Baranek and Chan, 1987; Griffin, 1992, Hartley, 1992a,
1992b; Ericson, 1998), and the various hybrid forms of infotainment, docu-drama, reality TV, and
simulated reality (Nichols, 1994; Caldwell, 1995; Corner, 1995; Messaris, 1997). These issues are
perhaps more significant than ever for the processes of “remediation” that characterize “new” digital
media and the emphases on “transparent immediacy” and “hypermediacy” that distinguish digital
visualization (Bolter and Grusin, 1999).
Visual communication research, more than anything else, has been a path into the examination
of the specific forms of our increasingly visual media surround. In the early stages of mass
communication research Lang and Lang reported on “The Unique Perspective of Television and its
Effect” (1953). The heart of the study was their comparison of the televised coverage of Chicago’s
MacArthur Day parade to the reported observations and experiences of informants on the scene; a
comparison that found the representation of the parade on television, the “TV reality,” to be very
different from, even contradictory to, the “reality” seen and experienced by those attending the event.
They concluded that television’s need to create a coherent presentational structure from separate,
fragmented, and often only indirectly related scenes and activities resulted in a “televisual perspective”
or televisual form specific to the nature and workings of that medium. Unfortunately, this fascinating
line of research never took hold in mainstream mass communication research.12 It was only decades
later that visual communication studies provided an impetus to return to such analysis of media forms.
Two important books in the 1990s revisited this concern with form as part of a heightened
awareness of the visual. Corner’s Television Form and Public Address (1995) suggests that only
through the study of the specific visual forms of television, and not simply its most apparent content,
will we come to better understand the rhetoric and influence of TV as our major forum of public
address. Like Messaris, he sees the propositions and influence of television to reside in the nature of
its simulated reality, its modes of depiction, and its presentational formats. This is not a return to a
McLuhanesque essentialism regarding media technology. Rather it is a recognition (following

29
Raymond Williams) that the historically and culturally specific forms of television that have evolved
in particular industrial and commercial systems inexorably shape and delimit the nature of television
discourse.
Caldwell’s Televisuality: Style, crisis, and authority in American television (1995) revisits
Lang and Lang’s notion of televisuality in an even more explicit technical/aesthetic manner and finds
an even greater gulf than they between presentational styles and connections to external referents.
Caldwell comprehensively describes a solipsistic universe of stylistic excess in which aesthetic
performance dominates a self-referential world. Partly for economic reasons (the desire to cut costs on
locations and sets) television producers increasingly create “virtual worlds of excessive
videographics” in place of the realist style of conventional production techniques (1995:77-78). This is
an issue of particular concern to visual communication researchers as we proceed into an era of
increasingly convincing virtual realism, on the one hand, and the increasingly solipsistic textualization
of images in cyberspace, on the other. More and more visual practices are moving away from the ideal
that visual media can and should explore and reveal our social and natural environment and towards
self-contained visual lexicons that reduce all visual elements to characters in digital texts. It is as if we
seek to follow French structuralist philosophy to its logical conclusion, taming the autonomy and
power of images and making them subservient to textual interpretation (Jay, 1993). It is not just what
we can do with new digital technologies of manipulation (W. J. Mitchell, 1992) but to what purposes
we seek to use the production of images in a post-photographic age (Lister, ed., 1995).
All of which reminds us of the importance of studying not just images themselves but the
social worlds out of which they are produced and in which they are received and used (Worth, 1981;
Becker, 1982). As the various essays in Gross’ On the Margins of Art Worlds (1995) illustrate, cultural
production is always implicated in the communication and reproduction of social distinction, historical
memory, and cultural identity (see also Bourdieu, 1984, 1965/1990). Recently, an increasing number
of studies have turned their attention to the role of visual images in the maintenance of collective
memory, historical mythology, and “cultures of vision” (Perlmutter, 1992, 1999; Burnett, 1995;

30
Zelizer, 1993, 1998; Brennen and Hardt, eds., 1999). The entire movement of the last quarter century
towards new, “critical” histories of photography has largely been an attempt to replace the concept of
photographs as mechanical artifacts of reality with that of photographs as expressions of cultural
vision (Sekula, 1975; Bolton, ed., 1989).
Now, at the beginning of a new millenium, we struggle with the new challenge of relating
some sense of a natural world with the artifice of cyber space and interactive design. Postmodern
theorists have long since thrown in the towel on referentiality, but it is still very unclear where we go
“after photography.” Are we destined to abandon the analogic project of realist exploration and resign
ourselves to digitally generated symbols? Interestingly, at the same time that some are concerned with
the “postlinguistic, postsemiotic rediscovery of the picture,” not as naïve mimesis but as “a complex
interplay between visuality, apparatus, institutions, discourse, bodies, and figurality” (Mitchell, 1994)
the more mundane world of daily media production and consumption continues to subscribe to a
relatively simple correspondence theory of representation. The relationships of visual representations
to either external or intertextual references may often seem ambiguous, but the “reality” of such
representations tends to be assumed nonetheless, both by producers and spectators. The central
common task, then, that still confronts, and helps to define, visual communication scholarship is to
explore and discern the precise ontological and epistemological status of visual media representations,
to clarify the processes of viewer reception and interpretation, and to analyze the social and cultural
ramifications of the peculiar properties of the visual in contemporary media.
Finally, in that emerging condition often referred to as the “global media environment” visual
images have become a new sort of transnational cultural currency. Not the “universal language” that
promoters such as Eastman Kodak Company claimed for photography earlier in the century, but a
currency of media control and power, indices of the predominant cultural visions of predominant
media industries. Western ideals of feminine and masculine appeal, for example, have proliferated
around the world in commercial and entertainment portrayals, making the peculiar look of Western
fashion models a kind of global standard of beauty and sexual glamour (Griffin, Viswanath, and

31
Schwartz, 1994). Similarly, the visual forms of news, entertainment, and cyber landscape that have
rapidly diffused globally seem to reconfirm Tunstall’s 1970s observation that “the media are
American” (Tunstall, 1977; Nordenstreng and Griffin, eds., 1999). So it was that at the most recent
ICA meeting in San Francisco sessions of the Visual Communication Interest Group included panels
on Perceptual-Cognitive Approaches to Visual Communication Research; Theorizing Visual Culture;
Social Experience and Visual Culture; Realism, Narrative and the Image; Photography, Imagination
and Discourse; Cultures of Graphic Design, and Visual Form/Content Across Cultures.

32
Communication Yearbook 24
Camera as Witness, Image as Sign: The Study of Visual Communication in Communication Research
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Alpers, S. (1960). Ekphrasis and Aesthetic Attitudes in Vasari’s Lives. Journal of the Warburg-
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1 I use the term picture here in a sense that is similar to the Albertian definition of a picture noted by Alpers
(1983): “a framed surface or pane situated at a certain distance from a viewer who looks through it at a second or
substitute world” (p. xix). I do not, however, wish to limit my definition to a strictly Renaissance model of
picture making but rather would include all types of visual image making that address viewers in a picture-like
manner.
2 As in any such generalization there are, of course, exceptions. Tuchman’s Making News (1978), for instance, is
a well-known sociological study of news production that does, in fact, devote a chapter to visual representation
(Chapter 6). However, such examples are, indeed, rare in the mass communication literature.
3 This issue is addressed in Griffin and Kagan (1996). Consciousness of the importance of visual images in
political communication expanded greatly in the wake of the Reagan presidency, when such Reagan advisers as
Michael Deaver averred that the control and manipulation of images overpowered anything that the public heard
or read (Deaver, 1987; Adatto, 1993). Following the 1988 campaign, prominent political rhetoricians, such as
Kathleen Hall Jamieson, began for the first time to explicitly call for the visual analysis of political spots and
contemporary political discourse (Jamieson, 1992).
4 See the special issue of Journalism Educator (Spring 1991), Visual Communication Study and Teaching,
edited by Kevin Barnhurst.
5 These issues relate as well to spatial and temporal constructs in literature and the earlier plastic arts, and were
raised by writers at least as early as the eighteenth century (see W.J.T. Mitchell’s treatment of Lessing’s
Laokoon, 1986: 95-115).
6 See Barthes (1977, 1981), Berger (1980), Burgin (1982), Eco (1986), Sontag (1977), Sekula (1975), Tagg
(1988).
7 An early example of the incorporation of visual analysis in the study of representation and ideology is Stuart
Hall’s essay “The Determination of News Photographs” (1972). In this essay he attempts to apply the cultural
and ideological analysis derived from Birmingham Center studies of popular culture to news photographs in
order to demonstrate how pictures enhance and frame the ideological positions of accompanying linguistic text.
In the mid 1970s The Glasgow University Media Group (1976, 1980) carried out some of the first detailed visual
analyses of television news in order to expose the ideological nature of BBC reporting on industrial labor
disputes. Although the Group has been criticized for the assumptions of scientific objectivity that underpin their
analyses of news “bias,” these studies represent a new level of rigor in their employment of concrete visual
analysis.
8 For comprehensive reviews of psychological theories of visual perception and controversies surrounding the
nature of images and visual apprehension see Messaris, Visual Literacy (1994) and Barry, Visual Intelligence
(1997).
9 Messaris was instrumental in organizing some of the earliest of these visual communication sessions.
10 The tenure of the unique and impressive Studies in Visual Communication was unfortunately short-lived. A
cut-off of funding support forced the journal to cease publication after 1985.
11 A book of the proceedings, Visual Explorations of the World, Ruby and Taureg, eds., subsequently appeared.

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12 Almost forty years later mass communication and political communication theorist Doris Graber explicitly
bemoaned the fact the visual elements of such important media genres as television news had not received much
attention (1990; 134n).