Visual Studies

Kevin G. Barnhurst
University of Illinois at Chicago
kgbcomm@uic.edu

Abstract
Formal theories reveal a visual dimension underlying better-known picture
theories. Patterns of elements such as lines, shapes, and spaces, along with
their properties, generate emotional responses and follow visual styles in
society. The elements combine into systems that create perspectives on the
world. Formal awareness may generate an understanding of visual
philosophies and their inherent values and consequences. Picture theories
start from the tension between scientific invention and artistic expression.
From linguistics and philosophy, semiotics provides terms for analyzing
pictures as signs that mediate among mind, eye, and reality, operate within
codes, and reproduce mythology. From film and literary aesthetics,
narrative theory offers analytical structures that reproduce realism through
supposed objectivity, rationality, and autonomy in dialogue with
conventions and genres. Critical, cultural, and poststructural theories assert
the inauthenticity of pictures, social construction of representation, and
instability of meaning. Visual aesthetics, analysis, criticism, and ethics have
entered flux in digital times.

Keywords. Aesthetics; Critical theory; Cultural studies; Design;

Film/cinema studies; Literary studies; Narrative; Realism; Signs; Social
construction of reality

Citation. Barnhurst, Kevin G. “Visual Theory.” International Encyclopedia

of Communication Theory and Philosophy. Ed. Klaus Bruhn Jensen &
Robert T. Craig. London: Blackwell, forthcoming.

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Formal theories
Most attention to visual phenomena in communication studies has
focused on images, from photography, television, and film to digital
screens. Another dimension of visual studies deals with the form underlying
pictures, elements such as the lines, shapes, and colors in media with or
without images. To find how form—the arrangement or presentation
aspects of communication—produces meaning, visual studies researchers
assume that viewers employ a theory of elemental form. Formal theory
began with the notion, proposed by British philosophers in the seventeenth
century, that the source of knowledge of the external world is the
experience recorded by sensory organs. This seemingly commonsense idea
encompasses a particular set of propositions about how the mind and the
eye work together, about what raw material the eye finds in the visible
world, and about when the mind encounters beauty or aesthetic experience.
Formal theory proposes that the mind actively interprets what the eye
records. In the middle of the nineteenth century, the lab of German
psychologist Wilhelm Wundt demonstrated that vision is a mental act, not a
simple, instant response to stimuli. In one experiment, they fitted subjects
with distorting lenses, such as prisms, that turned their vision upside-down,
and found that subjects soon adjusted, performing everyday activities
without difficulty. In studies with subjects cured of congenital blindness,
they demonstrated that visual perception occurs in the mind rather than in
the eye alone.
Formal theory also proposes that the eye and the mind record elements,
the fundamental parts and qualities of visual form. In the eighteenth century
the German dramatist and critic G. E. Lessing (1984) defined space as a
fundamental element of painting. A similar approach found its way into
psychology in the late nineteenth century, when Wundt employed the
empirical method of introspection to identify the elements of visual
perception. Psychologists early in the twentieth century then investigated
specific meanings of forms such as vertical and horizontal lines, following
the Gestalt argument that the whole is greater than the sum of the parts,
with elements implicit as the parts that formed Gestalt structures.
Formal theory further proposes that the mind interprets all visuals
similarly, whether they are from the various arts, nature, or dreams.
Aesthetics traditionally was the exclusive province of the arts, assigning
painting the highest rank but setting standards for observing beauty in the
natural world. Early in the twentieth century, critics such as Roger Fry and
Clive Bell insisted on viewing all arts in equal terms. Art historians and
artists such as Wassily Kandinsky used three formal elements—point, line,
and plane—to explain twentieth-century movements that made art out of
everything from unrecognizable shapes to ordinary household objects. An
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industrial product, a dance, a snapshot, a musical score, a landscape, a

painting—that is, any visible image—could then lay claim to beauty
because each embodies the basic elements.
Drawing from the critical approach known as formalism and from the
philosophical and empirical study of visual perception in psychology,
formal theory established a “grammar” of the visual. Gyorgy Kepes, in his
1945 book, Language of Vision, asserts that grammar extended beyond art.
He considered typography, layout, and design spatial expressions, along
with drawing, painting, and photography. Their language, built from visual
elements that Kepes likens to letters of an alphabet, relied on optical
sensations to form “words” and convey meaning. Although theorists
consider the elements building blocks for visual communication, they
disagree on which elements belong in the basic enumeration. In the 1960s
William Bowman used visual grammar to answer the “who-what-when-
where” questions from journalism. His list of elements includes a form
vocabulary (point, line, shape, value, texture) and a space grammar (plane,
multi-plane, continuity), and carries the language metaphor further (idiom,
phrase, statement, and the like). He then applied his elements to varieties of
information graphics (parallel to Jacques Bertin in semiotics).
In the foundation programs of commercial art schools, courses in two-
dimensional design came to rely on elements to teach visual analysis. Donis
Dondis and others carried a similar grammar into the visual literacy
movement of the 1970s, taking inspiration from Marshall McLuhan, who
pointed to the shift from oral culture to the visual syntax of the printed
page. Textbook authors including Herbert Zettl and Arthur Asa Berger
followed Dondis’s scheme, and Arthur Turnbull’s popular textbook
included a similar vocabulary in later editions.
In a mid-twentieth-century controversy over whether visual images
constitute a language, scholars questioned the metaphor and its
logocentrism. But like the letters for sounds in some languages and icons
for ideas in other languages, formal elements have no fixed or absolute
value or meaning but are arbitrary, defined by custom and context. In that
sense visual elements may have a “grammar”: each element builds upon
those before it and depends on those that follow, interconnecting like links
of a network.
A useful summation of the many listings of elements might include
four: point, line, shape, and space. The point or dot is the smallest mark a
drawing instrument makes and also the fundamental element from geometry
(where it has no measurable size). The elemental property of a point is its
position in an image. A line in artistic practice is the trace left by a moving
tool or, in geometry, a connector without physical dimensions (an infinite
set of points) defined by its ends. Although humans produce lines to take
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turns or follow a train of thought, lines do not exist in nature, where they
may seem to mark boundaries but dissolve upon closer inspection, as
observed in chaos theory. Lines are a simplification to manage the visible
world and an invention to organize experience. The property that makes the
line elemental is extent, its length or measure.
Humans employ shape to recognize and search for objects and can
hardly imagine a seamless world, where discrete objects lack a discernible
shape. The physiology of human vision enhances the contours, or edges of
things, and a “lateral inhibition”—wherever the eye records sudden changes
in the visual field—makes a shape appear distinct. Shape “makes” an
object, giving it an existence as a “thing.” The property that makes shape
elemental is called figure. A shape depends on the line of its border, just as
lines are defined by points, but imagining any of them would be impossible
without a surrounding space. Position is nonsensical without a field, and
figure meaningless without a background. In plane geometry, points and
lines exist on the Cartesian grid, which defines position and length from the
center intersection of two perpendicular axes. Art defines space not from
the center but from the exterior edges or frame.
Humans usually respond to undifferentiated space—the Gansfeld
described in psychology—with visual and motor disorientation
(experienced by covering the eyes with white plastic spoons and staring
toward a light). The idea of space provides comfort by setting boundaries
between nations, neighborhoods, and individuals. Space need not be
rectangular, but the artist’s frame or Cartesian axis completes the network
of visual elements. It also produces a sort of anti-matter universe, so that
every dot is surrounded by a shape with a hole in it. Lines and shapes define
inside and outside, ink-black or screen-white—but the surroundings have
just as much claim to forming points, lines, and shapes. This property,
which makes space elemental, is called ground. Space occupies a special
rank in the list of elements. Its use has been central to controversies over
media designs and practices such as photography and typography, which
depend on an understanding of space.
Point, line, shape, and space appear most frequently on the lists of
elements and seem to form an irreducible core. All four share a definition as
two-dimensional objects, figures on either a negative or a positive ground.
Their properties—position, extent, figure, and ground—are fundamental to
other terms in the many lists of elements cited.
Most authors list several elements that have neither a figural property
nor any fundamental position or extent. Instead of elements, they are
descriptions of the elements, visual attributes that describe elements by
identifying their relationship to other elements or to their surroundings:
direction, scale, tonal value, and color. A position may be high or low, to
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the left or the right, only in relation to other elements or to the frame. That
relation is direction. The cardinal directions—vertical, horizontal, and
diagonal—describe some elements inside the frame, such as a line or
oblong shape but not a single dot or square. Two common analogies—maps
and clocks—describe relations among elements. With the map analogy,
direction relates to the points of the compass. With the clock analogy,
direction relates to the quarter hours, as in the expression, “twelve o’clock
high.” Both methods work well for the traveler in a given position, but in
visual aesthetics they require a designated starting point.
In isolation, no element is either large or small in absolute. The term
size refers to fixed units of measurement. A ton overwhelms a gram, and the
baby is tiny compared to the adult, but in visual images, size is always
relative to the surrounding space and to other objects. A photograph is large
only in proportion to the page and to the typography and other objects
around it. The term scale encompasses that flexibility and suggests a pattern
of relationships. For example, a photograph occupying much of the screen
will appear even larger if something tiny such as a logo sits nearby.
Elements in an image also exist on a continuum ranging from black to its
opposite. The range differs on a screen that glows whiter than paper but not
blacker than ink. The tonal value of an element is not an “absolute” but a
relationship that depends on the surroundings. A mid-gray on a light
background appears darker to the eye than the same gray on a dark ground,
an effect called simultaneous contrast.
Finally, one can describe visual elements by their colors. Like the
super-element space, color is more elaborate than its fellow attributes. It
masks and enhances tonal value, scale, and direction, and it shares the
phenomenon of simultaneous contrast. Color itself is a complex of
fundamental qualities in visual perception and conventional practices
among artists and societies. Physics, psychology, sociology, and the studio
arts contribute to the study of color. Each attribute works across most or all
the elements and properties.
All the elements with their defining properties and attributes (see the
Table One) come under the rubric form (a term sometimes used as a
confusing synonym for shape). The formal terms may underlie any
additional terminology needed for the arts involving live motion, including
theater and dance, and also suggest a likely basis for motion media
produced by the rapid succession of still images. To demonstrate the value
of elements and attributes requires exploring two questions: How does form
convey meanings? And what role does formal theory play in larger systems
of spatial organization?
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Table One
Elements of Visual Form

Element Property Attribute

Point Position Direction

Line Extent Scale

Shape Figure Value
SPACE Ground COLOR

Meanings from formal aesthetics

Form provides one but not the only way to understand media aesthetics.
The elements create at least two types of meaning-responses. Within a
single image, form provides the stimuli that set the mood. And across many
images produced in a society, the repetition of form recalls a style that
embodies the values of culture at a particular moment in its history.
Introspective psychologists early in the twentieth century suggested that
particular forms convey emotions, an idea later taken up by advertisers. For
example, the horizontal line can suggest repose, so that the abundance of
horizontal forms in some eighteenth-century landscapes suggests tranquility
and stasis. The vertical by contrast can indicate life, found in the posture of
flowers or trees and humans when standing. The diagonal can suggest
motion, as in the posture of a runner. Luc Joly (1982) explored the tie of
elemental form to primitive expression, and Betty Edwards (1979/2012)
showed that shapes and their arrangements in space are analogous to human
feeling. Dark, horizontal shapes low in the frame may invoke sadness, but
pale, circular shapes higher up may suggest happiness. Edwards came at her
connection between form and feeling inductively, by asking non-artists in
the West to depict emotions abstractly, but Suzanne Langer (1953)
preceded her in philosophy.
The moods recorded in form are not unambiguous. Horizontal lines can
indicate high-speed motion and activity in conventional drawings such as
cartoons. Vertical lines may signify inaction, a stick in the mud. Because of
simultaneous contrast, every statement contains its own contradiction. In
language a verbal claim asserting one meaning implies its opposite, a
contradiction that comedy and irony exploit. In images the assertion and its
opposite often have equal force. Every up says down, and left, right. One
cannot say large without implying small or light without dark. Everything
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depends on nothing, which mirrors and conforms to its every particular.

Figure cannot exist without ground. Few objects on a great deal of space
can suggest independence, power, and luxury (as in architecture
magazines), but spaciousness can also imply the opposite—isolation and
powerlessness.
The elemental forms within a single image are inadequate to explain its
meanings fully; interpretation depends on other contexts. Individual images
present formal elements in a pattern common to many images of the same
period in time, a larger formal context called style. Heinrich Wölfflin found
the patterned uses of linear, planar, and closed forms peculiar to styles of art
in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, just as the pointed shape of
arches became a defining characteristic of Gothic style in the middle ages.
Extended to a variety of contemporary images, the analysis of form may
reveal one aspect of the structure of feeling, a phrase Raymond Williams
used for how life felt in society of a given period. The tightly filled spaces
and elaborate borders common to Victorian designs may be an extension of
social order in the period. Ann Ferebee’s (1980) history of design lists the
qualities of line for each decade in twentieth-century products, such as the
step form and streamline of art deco in the thirties. The same approach
helped identify reigning political ideas in the styles of newspaper design
through U.S. history (Barnhurst & Nerone, 2001).
Consider, for example, the way the human eye emphasizes the contours
of things. A Western society that admires material possession and exchange
might consider the edges an enhancement, rightly defining objects as
interchangeable commodities. An Eastern society that admires relationships
and intimacy might consider the perceived edges an exaggeration, wrongly
obscuring the interconnectedness of shape, geography, and history. To the
French, for example, the locale and the wine of Burgundy are inextricably
linked. Elsewhere the name may simply identify an import product. Visual
design can make different media look familiar or peculiar as expressions of
a time, place, and community. Each alternative has its consequences, but
nothing in the form itself makes one superior to the other.
Style emerges from the interplay of culture and physiology. Art and
psychology come together in the act of communication. Where
psychologists may start with elemental forms to measure perceptual
meaning, art theorists may begin with complex images, analyzing social
meaning by parsing them into their formal elements. The meanings coincide
in human expression. The moods people register in their faces and also in
designs are partly physical and partly cultural. A brush wielded in anger
makes a different line from one moved dreamily, and although culture
delimits the range of acceptable expression and technology the tools
available, the same applies to a digital drawing app. The form of visual
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images expresses the creator’s excitement, professional standards, and

cultural norms.

Gestalt laws and principles of design

Under formal theory, images take on meaning by accretion, as
producers pile up elements or viewers pull them apart. But the meanings of
pictures or typographic designs at times seem to spring up whole, upon first
glance. The same images may inspire a sublime reaction as well—an
aesthetic response. Two twentieth-century theories identified and sought to
account for and reproduce the whole and instant experience of encountering
the “good,” effective, or beautiful image.
Psychologists around 1900 began to question the idea that the elements
of perception simply combine to produce meaning. William James
proposed that higher functions intervene, such as the intentions of the
viewer. The Gestaltists argued that the perception of whole relations is
greater than the sum of individual elements. Gestalt psychology followed a
circuitous route, slowly traveling through translation from Germany into
American art and design textbooks of the 1950s, entering discussions of
visual communication since John Cataldo’s (1966) foundational textbook
on visual communication. Gestalt laws seek to account for the “Aha!”
experience, when the whole comes clear in a moment of insight. A
“Gestalt” is a new property, not necessarily apparent in the elements
themselves but resulting from their combination.
Gestalt laws identify the properties that fuse elements into larger
wholes: Proximity groups nearby elements in a sort of guilt by association.
Continuation unifies aligned elements even at a distance. Similarity
associates like elements. Closure makes an incomplete grouping whole.
And common fate, which unifies elements that move together, applies only
to moving images. The laws of grouping contribute to an overarching ideal,
the Law of Prägnanz or equilibrium: a stable whole immediately
recognizable as a “good” figure.
While Gestalt psychologists were trying to explain the sudden and
whole perception of something akin to beauty, commercial and fine artists
set out to identify principles for creating that beauty. Their functional
principles developed as tools that layout artists could use to produce eye-
catching ads. Commercial art and layout textbooks of the 1920s and 1930s
accumulated a list of principles they then taught to students of creative
advertising. The principles made their way into magazine and newspaper
design during the 1930s and 1940s and were a staple of visual
communication courses emerging in the 1970s and 1980s.
Five principles of design have become traditional (Barnhurst, 1994),
and some of them also found their way into the lists of elements described
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earlier. The first two generate stasis. Unity governs the grouping of the
elements, either on a central point, along a line, or within a common
silhouette. Unity provides a base of order, and three other principles govern
the employment of formal attributes. Balance assigns the attributes visual
weight, making larger, darker, and higher elements “heavier,” and then
equalizes elements from side to side (in symmetry), around another point or
axis (in asymmetry), or along a spiral (in radiality).
The next two generate visual action. Contrast requires differentiating
attributes (small and large, dark and light, and so forth) to create variety.
Rhythm sets up a pace or sequence by repeating or gradually changing the
attributes and then (sometimes) interrupting the expected flow. Proportion,
the crowning principle, governs the division of space and accomplishes the
other four in either “classical” (that is, obscure) or “Oriental” (apparent)
ratios. “Classical” proportions start from a rectangle with an esoteric ratio
(such as one from the Fibonacci series), but “Oriental” proportions start
from a square (1:1), an immediately clear rectangle. (Although the latter
term employs the sense used to describe the rugs and not the racism Edward
Said condemned, it may still contain a scent of racism.) Like any system of
values, the principles operate in continual tension with each other.
The principles relate closely with Gestalt laws. The laws of grouping
repeat and elaborate the means for achieving the principle of unity, and
their opposite achieves the variety that achieves the principle of contrast.
The Law of Prägnanz restates the principle of balance, expanding it to
include a preference for regular and simple forms. The two theories differ
because one describes perception where the other directs creation of “good”
or attractive images. Gestaltists remain silent on the principles of rhythm
and proportion, which guide the functional processes of design, and instead
explore the viewer’s experiences with learning, teaching, and solving visual
problems, about which design principles fall silent.
In a sense the Gestalt laws and design principles were attacks on
inductive formal theory. Both were modern, envisioning a holistic, top-
down approach to images and the immediate recognition of the beautiful,
effective design or image. Both argued against the so-called dumb method
of manipulating elements by trial and error, insisting on a higher, creative
sense. But both movements also depended on those same elements. Gestalt
psychology described the process of perception and suggested how
elements combine to produce new and greater structures. Principles of
design describe the properties of beauty and explained how particular arrays
of elements produce an aesthetic effect. Both are also functionalist. They
extend rather than replace the atomic or molecular view found in formal
theory.
The two theories do more than provide structure for the elements: they
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ignore or may close off critical avenues of inquiry that formalism would
later embrace. Each is also a creed proposing a theory of “goodness.”
Principles of design in general application have consequences for society,
so that a product or female body, to cite two examples, becomes the center
of design and desire, while the costs of industrial production and for women
remain hidden along with their (male) masters. Because of their similarity,
Gestalt laws would have a kindred effect. As a visual creed, Gestalt laws
favor order, simplicity, and stability, qualities that—however appropriate
for such things as philosophy books, banking websites, and conservative
editorial pages—hew to the elitism of modern thought. They also contradict
the complexity, ferment, and urgency that historically have characterized
realism in literature and, for media studies, in news of everyday life.

Systems of perspective
Other systems of visual organization ingrained in communication are
called perspective. They combine the elements and attributes of design into
larger relationships that serve the purposes of power. One is to establish
relative importance. All perspective systems work to create hierarchies, just
as the Mercator map projection assigns greater importance to northern
countries. To place some powers above others, the systems create an
illusion. Maps color the oceans and lands and add illustrations of mountains
or ships to give the projection a natural feel. Systems of perspective assign
power and privilege but disguise their purposes as natural. The systems
most influential in visual representations are spatial hierarchy, atmospheric
perspective, chiaroscuro, and linear perspective.
Spatial hierarchy imposes a discipline of scale, tonal value, direction,
and sometimes color to assign greater importance to some objects in space.
Egyptian art used scale alone to suggest rank. The ruler appears larger than
any subjects, and in some drawings slaves are smaller still. In works of
Byzantine art, direction (position within the frame) appears to suggest
moral stature. The venerated personage occupies a position higher than
underlings and adorers. The works often combine scale with direction, and
special colors are markers of important persons. In communication,
representations employ spatial hierarchy to show and organize contents.
Important persons and information go on top, in a larger, bolder
typographic setting, or occupy more space.
Atmospheric perspective uses tonal value, direction, and in some cases
scale to create illusory depth on a flat surface. In Egyptian art, one object
overlaps another to imply a receding background. Roman frescoes and vase
paintings use gradations in tonal value to suggest receding space. In
atmospheric perspective, objects resting closer to the viewer are positioned
lower in the frame. Although primarily used for illusion, atmospheric
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perspective also suggests the relative importance of the objects overlapping

anything paler and higher. The perspective is built into photography (Crary,
1990), where important nearby objects overlap distant, less-important
objects. Atmospheric perspective includes hierarchy by positioning less
significant objects progressively higher, as well as smaller and fainter, in
the frame. The result shifts focus on the here and now. Some media use
overlapping boxes, screens, and tint blocks to create the illusion of
additional layers. Using larger and darker titles for more-important words
places the smaller, lighter text typography into the receding distance,
imposing a simple and natural-seeming order.
Chiaroscuro uses only the value scale to create an illusion of depth.
The modeling effect first identified by the Assyrians recreates in two
dimensions the play of light and shadow across three-dimensional objects.
Although larger pictures did not survive, Greek vase paintings from the
fifth century BCE used darker areas to suggest cast shadows. Roman
frescoes and wall paintings adopted shading from the Greeks, using the
modeling across the form along with a darker shadow cast nearby. As
refined by painters in Renaissance Italy, chiaroscuro clothes objects into
identifiable areas made from the scale of tonal values. A highlight at the
white extreme of the value scale is nearest the light source, and deep
shadow at the other end is farthest from the light. Between the extremes is
middle shadow, and a cast shadow and a reflected highlight complete the
illusion of depth. Illustrations, charts, and cartoons in the media may
employ chiaroscuro traditionally or violate the rules to produce a comic
effect. Artists use conventionally correct shading to suggest sophistication
and naturalism and “incorrect” shading to suggest the primitive or exotic.
Linear perspective, the most elaborate system, uses geometric relations
between lines to produce illusionary depth on a flat surface. Although
Roman art did not use perspective systematically, the architect and author
Vitruvius understood the concept in the first century BCE. To render a
building in perspective, the lines cast from its corners to converge on the
eye can be plotted where they intersect the intervening plane of the
drawing. This rather daunting abstraction was reinvented by Italian painters
during the Renaissance and codified by the humanist Leon Battista Alberti
in the fifteenth century. Alberti’s signal contribution was to explain linear
perspective not according to its mathematical construction but with an
elegant metaphor. His treatise of 1435, Della pittura, compares a picture to
a view through a window. The concept revolutionized painting by
disguising the elaborate machinery of linear perspective as a deceptively
simple and natural way of seeing. The power of the metaphor spread from
painting to military engineering, theatrical scenery, city planning, and other
practical affairs. Demand for mechanical aids to create linear perspective
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led to the development of optical lenses and then to the photographic

camera. As photography became ubiquitous, the picture metaphor
permeated almost every corner of Western society, eclipsing all other
modes of vision.
Pictures in linear perspective begin with a horizon and render objects in
relation to one, two, or three vanishing points. The horizon establishes the
most distant edge of a grid or plan. Horizontal lines then march down from
the horizon at increasing intervals to show the approaching surface. Objects
on the surface have edges that, if extended, would converge on the
vanishing points. Other cube forms, such as a building whose front edge
does not align with the horizontal plan, fall into two-point perspective, so
that the nearest standing edge is a vertical line, and perspective rays
converge at the two extreme ends of the horizon (or off the page). Three-
point perspective produces buildings from a worm’s or bird’s-eye view,
with perspective rays that converge toward the front of the picture plane
rather than toward the horizon.
Although commonly accepted as the true and correct appearance of
things, linear perspective depends on several arbitrary choices. Some are
mechanical, such as the height of the viewing point and the horizon line, the
location and size of the picture plane, and the distance to the vanishing
points. When the horizon is high in the frame, objects appear small and
beneath the viewer, but objects loom from above the viewer when the
horizon is low. A large picture plane rendered close to the viewing eye
emphasizes surroundings and the environment, but a smaller picture plane
situated closer to the objects emphasizes their details or blemishes. Moving
the vanishing points closer together exaggerates the angles of the
perspective lines, suggesting a distorted quality in the objects. Even without
realizing it, producers apply linear thinking to images in the media. Picture
editors may “correct” a photograph by tilting it until the horizon is flat or
the posts or corners of buildings are vertical. Cropping a picture narrows the
picture plane, shrinking the setting and enlarging the surface detail. When
creating an image, photographers move the horizon by shooting from a low
or high vantage point, and illustrators can move the vanishing points and
horizon at will.
The most important choice linear perspective imposes is not mechanical
but philosophical. Paleolithic cave drawings had no consistent horizon,
allowing for a variety of viewing positions. Roman wall paintings and later
murals presented cityscapes as visitors or residents might walk around
them, one building at a time; that is, rays extended from the edges of
buildings would scatter in every direction. Some Medieval paintings
focused the rays of objects on a single spiritual figure. In contrast
Renaissance perspective is called humanist because it places the human
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viewer at the center of the arrayed world, exalting the individual and
turning the world into a human domain. The media, like other cultural
artifacts, reiterate this philosophical position every day. Placing the self at
the center of attention is widely accepted especially in the West.
Linear perspective has adapted and absorbed the other systems.
Chiaroscuro and atmospheric perspective usually accompany linear
perspective. Spatial hierarchy plays a role because the important and
admirable objects usually appear nearer, that is, larger, darker, and lower in
the frame, when they do not appear at another focal point resulting from the
arrangement of objects. The illusionism of chiaroscuro and atmospheric and
linear perspective disguises and strengthens the hierarchy by hiding its
constructedness behind references to the natural world.
No perspective reproduces precisely what humans see or what is out
there physically, as Erwin Panofsky (1991) observes. Perspective systems
are like precision instruments; their measurements provide sharp, clear
insights, but not without limitations. The careful examination of objects
such as a ball and a shoebox under a light will reveal the limits of
chiaroscuro. If they really do occupy opposite sides of the object, the
highlight and deep shadow would hardly be visible at the same time.
Atmospheric perspective also yields to observation. Any cross-country
traveler can note how often the more-distant hills or mountains seem darker
and larger rather than fainter. Limitations of linear perspective are easy to
demonstrate. On flat terrain one walking down a sidewalk or railroad bed
fixing the eyes on the horizon can observe how the rails (or edges) appear to
converge toward a vanishing point, in classic linear perspective, but the
pavement or rails nearest the eyes appear parallel to each other when one
looks down. Focusing one’s eyes on the middle distance using peripheral
vision can reveal the rails parallel nearby and converging in the distance.
For parallel lines to converge requires that they curve the whole way.
Identifying the limitations demonstrates palpably how any perspective
system clarifies some aspects of human experience while obscuring others.
Besides experience, perspective systems also spring from custom, the
conventions that cultures devise to structure the external world. When
artists draw, they must filter what they see through some system, much as a
camera filters the landscape through a lens. Hierarchy in media images
makes editorial priorities and political leanings immediately clear, but that
strength is also a weakness, persistently pushing some to the bottom of the
screen, to the back of pictures, or out of sight entirely. Readers who
disagree with media priorities may subvert the system by looking
elsewhere, express their discomfort by ignoring mainstream media, or
create alternative media. One cannot neatly prioritize the world without
removing conflicting points of view, but an absence of hierarchy presents
 Barnhurst / IEofComTheory&Phil / 14

its own complications. Communications that accommodate competing

priorities may be more egalitarian, but not without making demands on
viewers to sort things out for themselves.
Illusions of naturalism in communication serve to make visual
hierarchy authoritative. The vista-invoking quality of conventional
perspective and shading often accompanies images of powerful individuals
and institutions. Unconventional or surreal effects usually associate with
ideas considered offbeat or threatening. Simply reversing these patterns
may backfire. A grand vista can take on an ironic significance (because of
simultaneous contrast), crushing or looming over anyone poor or unusual
looking. Surreal effects applied to, say, a head of state can appear to be just
another politically motivated attack.
If perspective systems merely reflected the natural world, then injustice
would be without remedy when some people get shunted to the background
and others treated as insiders. Leveling the horizons of battle pictures
removes evidence of the chaotic experience of a photographer among
combatants. Following standard procedure makes war look good—
controlled or in some way natural—and even the most visually astute reader
cannot detect the alteration. To present pictures with greater fairness, users
may flout established systems by cropping linear perspective from pictures,
by making layout more random, or by using unfamiliar perspective systems.
Artists have continually searched for alternatives, some of them
startling. Some seventeenth-century works experimented with placing the
vantage point to the side (in anamorphic perspective). Twentieth-century
artists developed systems that record the curvature of visual experience. M.
C. Escher in the 1950s did convincing studies of curved perspective, which
Albert Flacon produced as an exacting system in engravings of the 1960s.
From most vantage points, the drawings by William Ramage may look
strange, but they accurately record the curvature of interior building spaces
around the vantage point. Viewed from one spot on the gallery floor, the
perspective suddenly looks natural, as if seen from inside the room itself.
Curved perspective builds from a complex geometry of arcs, but non-
geometric systems are possible.
The experiments in Wundt’s lab suggest that the human mind would be
capable of making sense of many possible visual systems. Reorganizing
communication by alternative systems would likewise cause discomfort.
Screens that avoided standard perspective could decenter the viewer,
allowing for other philosophical positions that start from diversity or
community. Mainstream editors and user-producers of media usually ignore
the underlying shapes, directions, and arrangements as an expression of
moods and values. Those receiving images may also ignore what the media
mean when presenting any visual object. Instead viewers view for content,
 Barnhurst / IEofComTheory&Phil / 15

and producers and editors edit to conform to prevailing styles of

appearance. Visual production and consumption may be practical or
amusing but need not be superficial. Visual philosophy provides tools to go
beneath the surface to analyze the moods and values that images express.

Picture theories
Visual theory has tended to focus not on form but on the picture. Where
form seems merely to contain content, pictures seem to be the content, the
substance of visual experience. In communication, visual theory drew
originally on European art history to explore the relationships between
image and reality (Summers, 1989). In media studies, the focus further
narrowed to the study of lens-based media, although expansive in ranging
across film/cinema studies, perceptual psychology, and visual anthropology
and sociology (Griffin, 2008). Technics of mediation have been the main
current in visual communication studies and the basis for institutional and
organizational connections.
Theory in media studies begins with photography in the nineteenth
century, and its main tensions arise between science and art. Unlike earlier
plastic arts, photography is a product of science relying directly on an
implement that records traces of the physical world. The camera seems
capable of documentation, making pictures that exist apart from their
makers and feeding out meanings in ways not unlike direct experience. Yet
mechanization could not exist without the human hand in designing if not in
operating the camera directly, making camera arts also a means of
expression. Choices taken in creating the machine and then employing it to
make pictures do more than merely “write” the world from artificial light or
sunlight. Cameras “see” the world through social processes that transform
the resulting image no less than other arts do (Crary, 1990). Because
photography is a creative process and a tool that draws in reflections of
material objects, its products require close analysis.

Semiotics
A central theory for analyzing pictures whether moving or still has been
semiotics, an approach from philosophy. John Locke coined the term
semiotic to refer to the doctrine of signs. A sign is any utterance or sound,
gesture or image, deemed meaningful. Semiotic terms have immediate use
to communicators and audiences for analysis and also critique.
The Swiss linguist Ferdinand de Saussure proposed that signs are a
fusion of a signifier (such as a word in language) with a signified (its
corresponding concept). Although Saussure refers primarily to linguistic
semiology, breaking apart the internal structure of signs has value for visual
studies. The signifier is a phenomenon outside the mind, such as a picture,
 Barnhurst / IEofComTheory&Phil / 16

and the signified is inside the mind, the particular sense or meaning one
assigns to the signifier. Much confusion in interpretation is merely the
mistaken fusing of the signifier with the signified, the assumption that one’s
mental idea is in fact the same as whatever in the external world prompted
one to think about it. From that fusion, an easy step is to assume that others’
minds hold the same signified in response to the signifier, the root of
cultural misunderstanding.
The signifier and signified together form the sign, a kind of conceptual
triangle that repeats throughout the theory. The sign has a similar, complex
relationship with the referent, whatever in the world of things or ideas the
sign refers to. Confusion of the sign with its referent is an even greater
source of perplexity and strife in human affairs. In photography the picture
(the sign) is not the object pictured (the concrete referent), just as in
typography the shape or design of a particular letter (the sign) is separate
from the letter (the abstract referent). Saying so may seem obvious, but
much of the fuzzy thinking about objectivity in modern science results from
mistaking one’s picture for nature or the visible story for a natural process.
The Belgian surrealist Rene Magritte illustrated the mistake when his
painting The Treachery of Images showed a brown pipe with the legend,
“Ceci n’est pas une pipe” (“This is not a pipe”).
The three-in-one quality of semiotics is most present in the work of the
American philosopher Charles Sanders Peirce, who proposed three general
classes of signs. A first class of signs is symbolic, individual symbols or
groupings such as the alphabet, which society has agreed upon but which
have no necessary connection to the thing they represent. The letter a, for
example, is an arbitrary shape. Its history through Phoenician and Greek
lost the ties to its origin in the Egyptian ox-head hieroglyph. It became a
free-floating form, useful but independent of objects seen. Even its
relationship to sound is arbitrary, especially in English where it stands for
seven phonemes. Its symbolism can also inspire emotions, as in the
symbolic significance of capital A as a mark of virtue in school or of
adultery in Nathaniel Hawthorne’s The Scarlet Letter.
A second class includes icons, which in some ways resemble the things
they represent. A photograph of a trophy, for example, coincides with
almost every detail from the trophy itself so that ignoring their differences
is easy. Illustrations and cartoons may resemble seen objects only slightly
but are icons because of the similarity between sign and referent. Like
symbols, icons may seem neutral, such as the pictograms used to guide
users of digital interfaces or airports, or they may seem charged, like the
icons found in religious spaces. But all icons express power, as the focus of
visual studies on iconic pictures underlines.
Indexes comprise a third class of signs, which represent things
 Barnhurst / IEofComTheory&Phil / 17

indirectly, as smoke implies a fire, or act as signals to suggest a response, as

a gun shot starts a race. The index and signal are two terms for the same
idea, a sign that has meanings established by the repeated coincidence of
the sign with some referent. Typography, layout, and color can perform
signaling and indexing functions. The arrangement of objects on a page
contains widely recognized signs of newsworthiness, and the use of color in
website graphics also coincides with an editorial judgment. But indexes are
most present in moving images, where gestures imply actions or reactions
in interpersonal communication.
If color, shape, and direction are signs, then semiotics might at first
appear to supersede the elements, attributes, properties, and systems derived
from formal aesthetics. But the aspects of form can also serve as the
constituent parts or semes of visual semiotics. Roland Barthes (1977)
suggests that elements such as lines and shades undergird the information in
pictures. Just as letters provide the building blocks for words, formal
elementals may be the alphabet of signs. The expressive meanings of form,
according to Stuart Hall (1973), amplify and reinforce the semiotic
meanings. And just as the attributes of form describe the elements of
design, signs have a second order of meanings for analysis.
Three aspects are commonly used to analyze signs. The first is whether
they are motivated or arbitrary. A motivated sign corresponds in some way
to the referent. Peirce argues that icons and indexes are motivated, unlike
symbols; that is, they bear a visible trace of physical presences. Saussure
suggests that all linguistic signs are arbitrary. The argument bears on
whether everything from a website to a documentary film can reflect reality,
repeating a basic question of visual theory.
A second way to analyze signs is by whether their meanings are latent
or manifest. Latent meaning repeats unintentionally through habit or
custom. When digital users and filmmakers are unconscious of the
hierarchy hidden in pictures of men and women, that meaning remains
latent. For example, a rule for mug shots of the 1950s was that all heads,
from the top of the hair to the bottom of the chin, be the same size
(Barnhurst, 1994). The practice made the faces, measured from the pupils to
the chin, smaller for women in a big-hair era, but the sexism remained
latent under the veneer of a simple, consistent rule. Film accomplishes
manifest contradictions through editing action, as when activists complain
that their protests ended up on the cutting-room floor. Manifest meanings
are evident but have their own problems because the obvious always hides
its underlying assumptions.
A third way to parse the meanings of signs considers denotation and
connotation, terms that mean the same as in ordinary conversation. When a
film uses a picture of a person of African descent, the color of the person’s
 Barnhurst / IEofComTheory&Phil / 18

skin may seem to denote a simple difference in appearance or ancestry.

That assumption would be foolish given the patterns of showing black
persons as criminals in Western media content, with the connotation that
violence is an attribute associated with a person’s skin color. The
connotation, a larger meaning in the political and cultural legacy of
language and non-linguistic signs, will differ by cultural group and tend to
overshadow the denotation.
Signs further operate within codes. The French semiologist Pierre
Guiraud identified three types of codes. The most familiar are logical, such
as sign language, Morse code, or road signage. The second type are social
codes, the manners and standards of accepted behavior within and between
groups. The patterns of visual presentation catering to hipsters in the film
Fight Club (1999), for instance, might be social but also operate within the
third type, aesthetic codes. And an image might follow a very different
code when appearing in a website or made into a dance performance. The
signs collected together form a text, which includes the concrete images,
abstract words, and intermediate signals.
At a higher level, signs reproduce a structure that Roland Barthes
(1977) calls mythology. The sign fuses with its cultural meaning in a
process he calls signification. Myth in this sense is not false but presents a
puzzle that one can begin to assemble by assigning or inventing a name.
The example Barthes presents in “Rhetoric of the Image” examines an ad
for Panzani pasta showing packages and tins along with fresh vegetables in
a string carry-bag common in Italy. The impressions—the fresh ingredients,
the tri-color product labels, and the bag collecting things for a meal—
combine to convey a myth “Italianicity.” The myth inheres in the still-life
manner of the image and projects desires onto viewers. It hails to them
through comfortable-seeming content, as if vegetables and tins belong
together, misdirecting attention away from consumer economics or
industrial food technology. The myth also positions Italian food as ideally
fresh, unlike other cuisines, setting up barriers between and favoring one
culture over others. Semiotic mythology is common to communication and
reiterates core beliefs that pictures reflect human eyesight, require artistic
talent to make or understand, and stand in opposition to words and
language.

Narrative
Visual theory for pictures also emerged out of aesthetics, principally
from film but also literary studies. Where still pictures could draw on long
traditions of “proper” practice in the visual arts, cinema seemed to shift the
ground underlying earlier theater performances and religious rituals.
Thinkers such as Hugo Münsterberg and Rudolf Arnheim developed film
 Barnhurst / IEofComTheory&Phil / 19

theory especially around judgments of beauty within communication

(Griffin, 2008). Film extends formalism to include temporal concepts for
composing and juxtaposing images. For instance, mise-en-scène refers to
how filmmakers construct the shot, a process connecting film imagery to
physical settings and action. And montage refers to how motion-picture
makers structure shots into sequences.
Film theory also embraced semiotics by the mid-twentieth century
(Metz, 1974). Its concepts became tools of film analysis and strengthened
the understanding of cinema as a means of artistic expression and as a kind
of language that structures the visual record. The application to cinema of
formal and semiotic ideas expanded the grammar of still images into a
syntax of moving images, the dynamic dimension displayed through time.
The search for a “language of film” (Griffin, 2008) further extends film
theory into the realm of narrative.
Visual narrative is an account of connected events, a story in images,
and moving pictures narrate in ways that still pictures only imply. Literary
studies provide a tradition for understanding that storytelling. Until after the
second World War, literary theory focused on the realistic novel invented in
the eighteenth-century (Martin, 1986). Scholars followed either Henry
James in analyzing the form (character, plot) or Charles Dickens in
assessing content (edifying or not). Northrup Frye later expanded literary
theory beyond realistic novels by redefining fiction as something made
rather than merely non-factual. By making stories, literature tries to
approximate truth, just as communication does. Wayne Booth (1983) shows
that all writing conveys rhetoric and comes value-laden, as Kenneth Burke
demonstrated.
Narrative theory also has structural roots. Russian formalists such as
Roman Jakobson and structural linguists such as Claude Lévi-Strauss used
anthropology and language to study narratives and the patterns underlying
their superficial differences. Narrative tames random-seeming events or
ideas within larger structures in still and motion pictures, and it ties other
patterns to practices in culture and to cycles such as the seasons and the life
course. As occurrences emerge, communication presents them as narratives
to make sense of the world.
Literary devices such as plot and action (Booth, 1983) come to life in
moving images. Character may be visible in a photograph, but its content
plays out in film. Point of view projects a view of ideas and actions in
movies, although still pictures take a vantage point. Motifs, or recurring
symbolic elements, emerge in the patterns of moving images. Time, the
flow characteristic of moving pictures, remains implicit in still media. The
descriptive concepts from narrative translate readily into moving and fixed
imagery, and visual images in communication combine to form a text.
 Barnhurst / IEofComTheory&Phil / 20

What constitutes a text has expanded in the past century. In

elementalism, text becomes image, but in semiotics, image becomes text.
Narrative provides a unifying structure uniting other systems of analysis. It
underlines how cultural practices such as photography and filmmaking filter
and make sense of ideas and objects. Like formal theory, literary theory has
had too little play in communication studies, but both work with semiotics
at the complex boundary between the real and the represented.
Narrative practices sustain a complex relationship with realism.
Narratives cannot contain the world any more than signs encompass their
referents. In film studies what appears on the screen, the sujet, is distinct
from what the viewer constructs mentally, the fabula (Chisholm, 1991).
Like the signifier and signified, the sujet and fabula together form the
narrative, and the success of pictures may depend on whether the fabula
seems real in the mind of the viewer.
Realism in literary narratives sets four desirable ends: to disentangle
reality from social convention, to report faithfully, to supply reasonable
motives for action, and to avoid pandering to audiences (Booth, 1983). All
four goals interact with convention, which supposedly filters and stylizes,
where realism forthrightly represents the world. But if the assertion held,
then realism would remain constant as social conventions evolve. Roman
Jakobson asserts that realism in narratives changes with each generation, an
argument that Ernest H. Gombrich extended to art (Martin, 1986). Many
styles of painting have passed as realistic. If each new view of reality were
better, the old ones might fade away, but in the arts, old ways of viewing
constantly reappear. Each generation has the task of defining what will pass
for realistic imagery.
The other three goals position realism opposite convention. First,
realism aims to reject the subjective in favor of objectivity (Herrnstein
Smith, 1988), so that the realist shows the event rather than labeling or
judging it. But Booth (1983) demonstrates that even ostensibly neutral
accounts convey judgments. Without such moral cues, the viewer would be
left adrift, and that rhetorical quality is even more insistent in pictures. The
setting and sequence imply a judgment, position subjects in visual
hierarchy, and provide cues to an external world. Next, realism aims to
explain itself by providing sensible motives for actions, so that the realist
lays claim to rationality by avoiding a reliance on chance encounters, divine
intervention, or similar devices. By that standard, literary critics may
consider popular narratives unrealistic, citing the range from fairytales to
soap operas. And finally, realism aims to report reality without catering to
audiences. A certain indifference to the recipient defines realistic fiction as
high art. Media producers credit their work as autonomous when they
reveal through fictional film or factual TV programs conditions that
 Barnhurst / IEofComTheory&Phil / 21

audiences find unpleasant.

Communication has other trappings of realism. The historian Hayden
White (1973) notes three levels of complexity in narrative structure. Annals
list events as they occur, chronicles organize the events around central
institutions or undertakings, and histories list, order, and explain the
meanings of events. All three also convey something larger. Annals picture
how power controls what happens and leaves the powerless to their fate.
Chronicles picture the authority of patrons who have the means to found
institutions and begin other undertakings. Histories picture events with
purposes either accomplished or frustrated in the course of time. In visual
communication, v-logs might be annals, simply showing videos of anything
that occurs, but mainstream news content seems more often to show a
chronicle (Carey, 1988). Documentary film aims to produce something
more like history.
Narratives depict a world “out there” but monitor the borders of realism
through conventions like genre. In films as in books, narratives of good and
evil fall into identifiable types. E. D. Hirsch (1978) identifies genre as
central to aesthetic interpretation in the arts because it provides a frame of
reference, setting the broad expectations that help determine what any text
means. Genres of visual images are not unlike film and literary genre that
falls within widely understood categories. They spring initially from the
activities of picture making. Television producers and viewers have no
difficulty distinguishing a talk show from a drama, for instance. Each genre
has at least some defining traits, and some of the resistance and attraction to
genre springs from breaking those expectations.
Genre studies also go beyond description to identify meanings. Besides
the inclusive or semantic definition, genres have an exclusive or syntactic
definition (Altman, 1984). Some developed work on genre in
communication concerns the picture media, which produce romances,
mysteries, westerns, and so on. In the western, stock characters appear in a
typical setting, and the action displays conflict at the human frontier
between civilization and the wild. The syntactic meaning interprets
relationships found in the stock traits and characters of the semantic
definition, and so visual genres help place content within demarcated
categories.
Through visual genres, media producers make sense of the world.
Visuals of violence may assert order, visuals of cities may express suburban
desire, and visuals of poverty may speak tacitly about privilege, among
other stories. Through genre and other aspects of narrative, visual content
polices boundaries, establishing a kind of visual ethics. But other picture
theories focus more directly on the critique and culture surrounding power
and values.
 Barnhurst / IEofComTheory&Phil / 22

Cultural studies and critical theory

The cultural critic Walter Benjamin (1968), especially his 1936 essay
“The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction,” proposes that
original artwork once had an aura springing from its historical moment,
which the ritual reinforcing its authenticity then embedded in tradition. But
the shift to manufacturing realigned pictures to the needs of capitalism,
making images political in new ways. His perspective influenced Frankfurt
School thinking on aesthetics, which John Berger later renewed in his BBC
series Ways of Seeing (1972). Berger says television immerses viewers in a
commodity dream that ignores the conditions of labor behind products and
trades in representations of distant suffering, luxury for purchase, and desire
especially for the female body. In critical theory, communication reinforces
ideology, the hidden rules that order power relations within a society or lead
subaltern groups to participate in their own subjugation.
Representation is a concern of cultural studies, which works from three
familiar theories: the reflective, the intentional, and the constructivist (Hall,
1997). The reflective assumes that images are like a mirror, so that meaning
resides in the concrete objects of reflection. The theory emerges from
mimesis in art, realism in literature, and objectivity in media, but semiotics
shows that meaning goes beyond mere reflection of any object. The
intentional places the origin of meaning in the author, which again captures
a narrow range of possibilities focusing on the creativity of artists,
producers, and users of visual materials. Literary theory has examined
artists representing the world in original ways, but the social and cultural
surround limits their degrees of freedom. Social construction acknowledges
the other two theories but emphasizes how cultures construct meaning from
the available material objects and abstract ideas. Constructed knowledge,
such as the meaning of red, yellow, and green in traffic lights, through
reification, makes abstract ideas solid, natural, and inevitable.
Representation is one of five processes in the circuit of culture, all of
which interconnect and provide avenues to understanding. The visual
impinges on and facilitates identity, grows out of and feeds back into
material production, sustains cycles of consumption, and falls under social
and official regulation. By opening the analysis of pictures to subjectivity,
politics, history, and the economics of supply chains and demand creation,
cultural studies can tackle larger issues. To examine race and whiteness, the
anthropology of ethnicity, the politics of nationality, and the genres of
gender, visual representation interconnects with other processes. Although
cultural studies tends to privilege language, its view of pictures in culture
supplies a much broader toolkit for parsing the power of images.
Structuralist theories of form, signs, and narratives faced criticism from
 Barnhurst / IEofComTheory&Phil / 23

postmodernism, when meanings came to seem unstable or indeterminate.

Jacques Derrida (2010) led others in developing deconstruction as a
semiotic practice to unmask the reliance on opposites in Western culture.
Deconstructing the binary male/female, for example, might involve
exposing continuities by inverting them (female over male), destabilizing
their meanings through juxtaposition (perhaps with Freudian associations),
or undermining authorship by showing how the ideas employed are
derivative. Others such as Jean-François Lyotard and Jean Baudrillard
considered structuralism authoritarian and viewed visual imagery with
irony, modeling playful and accidental ways of communicating. But
poststructuralism has its limits. Even when adrift in an immediate surround
of indeterminate meanings, individuals manage to make meaning, societies
generate order, and cultures reinforce power relations. Regular episodes of a
television series, for example, do the work of representation synchronized
within their era and dynamic across their shared history.

Digital change and new directions

The rise of digital media seems to have shifted the ground under visual
aesthetics, but the opposite is more likely. New media may mimic standard
image-making to appear safe or authoritative even when presenting radical
content. Older technologies incorporated existing ways of seeing into
machines, such as the camera lens, built around linear perspective, not the
other way around. New media carry deeply embedded traces of Western
visual history and make them seem natural. A main challenge to the study
of formal aesthetics in communication is to escape those bounds.
New directions in picture theory have emerged in response to the digital
era. Stories, constructions, and critiques appear bundled into paradigms—
the patterns of meanings that emerge in society. In digital times, the idea of
hypertext may shift meaning-making from experts into the hands of
viewers. Users of social media platforms, blogs, and picture-sharing apps
may be adapting montage, for instance, to produce playlists of online
videos. The digital manipulation of pictures has made the instability of
meaning manifest, raising their relation to ethics and the agendas of power.
Visual studies in the philosophy and theory of communication provides a
vehicle for understanding aesthetic intensity, the emotional tie that gives
meaning urgency today. Visual aesthetics, analysis, criticism, and ethics are
important avenues to understanding what exists and what things mean,
especially in the digital era.

SEE ALSO: Aesthetics; Art history; Barthes, Roland; Burke, Kenneth;

Constructivism; Creativity; Critical theory; Criticism; Cultural studies;
Culture; Derrida, Jacques; Design; Economics; Expression; Film/cinema
 Barnhurst / IEofComTheory&Phil / 24

studies; Gender studies; Identity; Interpretation; Jakobson, Roman; Lévi-

Strauss, Claude; Linguistics; Literary studies; Meaning; Myth; Narrative;
Peirce, Charles S.; Postmodernism; Poststructuralism; Race and racism;
Realism; Rhetoric; Ritual; Signs; Social construction of reality; Social
media; Structuralism; Technology; Text

References & further reading

Altman, R. (1984). A semantic/syntactic approach to film genre. Cinema
Journal 23(3), 6–18.
Barnhurst, K. G. (1994). Seeing the newspaper. New York: St Martin’s
Press.
Barnhurst, K. G., & Nerone, J. (2001). The form of news, a history. New
York: Guilford.
Barthes, R. (1977). Myth–music–text. New York: Hill & Wang.
Booth, W. E. (1983). The rhetoric of fiction, 2d. ed. Chicago: University of
Chicago Press.
Carey, J. W. (Ed.) (1988). Media, myths, and narratives. Newbury Park:
Sage.
Cataldo, J. W. (1966). Graphic Design & Visual Communication. Scranton,
PA: International Textbook.
Chisholm, B. (1991). Difficult viewing: The pleasures of complex screen
narratives. Critical Studies in Mass Communication 8: 389–403.
Crary, J. (1990). Techniques of the observer. Cambridge: MIT Press.
Derrida, J. (2010). Copy, archive, signature. Stanford University Press.
Edwards, B. (1979/2012). Drawing on the right side of the brain. New
York: Penguin.
Ferebee, A. (1980). A history of design from the Victorian era to the
present. New York: Van Nostrand Reinhold.
Gombrich, E. H. (1968). Art and illusion. London: Phaidon.
Griffin, M. (2008). Visual communication. In W. Donsbach (Ed.),
International encyclopedia of communication 11: 5304–5316. Oxford:
Blackwell.
Hall, S. (1973). Encoding/decoding television discourse. Birmingham
Centre for Contemporary Cultural Studies, Stenciled Paper no. 7.
Herrnstein Smith, B. (1988). Contingencies of value. Cambridge, MA:
Harvard University Press.
Hirsch, E. D., Jr. (1978). The aims of interpretation. Chicago: University of
Chicago Press.
Joly, L. (1982). El signo y la forma. Translated by E. Dejardin. Lima:
Universidad de Lima.
Langer, S. K. (1953). Feeling and form. New York: Charles Scribner’s
Sons.
 Barnhurst / IEofComTheory&Phil / 25

Lessing, G. E. (1984). Laokoön; An essay on the limits of painting and

poetry (trans. E. A. McCormick). Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University
Press
Martin, W. (1986). Recent theories of narrative. Ithaca: Cornell University
Press.
Metz, C. (1974). Film language. New York: Oxford University Press.
Panofsky, E. (1991). Perspective as symbolic form. Cambridge, MA: MIT
Press.
Summers, D. (1989). Visual image. In E. Barnouw (Ed.), International
encyclopedia of communications 4: 294–305. Oxford: Oxford
University Press.
White, H. (1973). Metahistory. Baltimore, MD: Johns Hopkins University
Press.

Author Bio
Kevin G. Barnhurst is Professor Emeritus of Communication at the
University of Illinois at Chicago, USA, and also retired professor and Chair
of Communication in the Digital Era in the School of Media and
Communication, University of Leeds, UK. His research areas include
critical issues in visual media, digital culture, media history, political
communication, and audience sociology. He is the editor of Media
Queered: Visibility and its Discontents (New York: Peter Lang) and other
works on visual history and theory.