Introduction

Depth of Field

Photograph of gardening tools hanging outside a shed.

Figure 1. A suburban scene, 2024. Unititled Garden Series. Photograph. Kathleen Henning.

We open this book about visual rhetoric with a photograph of a scene that is unlikely to quicken any rhetorical pulses. Nevertheless, it is rife with visual elements that rhetoricians have come to understand as deeply rhetorical. We start with this photograph because both what it shows and how it was taken will help us make the case for a new way of doing—and looking at—visual rhetoric. More on that soon.

For now, a starter question: where is visual rhetoric in this picture?

The photograph itself is serving a pedagogical and policy function for us as authors. We’re using it to guide viewers’ attention to specific salient elements, and it helps us frame the arguments we’ll make for re-envisioning the study of visual rhetoric. It teaches and leads.

The photograph also invokes the visual’s ability to spark change. Looking closely, viewers will notice two yard signs in the center-left of the picture. On the right is a bright red sign with white lettering that reads “no rezoning.” Its design elements, echoing the ubiquitous form of the stop sign, indict a proposed policy change and, ironically, aim to get neighbors moving as part of a political campaign. To the left is a union organizing sign, where the raised fist—long associated with collective action and Black power—has been subtly altered to match the shape of the state of Wisconsin. Each sign aims to catalyze change through visual activation.

The picture also captures elements of the environment that act rhetorically through vision. A curving, sidewalk-less street, a speed-limit sign, mailboxes, garbage and recycling bins, and copious grass and trees inform viewers’ sense of the sort of community they are about to enter. The partly obscured “Saukdale” sign, set between stone pillars, confirms that the photograph was taken in a suburban subdivision. Those attuned to regional differences in planning and plant life or to Indigenous history might, likewise, be able to use clues from the photographs to place the scene in the upper midwest. The photographs index location and community.

These are three common places where rhetoricians have found rhetoric in the visual—its utility for supporting argument, its capacity to spark change, and its facility at community-making. These rhetorical aspects of the visual are all over the place—both in our everyday lives and in rhetorical scholarship. However, ubiquitous as they are (discoverable even in a somewhat random suburban scene!), these are not the only ways that the visual and the rhetorical come into contact. Two additional pictures help us picture three other sites of visual rhetoricity. These two new photographs show more-or-less the same scene as the opening photograph and are nearly identical to one another. They differ only in their depth of field—the amount of the photograph that is in focus, itself a rhetorical choice on the part of the photographer.

Photographs of gardening tools at two different depths of field, one with more focus on the tools in the foreground.

F5, 1/80, 74mm, ISO 100

F32, 1/13, 74mm, ISO200

Figure 2. Two views of a suburban scene, 2024. Unititled Garden Series. Photograph. Kathleen Henning.

First, our choice to place these two new photos side-by-side—and to include technical information about aperture, shutter speed, lens length, and film speed—not only draws attention to the technologies that make any given picture possible but also to the human principles of selection and editing that work alongside them. Those technologies not only enable the rhetorical choices made by a given image-maker, they also carry the legacies of the earlier rhetorical choices that went into making the technologies themselves. The two pictures, differentiated only by shutter speed and aperture diameter, draw viewers’ eyes in different ways and make different elements of the scene seem to matter. Visual technology acts on and through viewers.

Second, viewers’ own access to sight—and our assumption that those who encounter this book will use their eyes to read it—have rhetorical implications. Not only are these photographs full of signals that presume people navigate the world through sight, they also reflect back to us the actual limitations of sight. No viewer registers every pixel of these scenes and every viewer’s neurological processes engage preexisting assumptions in order to meaningfully distinguish trees, grass, tools, and roads from the mass of stimuli that enter through their eyes. Physiologically, intellectually, and culturally, seeing includes shaping.

And third, each viewer makes both conscious and unconscious judgments—about where to focus, about the quality of the picture, about the importance of a particular element in the scene. In the process, viewers’ selections make certain elements matter. Those selections also elide other elements of what could be seen, setting them aside. This normal and necessary process nevertheless turns the act of looking into a constant flow of tiny rhetorical choices. What viewers notice and don’t notice affects their actions.

These three photographs, then, are rich in elements that rhetoricians have often called “visual rhetoric.” They are also rich in features that are recognizably rhetorical but that have been less-commonly discussed by visual rhetoricians. In many ways, they encapsulate what has sometimes made “visual rhetoric” hard to define. When invoking “visual rhetoric,” rhetoricians have variously analyzed visual objects (pictorial instantiations of a “thing” called rhetoric); invoked methodology (an approach to rhetoric informed by the ubiquity of visual stimuli); engaged in theorizing (reconceptualizing rhetoric through vision); or identified themselves with a sub-field of rhetorical studies (a conglomerate of scholars with shared interest in things visual).

The intersection of rhetoric and the visual draws our attention to objects like the signs and structures in our opening pictures (and also photographs, artwork, multimodal texts, etc.);1 it includes images like the ideals of suburban design that inform the development captured in the photographs (as well as other intangible ideas, descriptions, and figures); 2it includes visual technologies like the camera used to take the photograph (and also lenses, pigments and pixels, fiber optics, etc);3 it includes the physical-cognitive act of seeing through which we processed the scene and photograph (involving retinas, optic nerves, brains, and more);4 and it includes the social, cultural, and political worlds in which seeing practices emerge and function—including the ones that lead us—and the photographer we asked to take them—to describe these photographs as aesthetically unremarkable.5

Visual Rhetoric's Depth of Field

Throughout this project, we approach “visual rhetoric” as encompassing all those elements. We also argue for a major shift in how rhetoricians think, write, and teach about vision and rhetoric.

Visual rhetoric is a vibrant area of research because it offers and demands such a wide variety of approaches to what rhetoric is and how it functions. There is much that we can do when we set about studying what the visual does with us. And over the last several decades, rhetoricians have generated a capacious archive of objects and concepts for visual rhetoric—a wide-ranging catalog for the effects and affects of the visual which has established that the visual is, indeed, rhetorical; shown the importance of that rhetoricity; and provided robust means of engaging with particular aspects of the visual.

For the most part, visual rhetoric—as a scholarly field—has been constituted by the case study. Encountering the great variety of the visual, scholars have illuminated it by turning our attention to particular historical moments, particular technologies, and particular kinds of images and visual objects. This approach has resulted in a broad array of rhetorical concepts and approaches for engaging the visual and many “rich rhetorical histories” that model what happens when rhetoricians take account of the visual.6 We might think about the visual rhetoric case study as a particular choice about scholarly depth of field, perhaps like the one used in the second of our three opening images. Its relatively wide aperture and fast shutter speed—and the resulting narrow depth of field—draws sharp attention to a bounded area in order to help viewers grasp the scene and its importance.

Making wide use of the case study’s depth of field, visual rhetoric scholars have been less interested in elaborating relationships among the concepts and histories treated in those case studies or in elaborating overarching arguments about the shape or force of visual rhetoric (two other possible scholarly depths of field). In their foreword to a 2009 special issue of enculturation focused on image events, Kevin M. DeLuca and Joe Wilferth noted, “Although contemporary criticism reflects a certain agility with a variety of different visual artifacts … systematic rhetorical accounts of images are few.”7 They sought an approach to images that recognized their “ontological status” and avoided taming images with words—whether those words came in the form of concepts drawn from textual analysis or lent meaning through context. While we share DeLuca and Wilferth’s interest in systemic accounts, we are less faithful to images and their distinctions from texts and contexts. We are also less concerned with ontology and more concerned with relations and tools. We seek, in a phrase, not a “systemic rhetorical account of images” but a heuristic for engaging the rhetorical functions of the visual in their full range.

As hinted at above, we find it helpful to introduce our heuristic purpose using the photographic concept of depth of field. Taken literally, depth of field names the amount of a photograph that is in focus, and it is measured in terms of the distance between the closest and the farthest objects that are in focus. Photographers and filmmakers use depth of field to direct attention and to create a sense of three-dimensionality. “Portrait mode” on an iPhone relies heavily on depth of field manipulations to make faces pop out of their surroundings, and many a bland amateur landscape photograph suffers from excessively wide depth of field that gives every object equal weight.

To compose this introduction, we asked Kathleen Henning, a local photographer, to take pictures in which she relied only on depth of field to highlight different elements of a scene. The trio of photographs below were among the results. Photo #2 has a shallow depth of field, leaving only the garden tools in focus. Photos #1 and #3 have significant depth of field, keeping nearly everything—near or far—in focus. There is a whole range of choices in between, with varying benefits and disadvantages to each choice and different sacrifices required to achieve any particular depth of field.

F6.3, 1/160, 108mm, ISO100

F7, 1/200, 100mm, ISO160

F11, 1/200, 300mm, ISO160

Figure 3. Coneflowers photographs at different depths of field, 2024. Untitled Coneflower Series. Photograph. Kathleen Henning.

There is no single correct choice for depth of field. The photographer’s purpose, equipment, and the larger environment all come into play when selecting aperture size—the primary determiner of depth of field in a photograph. In addition, photographers do not typically rely solely on choices about depth of field to craft their pictures (e.g. Henning described our charge as “a good exercise” but noted its artificiality). At the same time, a mismatch between purpose and depth of field can quickly lead to an unsuccessful picture. Most importantly, no photographer can fulfill all possible purposes while using one depth of field. Different situations call for different foci.

Our heuristic for tracking the rhetorical functions of the visual is, essentially, a resource for making decisions about scholarly depth of field. It identifies the underlying factors driving rhetoricians’ analytical choices when engaging visual objects or processes, and it illuminates the structures that make particular choices of focus and theory work. It draws attention not only to what is in sharp focus but also to the shaping effects of that which is blurred or receding from focus. It also encourages rhetoricians to consider those choices in light of a larger range of possible choices, recognizing that each selection inevitably brings some things into sharper focus while obscuring others.

In effect, the digital book before you provides a tool for adding additional depths of field to our scholarly toolboxes and for understanding what different aperture settings reveal and obscure about the objects we study. In the photographs above and below, Henning has repeatedly captured purple coneflowers growing in a local prairie. Her choice of depth of field in each case—when combined with other technical choices—enable her to set individual flowers in evocative—but differing—context, crafting very different pictures in the process. She could have chosen a different aperture size in each case—and what viewers noticed about the scene would change as a result. Looking at each individual picture allows viewers to notice a particular set of information about the flowers. Looking at the pictures alongside one another, as representative of the choices made, attunes viewers not only to the images themselves but also tho their relations as well as the affordances and constraints of the choices at work within them. We hope that this project’s heuristics are like that—offering means of calibrating rhetorical studies’ analytical capacities to engage the full depth of ways the visual and the rhetorical intersect. Though each chapter, on its own, may initially feel like a typical visual rhetoric case study with a theory and an example, we invite reader-viewers to approach them as demonstrations that call attention to how different analytical orientation play out in practice.

Our first task in that heuristic project will be to introduce a replacement term for "visual rhetoric," one that highlights the choices rhetoricians make when orienting toward rhetoric and the visual. We ask you to shift focus from “visual rhetoric” to investigating “rhetorical functions of the visual.” Having made the case for that change, we then elaborate means for selecting scholarly depth of field when approaching the rhetorical functions of the visual: identifying the sort of visual functions being examined and recognizing how those functions shape the available theories, objects, contexts, and arguments. In developing this depth-of-field resource, we build on related work done by Cara Finnegan in multiple field-defining review essays,8 and by Lester C. Olson, Finnegan, and Diane S. Hope’s Visual Rhetoric.9 Vivian offers two divisions for the work of visual rhetoric, "representative" and "non-representative" or "virtual." Olson et. al., for their part, posit a framework of five “rhetorical actions” that highlight different aspects of visual rhetoricity. We, in turn, provide a heuristic elaborating six rhetorical functions of the visual which can (and must) be expanded by future scholars and which will allow students and scholars of the visual to draw connections among contexts, objects, and modes, noticing the consequences of those connections.

Our own experience in developing this heuristic is that it quickly showed us surprising patterns in what visual rhetoricians have undertaken to date. Those patterns both revealed nodal points of significant social energy (Ralph Cintron would call them commonplaces10) and drew our attention to sites of omission, where the visual went but visual rhetoric scholarship typically did not. In this book, then, we also review our scholarly area’s own depth of field: surveying where visual rhetoric scholarship has focused, trying out other possible foci, and generating tools to enable future perspectives.

Rhetorical Functions of the Visual


The conceptual shift to “rhetorical functions of the visual” helps us challenge visual rhetoric’s over-association of visuality with objects (iconic photographs, awe-inspiring landscapes, compelling propaganda) and the related tendency to treat “rhetoric” itself as an object. In the last few decades, rhetorical studies as a whole has become less interested in traditional rhetorical objects and moved away from treating persuasion as a linear relationship consisting of senders, messages, and receivers. Today, most rhetorical scholars instead treat rhetoricity as ambient, ecological, and trophic.12 What it means to study rhetoric has shifted, decidedly, from studying objects deemed rhetorical (e.g., public speeches) to studying the contexts, movements, structures, and relationships within which objects and affects move and move others.

F5.6, 1/500, 300mm, ISO250

F7.1, 1/100, 100mm, ISO125

F8, 1/100, 100mm, ISO250

Figure 4. Coneflowers, honeybee, and bumblebees, photographs at different depths of field, 2024. Untitled Bumblebee and Honeybee Series. Photograph. Kathleen Henning.

Within the study of rhetoric and the visual, we mark that shift as a change from studying rhetoric that is visual to studying what vision and the visual do, rhetorically. Cara Finnegan called for this transition in 2004, inviting scholarship that “explicitly brings visuality to bear on rhetorical theory” and that highlights how “visuality affects, challenges, or changes our understanding of rhetoric.”13 In 2007, Vivian reiterated a version of this call, noting that visual rhetoric scholarship tended to prioritize the "representational" aspects of the visual, neglecting its non-representational aspects. He advanced a "virtual account of images, focusing on the means by which they produce and enact modes of spectatorship, subject-object relations, form of affect, or grounds for competiting attributions of sense and value in ways that cannot be fully explained by representational categories such as consciousness, meaning, or presence.14 While many rhetoricians have moved in the directions Finnegan and Vivian advocated, “visual rhetoric” has still tended to mean the study of how visual objects persuade, making use of just one aperture option among the many possible depths of field.

Rhetoricians engaging the visual need to use the full range of analytical apertures if we are to accomplish the task Finnegan and Vivian each set for us two decades ago. Doing so will enable rhetoricians to better understand the immensely varied means by which vision encounters rhetoric and rhetoric infuses vision. The rhetorical functions of the visual—multiple, complex, and varied—are ubiquitous in our everyday lives just as they are in our opening photographs. The visual acts on us and through us in ways both explicit and implicit, both representational and virtual. We need means of making choices about our scholarly depth-of-field that will allow us to engage the visual’s full range. Thinking in terms of the rhetorical functions of the visual is a step in that direction because it orients us toward the multiplicity of choices rhetoricians have for capturing how vision and the visual are at work in the world.

In order to support those varied choices about scholarly depth of field, we identify six rhetorical functions of the visual that include but exceed what scholars have most often studied as “visual rhetoric.”

In developing our heuristic and identifying rhetorical functions, we realized that, despite all the variety of the visual, visual rhetoric scholars have mostly hewed closely to just a couple rhetorical functions of the visual. We have done our work within frames provided by the conditions of Western democracy, by discourses of citizenship, and by presumptions of normative public engagement. These frames have offered a fairly narrow set of aperture choices and resulted in a similarly limited depth of field for visual rhetoric—one framed by the traditional proclivities of our larger discipline and by its theoretical and structural investments in whiteness, Westernness, and coloniality.15 We begin this project by identifying these traditional frames and elaborating both their affordances and their shortcomings. Then, we add another set of rhetorical functions that, while still largely rooted in Western and hegemonic contexts, broadens the available means of doing visual rhetoric. Along the way, we point toward he vast stretches of rhetorical functions that exceed, undergird, and surround the ones we identify, making the case not simply for the functions highlighted in this book but for the idea that the visual has numerous rhetorical functions and ought to be treated in light of that complexity.

How to Read This Book

The Structure

This book is organized in two parts, each with three chapters. part I’s three chapters treat three familiar, more traditional rhetorical functions of the visual: the pedagogical, catalytic, and community-building functions. Each chapter introduces a single function or set of functions and theorizes that function through a relevant example that helps reveal the function's affordances. Each chapter also identifies some of the limitations that can arise if rhetoricians rely too exclusively on its rhetorical function, using a single depth of field to fulfill too wide a variety of purposes. The chapters of part II introduce another three rhetorical functions of the visual that are equally crucial yet less frequently examined by rhetoricians: oversight, sight itself, and noticing. Here again, we introduce a single function in each chapter and theorize its affordances and constraints through discussion of a representative example.

Together, the two parts and six chapters not only detail six common rhetorical functions of the visual, they also model the utility of orienting toward the visual in terms of its rhetorical functions. We invite future students of visual rhetoric to extend the heuristic, identifying new functions, reshaping those offered here, and showing what emerges when different functions interact with one another.

Given those two parts and six chapters, readers have many possible entry points and routes through this book. You can read this book from beginning to end, starting here in the introduction and making your way through part I (introduction, chapter 1, chapter 2, chapter 3) and part II(introduction, chapter 4, chapter 5, chapter 6) before reaching the conclusion. We don’t expect many of you to do that, though. Most of us read strategically, after all.

So, if you're going to read strategically, allow us to give you some guidance as to what sorts of strategies can be helped by which ways of reading.

If you're looking to analyze something visual...

If you arrived at this book because you have something visual you want to analyze and you’re looking for guidance on how to approach it, we recommend that you start by reading this introduction and the introductions to each part (part I introduction, part II introduction). Reading those pieces will help you identify which rhetorical functions might be the closest fit with your project and purposes. Then, go read the relevant chapter or do the work of developing another rhetorical function of the visual to explain what you're seeing.

If you're new to visual rhetoric...

If you’re new to visual rhetoric and wanting to learn about the field, we recommend starting with part I and reading through all three chapters. Those chapters are a good starting place—they’re where visual rhetoric started, after all. They’ll help you build some of the basic critical tools that visual rhetoricians use. Also, we wrote our footnotes for readers like you—they provide a lot of context about the field of visual rhetoric that we couldn’t fit into the body paragraphs.

If you're familiar with visual rhetoric...

If you’re already familiar with scholarship in visual rhetoric and you want to see what we’re adding to the conversation, you should obviously start with this introduction and the idea of the “rhetorical functions of the visual.” From there, if you want to see how that approach reframes familiar work in visual rhetoric, try out one of the chapters in part I—chapter 1 if you’re interested in pedagogy and public spheres (or religious rhetoric and colonization); chapter 2 if you focus on social movements and powerful pictures; and chapter 3 if you’re most drawn to visual epideictic (or maps or AI). If you’d like to see us moving beyond visual objects as the center of visual rhetoricity, head to part II. The chapter descriptions below and/or part II introduction will help you decide which chapter to choose.

The design

This book is FILLED with pictures. No matter where you are in the book, you should never be more than a quick scroll away from a picture. That density is purposeful, and the pictures in this project are never mere illustrations—they aren’t just there to make the book look nice (though we do want the book to be beautiful as well as generative). At the same time, you won’t see us “reading” very many of the pictures as objects of analysis. We really only provide thick descriptions of visual objects once or twice in any given chapter. More often, the pictures serve as foils for thought or as fascinators meant to briefly but poignantly capture your attention. We hope that readers/viewers of the book will encounter those different uses of the pictures as different “aperture” choices, different depths of field by which you practice paying attention to the visual in a wide variety of ways. Close reading an image, the most common way that visual rhetoricians have made scholarly meaning from the visual, can yield a lot of information. Close readings also risk seeming to establish a single, certain rhetorical “thing” than the picture is doing and that ought to be transparent to all. Such clarity of meaning and effect rarely exists. And so, at various moments in this project, we ask you to encounter pictures as tools for triggering associations, providing contrast, or even simply giving your eyes a textual break. The pictures in On Visual Rhetoric will be doing all kinds of things—and we invite you to interact with them as you read, even when we don’t stop to tell you why or what to do with them.

In the spirit of recognizing that viewers encounter pictures differently depending on context and purpose, we note that—for readers online—the pictures in this book are configured as responsive images. That web design choice means that there is no single version of this book that all reader/viewers will encounter. The cropping and spacing, in particular, will vary depending on the screen size of the device you are using. And that’s okay. It’s illustrative, even.

Part I

Chapter 1

Picturing Rhetorical Education

Pictures and images participate in communication about what ought to be done and how a community ought to proceed in facing challenges. Looking at this rhetorical function through the colored light of medieval stained glass, we examine its ability to highlight the visual’s public and pedagogical aspects yet note its shortcomings for grappling with violence, coercion, and power differentials.

Figure 5. North Rose Window, Chartres Cathedral, August 4, 2007. Photograph. Flickr. Allie Caufield.

Photograph of a stained glass window with vivid red and blue tones.
Chapter 2

Catalytic Vision

Rhetoricians have been especially drawn to pictures’ capacity to indict and catalyze action. Taking Eddie Adams’ iconic “Saigon Execution” as its central object, this chapter highlights the convicting power of the visual and recognizes how that power easily moves analysts toward iconoclasm.

Figure 6. Moments before "Saigon Execution," February 1, 1968. Photograph. Associated Press. Eddie Adams.

Black and white photograph of a captured Viet Cong officer, Nguyen Van Lem, led by South Vietnamese soldiers, moments before being executed.
Chapter 3

Making Common Sight

Vision serves communal functions, inviting viewers to picture ourselves and our relations with others. This chapter plumbs that epideictic function of the visual using a set of images that literally (but abstractly) picture the public: political maps and their depictions of good and ill in the national body.

Figure 7. Collection of viral maps. 2018. Image. In "Elements of Viral Cartography." Cartography and Geographic Information Science 46, no. 4 (2019): 293-310. Anthony C. Robinson.

A composite of hundreds of maps shared online during the 2016 election.


Part II

Chapter 4

Oversight

Surveillance is not always about pictures but it is always about oversight or what Nicolas Mirzoeff terms “visuality.” That practice of visuality is ubiquitous, profoundly racialized, and crucial for understanding the rhetorical functions of the visual. This chapter investigates the visual as a means of control and a site of refusal. Visual technologies of racialization take central stage in this chapter, focused through the lens of Polaroid’s ID-2 camera, its role in apartheid South Africa, and a boycott led by the Polaroid Revolutionary Workers Movement.

Figure 8. Two surveillance cameras, June 1, 2017. Photograph. Unsplash. Scott Webb.

A black and white photograph of two bullet surveillance cameras attached to a concrete and brick wall.
Chapter 5

Sight Itself

Visual rhetoric has typically looked at things seen, not the act of seeing. But rhetoricians must follow neural pulses through bodies if we hope to understand the force of the visual. What lookers see, how they see, and what they do with sight all create the "rhetorics" of sight. Sight is about bodies as complex, situated, racialized, and visceral. It is also about bodies as habituated and trained. The chapter weaves together psychological work on implicit bias, examples of visual illusion, and physiological study of human visual processes to treat the fleshy matters of vision as profoundly, thoroughly, and generatively rhetorical.

Figure 9. Macro Photograph of Human Eye. January 4, 2017. Photograph. Unsplash. (@V2osk).

A macro photograph of a human eye, showing brown, yellow, and blue tones making up the iris.
Chapter 6

Noticing & Mattering

Noticing (and not noticing) happen subtly yet they have significant effects. Naming “noticing” as a rhetorical function helps us identify visual rhetorics of acquiescence and normalcy that are ubiquitous even if hard to track. Once again engaging scholarship on the psychology of sight, this chapter highlights the complexity of attention as a visual function in order to complicate rhetorical studies’ long-standing emphasis on importance and magnitude. Using the rhetorical problem of picturing climate change as our foil, we demonstrate what visual rhetoricians gain by attending to that which audiences fail to notice.

Figure 10. Untitled Landscape. Photograph. Cate Barry.

A photograph of a landscape blurred to be almost unrecognizable.

Footnotes

  1. As we note throughout this introduction and part I, study of visual objects has been, to date, the bread and butter of visual rhetoric scholarship. For just a small percentage of the available examples, see, e.g. Kevin Michael DeLuca, ed. Image Politics: The New Rhetoric of Environmental Activism. (New York: Routledge, 2009); Cara Finnegan, “Recognizing Lincoln: Image Vernaculars in Nineteenth-Century Visual Culture.” Rhetoric & Public Affairs 8, no. 1 (2005): 31–58.; Robert Hariman and John Lucaites, No Caption Needed: Iconic Photographs, Public Culture, and Liberal Democracy. (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2007); James J. Kimble and Lester C. Olson, “Visual Rhetoric Representing Rosie the Riveter: Myth and Misconception in J. Howard Miller’s ‘We Can Do It!’ Poster.” Rhetoric & Public Affairs 9, no. 4 (Winter 2006): 533–69.; Christa J. Olson, “Casta Painting and the Rhetorical Body,” Rhetoric Society Quarterly 39, no. 4 (2009): 307-330.; Kent A. Ono and Derek T. Buescher, “Deciphering Pocahontas: Unpacking the Commodification of a Native American Woman,” Critical Studies in Media Communication 18, no. 1 (March 2001): 23-43; Richard D. Pineda and Stacey K. Sowards, “Flag Waving as Visual Argument: 2006 Immigration Demonstrations and Cultural Citizenship.” Argumentation and Advocacy 43 (Winter & Spring 2007): 164–74. ↩

  2. Rhetoric scholarship about visual objects is also, often, about the larger social milieu in which those objects circulate and the meanings they acquire as they circulate. See, e.g., Robert Asen, “Imagining in the Public Sphere.” Philosophy & Rhetoric 35, no. 4 (2002): 345–67.; Dan Brouwer, “The Precarious Visibility Politics of Self‐Stigmatization: The Case of HIV/AIDS Tattoos.” Text and Performance Quarterly 18, no. 2 (April 1998): 114–36.; Dana L. Cloud, “‘To Veil the Threat of Terror’: Afghan Women and the ⟨Clash of Civilizations⟩ in the Imagery of the U.S. War on Terrorism,” Quarterly Journal of Speech 90, no. 3 (August 2004): 285–306; Greg Dickinson, Carole Blair, and Brian L. Ott, eds., Places of Public Memory: The Rhetoric of Museums and Memorials. (Tuscaloosa: University of Alabama Press, 2010); Cara A. Finnegan and Jiyeon Kang, “‘Sighting’ the Public: Iconoclasm and Public Sphere Theory,” Quarterly Journal of Speech 90, no. 4 (November 2004): 377–402; Jiyeon Kang, “Call for Civil Inattention: “RaceFail ’09” and Counterpublics on the Internet,” Quarterly Journal of Speech 105, no. 2 (April 3, 2019): 133–55; Jessy J. Ohl, “Nothing to See or Fear: Light War and the Boring Visual Rhetoric of U.S. Drone Imagery,” Quarterly Journal of Speech 101, no. 4 (October 2, 2015): 612–32; Trevor Parry-Giles, “Resisting a ‘Treacherous Piety’: Issues, Images, and Public Policy Deliberation in Presidential Campaigns,” Rhetoric & Public Affairs 13, no. 1 (2010): 37–64; Anjali Vats and LeiLani Nishime, “Containment as Neocolonial Visual Rhetoric: Fashion, Yellowface, and Karl Lagerfeld’s ‘Idea of China,’” Quarterly Journal of Speech 99, no. 4 (November 2013): 423–47. ↩

  3. See, for example, Jeremiah Dyehouse, “‘A Textbook Case Revisited’: Visual Rhetoric and Series Patterning in the American Museum of Natural History’s Horse Evolution Displays,” Technical Communication Quarterly 20, no. 3 (July 2011): 327–46; Jordynn Jack, “A Pedagogy of Sight: Microscopic Vision in Robert Hooke’s Micrographia.” Quarterly Journal of Speech 95, no. 2 (May 2009): 192–209; Brenton J. Malin, “Looking White and Middle-Class: Stereoscopic Imagery and Technology in the Early Twentieth-Century United States," Quarterly Journal of Speech 93, no. 4 (November 2007): 403–24; Megan Poole, “A Woman’s Optics: Margaret Cavendish, Sensory Mimesis, and Early Modern Rhetorics of Science," Journal for the History of Rhetoric 24, no. 2 (May 4, 2021): 195–222. ↩

  4. To date, rhetoricians have not spent much time pondering the physicality of sight. Debra Hawhee's "Looking Into Aristotle's Eyes" is about as close as the field has come. Debra Hawhee, “Looking Into Aristotle’s Eyes: Toward a Theory of Rhetorical Vision,” Advances in the History of Rhetoric 14, no. 2 (July 2011): 139–65. ↩

  5. For more on those worlds from which seeing arises, see, for example, Brenda Jo Brueggemann, “The Coming out of Deaf Culture and American Sign Language: An Exploration into Visual Rhetoric and Literacy,” Rhetoric Review 13, no. 2 (March 1995): 409–20; Roberta Chevrette and Aaron Hess, “Unearthing the Native Past: Citizen Archaeology and Modern (Non)Belonging at the Pueblo Grande Museum,” Communication and Critical/Cultural Studies 12, no. 2 (April 3, 2015): 139–58; Josue David Cisneros, “Looking ‘Illegal’: Affect, Rhetoric, and Performativity in Arizona’s Senate Bill 1070,” in Border Rhetorics: Citizenship and Identity on the US-Mexico Frontier, eds. Karma R. Chávez, Julia R. Johnson, and Kent A. Ono (Tuscaloosa: University of Alabama Press, 2012), 133–50; Christa J. Olson, American Magnitude: Hemispheric Vision and Public Feeling in the United States. (Columbus: Ohio State University Press, 2021); Lester C. Olson, Emblems of American Community in the Revolutionary Era: A Study in Rhetorical Iconology. (Washington: Smithsonian Institution Press, 1991); Stacey K. Sowards, “Rhetoricity of Borders: Whiteness in Latinidad and Beyond,” Communication and Critical/Cultural Studies 18, no. 1 (2021). ↩

  6. Finnegan, “Recognizing,” 33. ↩

  7. Kevin Michael DeLuca and Joe Wilferth, eds. “Image Events” [Special Issue],” enculturation 6, no. 2 (2009). ↩

  8. See, especially, Cara A. Finnegan, “Review Essay: Visual Studies and Visual Rhetoric,” Quarterly Journal of Speech 90, no. 2 (May 2004): 234–47.; Finnegan, “Recognizing”; Finnegan and Kang, "Sighting.” ↩

  9. Bradford Vivian, "In the Regard of the Image," JAC 27, no. 3/4 (2007): 471-504. ↩

  10. Lester C. Olson, Cara A. Finnegan, Diane S. Hope, eds. Visual Rhetoric: A Reader in Communication and American Culture. SAGE, 2008. ↩

  11. Ralph Cintron, “Democracy and Its Limitations,” In The Public Work of Rhetoric: Citizen-Scholars and Civic Engagements, ed. by John M. Ackerman and David J. Coogan. (Columbia: University of South Carolina Press, 2010), 100. ↩

  12. Caroline Gottschalk Druschke, “A Trophic Future for Rhetorical Ecologies.” enculturation no. 28 (2019); Jenny Edbauer, “Unframing Models of Public Distribution: From Rhetorical Situation to Rhetorical Ecologies,” Rhetoric Society Quarterly 35, no. 4 (Fall 2005): 5–24; Thomas J. Rickert, Ambient Rhetoric: The Attunements of Rhetorical Being. Pittsburgh Series in Composition, Literacy, and Culture. (Pittsburgh, PA: University of Pittsburgh Press, 2013). ↩

  13. Finnegan, “Visual Studies,” 245. ↩

  14. Vivian, "In the Regard," 474. ↩

  15. Kristiana L. Báez and Ersula Ore, “The Moral Imperative of Race for Rhetorical Studies: On Civility and Walking-in-White in Academe,” Communication and Critical/Cultural Studies 15, no. 4 (October 2, 2018): 331–36; Lisa M. Corrigan and Anjali Vats, “The Structural Whiteness of Academic Patronage,” Communication and Critical/Cultural Studies 17, no. 2 (April 2, 2020): 220–27; Lisa A. Flores, “Between Abundance and Marginalization: The Imperative of Racial Rhetorical Criticism,” Review of Communication 16, no. 1 (January 2, 2016): 4–24; Rachel C. Jackson, “Resisting Relocation: Placing Leadership on Decolonized Indigenous Landscapes,” College English 79, no. 5 (May 2017): 495–511; Ersula Ore, “Pushback: A Pedagogy of Care,” Pedagogy: Critical Approaches to Teaching Literature Language Composition and Culture 17, no. 1 (January 2017): 9–33; Malea Powell, “Rhetorics of Survivance: How American Indians Use Writing,” College Composition and Communication 53, no. 3 (February 2002): 396–434; Karrieann Soto Vega and Karma R. Chávez, “Latinx Rhetoric and Intersectionality in Racial Rhetorical Criticism,” Communication and Critical/Cultural Studies 15, no. 4 (October 2, 2018): 319–25; Darrel Wanzer-Serrano, ed. “#RhetoricSoWhite [Special Issue],” Quarterly Journal of Speech 105, no. 4 (2019). ↩