visual rhetoric

G Bonsiepe - Ulm: Journal of the Ulm School of Design, 14/15, 1965 - asomatic.com

That link may or may not work. It should automatically open up a pdf file. I found this piece off google scholar. The author, Gui Bonsiepe writes about advertizement and visual rhetoric. He states that the message of the advertiser is the "rhetoric of modern age." I don't fully agree with him there. I think there are other forms of visual rhetoric, where people are trying to send a message that isn't attempting to sell a product. I still agree that advertizement is a major component of modern rhetoric.

Here's just a few notes I collected that I think can be used towards a definition:

First he talks about classical rhetoric and how it has been broken up into legal, political, and religious sections. He now says marketing is one more section in modern rhetoric. He says, "where force rules there is no need for rhetoric." He talks about how consumers are free to make their own decisions and therefore rhetoric is necessary to convince people to purchase a particular product.

He says that classical rhetoric is no longer adequate for describing and analyzing rhetorical phenomena in which verbal and visual signs are allied. so basically visual rhetoric brings a whole other aspect to the once simple verbal rhetoric. The 5 main sections of classical rhetoric (which he doesn't define, but I think it's very similar to the sections we have been working on) can be reduced to just the third, which covers linguistic and stylistic formulation of the material.

He goes on to discuss the different kinds of figures. He loses me a bit here with his definition of synatic and sematic and how they apply to visual rhetoric. He says a figure is synatic when it operates through the shape of the sign, while it is sematic when it operates through the referent. I don't quite understand what he's getting at here.

He finishes off with several photographs that combine verbal and visual rhetoric. He classifies each photo into a certain kind of figure including how it conveys its message and what it tries to accomplish.