viz.

By John Jones

Similar to the method of analyzing text according to the way in which it reflects on its author or authors, the effect it has on an audience, and the composition, style, and logic of its arrangement, so too can visual “texts” be examined along these dimensions. Like any piece of spoken or written communication, visual texts exist at the center of a nexus of communication: they are presented by some author, be it a person, persons, or organization; they have some effect on their audience, and they consist of some basic text which can be analyzed.

Ethos, pathos, and logos

In On Rhetoric, Aristotle argued that the persuasive power of particular texts could be explained by three appeals: ethos, pathos, and logos. Ethos was the perceived character of the author of the text, that is, whether or not he or she could be considered trustworthy, wise, and moral. Pathos was Aristotle’s term for describing the effect of the speech on the audience. Did it drive them to anger? Laughter? Did it cause them to want to take a particular course of action in response? Finally, logos was the actual text of the speech, which was directly associated with the use of reasoning to convince an audience of the author’s point of view. According to Aristotle, the most important of these three was logos, the author’s use of reason, which was represented by the enthymeme, a shortened form of the syllogism, which Aristotle believed was the basic form of casual argumentation.

In reading a visual text using Aristotelian analysis, the author would look for the interaction of these three parts of the image: the way in which it reflects on the character and trustworthiness of its author or authors, its affect on an audience, and its form, composition, and argument.

An interesting effect of argument in images is the way in which those arguments, contrary to Aristotle’s advice, foreground the use of pathos and ethos rather than logos. Though images do make arguments, sometimes using tools like enthymemes, images have been primarily interesting to theorists for the way in which they foreground the experience of the viewer and impact our perception of the people in the image.