Abstract
This textbook presents a series of case studies designed to help students understand the nature of images in mediated culture and introduces the essentials of visual theory and methodology. It focuses on the cultural role of images in discourses of identity, politics and commodities. Aiello and Parry’s project offers a text for readers who wish to understand mediated visuality and its social implications.
Visual communication scholars have historically complained that images are neglected in research – and they were – but it seems time to put this notion to rest. As a discipline, visual communication research has come into its own, represented with division status in the field’s major conferences, research journals dedicated to the subject and, with the arrival of Aiello and Parry’s volume, an array of textbooks specializing in varied approaches. Visual Communication: Understanding Images in Media Culture offers a text that focuses on critical perspectives on media images, filling a gap that opened as the field – and the pedagogical need – have grown. Aiello and Parry have chosen to focus on one important visual site: mediated images, according to three theoretically rich approaches: identity, politics and commodities. Each chapter is supported by their own case studies of contemporary visual phenomena, such as iconicity in the #BlackLivesMatter movement, the discursive strategies of the opening title sequence from the Netflix series Orange Is the New Black, and the design strategies that distinguish the website Vice.com.
The case studies enable Aiello and Parry to introduce key concepts seamlessly throughout the book, defining for students what is meant by such terms as semiotic resources, visual framing, or metonymy. By using a variety of methods in the case studies and organizing their analyses according to description, interpretation and critique, Aiello and Parry are also able to introduce students to essential visual methodology. Together, the three topics, theoretical concepts and methods provide a comprehensive overview of the way mediated images operate culturally. For example, in Chapter 7, which is set within the textbook’s politics section, Aiello and Parry describe the way the Russian protest group known as Pussy Riot incorporated visuality with activism. Their close reading of a protest in a Moscow cathedral explains the way the activists use color and texture as semiotic resources. Pussy Riot’s brightly colored masks (one of which serves as the book’s arresting cover) with their rustic, homemade texture, associates their politics with light, femininity, and authenticity. In Aiello and Parry’s interpretation, ‘This was an attack on symbols and a retort to the particular political uses of aesthetics’ (p. 145). The case closes with a critical reminder that it is possible to simply buy a Pussy Riot balaclava online, turning the group’s image into a global brand. As with each case study in the book, the discussion closes with a suggested activity for students to apply the concepts covered by the Pussy Riot case to another instance, that of the Guy Fawkes mask.
Visual Communication: Understanding Images in Media Culture presents a text for students who would like to better understand the visuality of their mediated environment and what it means for society. Aiello and Parry’s contribution joins other texts that have approached visual communication from other angles. Lester’s Visual Communication: Images with Messages (2020[1996]), for instance, one of the earliest, first published in 1996 and now in its ninth edition, organizes the field largely by medium, as does Barnes’s (2017[2011]) introductory text. Rose’s (2016) methodological overview has become part of the graduate level canon, as has Sturken and Cartwright’s (2017) Practices of Looking and Kress and Leeuwen’s (2006) Reading Images: The Grammar of Visual Design. Aiello and Parry’s book is distinguished by its focus on mediated images in contemporary culture.
While the project is devoted to the role of images in media from a discursive and rhetorical perspective, the text would benefit from a more significant discussion of image effects in its foundational chapters. Visual messages really are different. Human beings process images in different ways; they are not equal components in message construction. Images have a stronger emotional impact; they are more memorable, and they operate at a less conscious level (what dual-processing theorists call ‘implicit’ processing). The science of effects research could only serve to underscore the importance of Aiello and Parry’s work.
One strength of the volume, its attention to current controversies and events such as the #BlackLivesMatter movement and trans self-representation on Instagram, runs the risk of dating the project. Aiello and Parry will doubtlessly be compelled to continue conducting new studies in order to maintain their work’s contemporary edge.
The field of visual communication studies is marked by interdisciplinarity, sitting at an intersection of social science and humanities-based approaches – as does communication scholarship generally. For that reason, no text will suit every visual communication course, but this book is especially well suited for upper-level undergraduate or graduate-level humanities-driven courses, such as rhetoric, semiotics, communication studies, media studies, or critical–cultural studies. It offers social and ethical principles, though not technical advice, for future designers. The book does not cover the psychological or biological nature of vision nor does it discuss photojournalistic principles, instead keeping its promise to present, in depth, the role of mediated images in culture as related to identity, politics, and commodification. Visual Communication: Understanding Images in Media Culture, therefore, is not only an accomplishment for its authors, but it marks the maturation of the visual research discipline. Aiello and Parry’s focused attention on the way mediated images operate culturally ensures that their project will be welcome not only to many classrooms but to the field at large.
