Abstract
As visual communication phenomena, images have a long-established presence across a multitude of social practices. New technological affordances of recording and distribution have amplified the proliferation of images, reflecting a broader shift in the general balance of communicative modes and the visual orientation of culture at large. However, new technologies do not necessarily change the kinds of semiotic resources available to a social group in a specific culture. Instead, technologies afford new combinations of familiar semiotic resources, given that we relate social practices, their context, and the use of semiotic resources in these practices. This kind of reasoning by Gunther Kress and Theo van Leeuwen underlies the third edition of their ground-breaking Reading Images: The Grammar of Visual Design.
The third edition of Reading Images builds on its established position as the first attempt to provide a systematic toolkit for visual-based communicative phenomena from a social semiotic perspective. It results from compendious discussions around whether this should be an entirely new book or an updated version. Since the framework introduced in earlier versions is still applicable to the visual design of images (given that the contexts of production and distribution are accounted for), this edition includes refinement of main ideas (e.g. a new approach to the theory of modality) and minor changes to some systems (e.g. the system of attitude in the interpersonal metafunction) instead of becoming a new book. 1 Whereas the technological realization of the available semiotic resources manifested in images has changed with the proliferation of digital media, the semiotic resources themselves remain comparatively stable. Therefore, the framework to understanding how these resources make meaning remains valid, standing the test of time.
Multidisciplinary in nature, the book uses systemic functional linguistics (SFL) as a foundational model for the semantics of visual representation, realized by formal structures adapted from the fields of visual perception, graphic design, and more. Integrating a ‘grammar’ of possibilities of meaning-making, the authors argue that visual artifacts can be characterized as a synergetic interplay between three kinds of dimensions delineated by the three SFL metafunctions. A given visual artifact can be said to have the capacity to represent objects and their relations in the world outside the representational system (the material reality), to constitute and maintain relationships between the producers and consumers of a given artifact (the social reality), and to integrate the representational and interactive elements into a coherent whole (the semiotic reality). Therefore, the overall meaning potential comprises three types of realities – the reasoning that impacts the book’s overall structure.
The book includes eight chapters. The first chapter lays the theoretical foundations and considers the semiotic landscape of visual communication more broadly. Chapters 2 and 3 consider the natural reality through narrative and conceptual representations. Chapters 4 and 5 provide tools for understanding the viewer’s positioning through a set of interpersonal design choices and validity markers (the truthfulness of representation) that shape the social reality. Compositional choices that weld representational and interactional meaning-making resources into coherent wholes and encode intended reading paths are examined in chapter 6. The materiality of communicative phenomena and their dimensionality are considered in chapters 7 and 8. Each chapter contains visual examples from various domains of social practices. The sections that provide distinctions between sets of visual choices end with a summary. Drawing on art history, this edition introduces visual realizations of distinctions covered in different sections as simplified schemas of diagrammatic representations to showcase the key ideas.
Reading Images is a ‘grammar’ – a level of organization between content and expression (Halliday, 1973: 67), and therefore, it can be applied to the materiality of images of various kinds. Although the term ‘grammar’ may mean a fixed and highly constrained regularity, it is also a notion tightly bound to natural languages, thus allowing for a degree of abstraction whereby different materialities of images can be accounted for. The new edition discusses these ideas in a separate chapter on materiality (chapter 7), addressing, to an extent, modes and media – concepts central to multimodal research in general. The discussion foregrounds the manifested visual choices as motivated signs – signs that have arisen out of the rhetor’s/designer’s purposes. Because these signs have developed out of fundamental beliefs and values shared across certain social practices, the signs, according to Kress and Van Leeuwen (p. 150) are subject to contestation and negotiation.
Despite this fruitful discussion, at times, the new edition provides inconsistent conceptualizations of images. For instance, having clarified modes as ‘the central resources for making meanings materially evident’ (p. xiv), the authors introduce the concept of a ‘modal complex’ as a number of modes with the distinct material affordances functioning in modally specific ways. However, according to such a conceptualization, images themselves are model complexes (and not modes, although they are referred to as such on a number of occasions throughout the book) since they draw on several resources with different materialities with metafunctionally-diversified meaning potentials. Clarification of this kind can serve as a means to strengthen the theoretical position and alleviate considerable ambiguity around what modes and media are – a recurring challenge in multimodal research more generally.
Writing a book on how to read images is, by all means, a challenging and ambitious undertaking. The research community has widely acknowledged Kress and Van Leeuwen’s efforts, generating over 18,000 citations on Google Scholar since the first edition was published in 1990. Drawing on the appliable Hallidayan linguistics, the framework can be said to exhibit what Michael O’Toole called ‘theorized practicality’. Despite criticisms of being ‘discursive’ and ‘difficult to verify or disprove’ (Bateman, 2008: 46), particularly in the analysis of compositional meanings (such as information value), ‘visual grammar’ does not claim exclusivity of application. It does, in fact, the opposite, providing one way to systematically understand how images, embedded in specific social contexts, mean. Therefore, descriptions of semiotic potential yield detailed insights into how different sign-makers use specific semiotic resources in different contexts – something that more quantitatively oriented approaches to image analysis may fail to consider.
Receptiveness to multiple perspectives evident in the book is indicative of the authors’ conviction that a social semiotic approach to images (and multimodality more broadly) must be interdisciplinary in at least two ways: by a continuous scholarly endeavor towards the social underpinnings of the theory and by exhibiting a willingness to integrate insights from research traditions which have long engaged with the modes and media studied in a semiotic spirit. The book is a valuable resource for students and scholars in design and media studies, visual communication, and the arts.
