Abstract
‘Visual Public Relations’ (co-edited by Simon Collister, doctoral researcher at the University of London, and Sarah Roberts-Bowman, senior lecturer at Northumbria University) emerges as an attempt to move beyond text within the strategic communication field and to acknowledge the integral role that the visual has in shaping communication. The book is organised conceptually: Its first part deals with images, its second part deals with spatial dimensions and its third part deals with research methods, all within a public relations context. The texts’ authors admirably recognise and respond to the relative paucity of research that considers the visual and/or attempts to theorise it – especially in the public relations realm – and should be commended for advancing a paradigm change that recognises and better understands how our different senses play a role in the media content we create, consume and critique, as well as influences how we behave, knowing that such behaviour will likely be mediated in our current environment through one or more multimodal channels.
Noteworthy in the work is the extension of thought that goes beyond camera-produced visuals, such as photographs and videos, and addresses hand-drawn approaches, such as illustrations (Chapter 3), and computer-generated approaches, such as data visualisations and infographics (Chapter 4). Praiseworthy, too, are several typologies (notably Kirsten Kohrs’ contribution in Chapter 2) that seek to help categorise visual resources and draw from an impressive array of transdisciplinary work.
A generous sampling of figures (48 in all, or about one image every four pages, on average) accompanies the text and boosts its usefulness. The images are all reproduced in greyscale, no doubt as a cost-saving measure, which is fine in most cases though there were a few textual references to colour-coded data (such as the one on p. 148) that were almost impossible to appreciate because of the colour mode and small reproduction size. The figures were used well, overall, with a few exceptions. As an example, the visual typology proposed in Chapter 9 (‘Environmental multi-modal communication: Semiotic observations on recent campaigns’) was described with words only and left me begging for visual exemplars for each of the six categories the author proposes. Rather than provide illustrations for each of these six types, the reader is instead presented in a section separate from the typology with three rather context-poor screenshots that lack captions and are accompanied only by labels.
After making my way through the full text, I was left a bit puzzled about why the book is not as narrowly focused as the title implies. A name like ‘Multimodal Public Relations’, ‘Multisensory Public Relations’ or even ‘Public Relations beyond Text’ would be more fitting and accurate, considering the prominent role that space (Chapters 5–7), which is experienced by more than just the eyes, and multimodal communication (Chapters 9 and 10) play in the book. It is perfectly fine to study more than one sense but highlighting in the title only one creates, I think, a bit of discontinuity between title and interior contents. I could also not help being distracted by a smattering of numerous, largely typographical, errors (I counted 31 errors spread over 203 pages, or about 1 error for every 6.5 pages, which to me seemed high).
Overall, even as a non-PR scholar, I found this text useful thanks to its transdisciplinary focus and its relevance. As Kirsten Kohrs notes in the book’s second chapter, public relations is, at its essence, about understanding stakeholders (or audiences) and communication. Thus, whether one’s purpose is to persuade, entertain or inform, ‘Visual Public Relations’ promises to help us better understand how images work, how environments affect visual communication and how we can more thoughtfully approach the study of the visual through eclectic means. It would fit nicely on my bookshelf among my other visual texts, and I would recommend chapters of it to my students and to burgeoning scholars interested in visual and multimodal strategic communication.