Evoking Visual Rhetoric

• Ernest Hemingway once said: “There is nothing to writing. All you do is sit down at a type writer and bleed.” • Many people believe that words often hold the power of a bullet, our pens pull the trigger. • This Semester when writing in my journal I began being confident about my: -sentence structure -I felt my word choices were full of heavy meaning and intellect. • After being introduced to the idea of rhetoric, which is: The study of impacting an audiences thoughts or actions through language. -I started to reevaluate my writing style. • Sentences no longer sounded poetic but cluttered and verbose. • I now saw complicated phrases that left no room to breathe. • My words were constricted by unnecessary adjectives and verbial phrases. • Every word seemed forced, a calamity. • This led me to question” -Are words too much sometimes? OR Are they Not ENOUGH? • This course helped me to realize why it is I love photography as visual rhetoric so much. • Sometimes without any intention words change the meanings and feelings behind our initial thoughts, morphing the reality of our ideals. • Sometimes words aren’t enough and visual rhetoric is. It widens the definition of rhetoric to include images. -Mood, structure, perspective, communication to the audience are crucial. • All of these components are part of why images can be so moving. • Elements of Design. How do the hues, textures, shading, and form affect the translation of the photograph to its audience? • Images have the power to capture peoples souls, innocence, love, history. That all may never be seen again. They evoke memories, inspiration, nostalgia, conviction. • They are vital in striking certain chords within the most private parts of our personalities, our aspirations, our memories. • The entire experience that surrounded that one image is forever captured. • The conversations, the laughs, the heartaches. • This is how powerful visual rhetoric is! • We as a society overuse words as a technology that has handicapped our grasp on reality. • Why should we attempt to describe beauty or innocence or heartbreak? • Photographs hold a thousand different emotions, meanings, and unsaid phrases that a simple caption may not do it justice. Words aren’t enough. • Author of the novel Blindness, Jose Saramago wrote: “Words are like that, they deceive, they pile up, it seems they do not know where to go, and, suddenly, because of two or three or four that suddenly come out, simple in themselves, a personal pronoun, an adverb, an adjective, we have the excitement of seeing them coming irresistibly to the surface through the skin and the eyes and upsetting the composure of our feelings, sometimes the nerves that can not bear it any longer, they put up with a great deal, they put up with everything, it was as if they were wearing armor, we might say.” • What they don’t understand about words and what they never tell you is that sometimes there aren’t enough, sometimes they’re meaningless, sometimes they don’t do justice, sometimes words fail. • And when they do, we resort to our Art. Our Photography. Our Dance. Our Music. We resort to our own forms of Visual Rhetoric.