Visual and Verbal Texts

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Visual and Verbal Texts
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Balance Symmetry

• Ask not what your country can do for you, ask
  what you can do for your country.
• --John F. Kennedy
• A scale with equal weights on both sides.

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Balance

• Houses, Atlanta. Photo by Walker Evans, 1936.

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Assymetrical Balance

• Chicago. Photo by Yasuhira Ishimoto, 1951-52.

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Comparison and Contrast

• At the Time of the Louisville Flood,
• Margaret Bourke-White, 1937

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Description A Picture is worth a Thousand
Words

• General Store, Moundville, Alabama, by Walker
  Evans, 1936

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Emphasis

• Some of the ways writers create emphasis
• Headings
• Boxes
• Typesizes
• Boldface and italic
• Sentence structure
• Placement beginning or end of book, chapter,
  paragraph, etc.

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Emphasis

• Afghan Girl, (a refugee), 1985, by Steve McCurry

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Metaphor
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Narration

• Street scene following the bombing of Mannheim,
• Germany, World War II

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Pattern

• We recognize certain kinds of writing by the
  patterns they follow. This is also called genre
  or generic conventions. For example, we depend
  on certain patterns to read a newspaper
• the comics
• classified ads
• stock market report, etc.

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Pattern

• It is not just an optical pattern, it is also one
  way to see the world simultaneously as parts
  and a whole.

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Point of View

• Afghanistan, photo by James Nachtwey, 1996

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Proportion

• Used primarily in design. In writing, when we
  pick up an old book and find a paragraph that
  runs for several pages, our modern sense of
  proportion tells us the paragraph is too long.

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Proportion

• Paris, photo by Frank Horvat, 1974

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Unity

• Hot Shot Eastbound, or the Laeger Drive-in, photo
  by O. Winston Link, 1955

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Acknowledgement

• This powerpoint is based on the textbook
• Picturing Texts, ed. Faigley, Lester, Diana
  George, Anna Palchik, and Cynthia Selfe.
• New York W.W. Norton Co., 2004.

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So the point is

• We use much of the same terminology in talking
  about visual and verbal texts.
• These are some terms you can use to analyze
  pictures.

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Goodbye!