When, in 1972, the art historian and critic John Berger first wrote that now-familiar sentence, “seeing comes before words,” he might not have guessed that his influential essay, “Ways of Seeing,” would be invoked to support a park ranger’s ideas about how visitors’ initial experiences of an historic site are visual and corporeal rather than expressly verbal. Nor might he have guessed that his essay would later be anthologized in collections such as Bartholomae and Petrosky’s Ways of Reading and subsequently become the inspiration for many a first-year writing assignment, or that his ideas would be used to help describe the subdiscipline of visual rhetoric at the beginning of a book about the rhetorical elements of national parks, maps used in environmental debates, and in-car navigational devices like the global positioning system (GPS). Nonetheless, Berger’s ideas about how we see in many ways constitute what we might refer to as visual culture and can serve as an accessible point of entry for understanding what, in the mid-1990s, became known among scholars of rhetoric and composition as the burgeoning subdiscipline of visual rhetoric.1 “Ways of Seeing” is perhaps most well-known, at least among those who have taught the essay in their first-year composition courses, for its ability to prompt discussions about how we see based on what we know. That is, our prior knowledge, cultural contexts, and learned assumptions about the world around us influence our interpretations of visual artifacts like, as Berger argues, paintings and photographs and, as this book will soon discuss, physical sites and material artifacts such as parks, green spaces, and public monuments. In the well-known quotation that opens the essay, Berger emphasizes the prevalence of the visual within society when writes that “seeing comes before words” (7). Rather than create a binary between word and image, he sees an ongoing interplay between them: “It is seeing which establishes our place in the surrounding world; we explain that world with words, but words can never undo the fact that we are surrounded by it. The relation between what we see and what we know is never settled” (7). While this book starts from the point of assuming a wider array of devices than just words to help “explain the world”—again, public monuments, cartographic representations, and even multimodal devices like the GPS are all artifacts that help us interpret and explain the world and, as we will see, are themselves products of visual culture—Berger’s larger point is well-received and holds true today: the relationship between what we see and what we know is always shifting and is a product of changing cultural contexts, public understanding, and modes of human communication. Thus, what Berger alludes to here is in fact a working definition of what may be understood as visual culture.
As visual rhetoric scholar Cara A. Finnegan notes, there are many ways to understand the concept of visual culture, but broadly construed, it “recognizes that visuality frames our experience and acknowledges ‘that vision is a mode of cultural expression and human communication as fundamental and widespread as language’” (“Recognizing Lincoln” 62). Visual rhetoric then draws on visual culture to consider the ways in which rhetorical action is “enacted primarily through visual means, made meaningful through culturally derived ways of looking and seeing and endeavoring to influence diverse publics” (Olson et al. 3). Visual rhetoric is likewise attuned to the many persuasive components of visual artifacts and how they function relative to specific audiences, or the social contexts that shape how such artifacts might be interpreted by their viewer. Berger’s focus in “Ways of Seeing,” for example, is largely on the assumptions that viewers bring to their interpretation of a given work of art. Through his analysis of two portraits created by the painter Frans Hals, Berger argues that works of art can serve to obscure or revise history, as viewers bring their own learned assumptions to bear on interpretations of these visual objects. When we interpret works of art or other visual artifacts based on our own learned assumptions about “beauty, truth, genius, civilization, form, status, taste, etc.,” he writes, we perpetuate what he calls an obscuring or “mystification” of the image, one that may work to distance the viewer from the artifact’s original meaning or context (Berger 11). Moreover, images are invariably reproduced over time (for example, in advertisements or photographs, or in sculptures or on websites). On the one hand, reproductions and appropriations make famous works of art accessible to the public. On the other hand, because those reproductions tend to manifest mostly in advertising images and in the mass media, they not only perpetuate capitalism, as Richards and David suggest in their discussion of “Ways of Seeing,” but also create a sort of mystification that distances viewers from the work’s original context and meaning (7). As social understandings continue to change, our interpretations of that which was originally represented by the image will likewise continue to shift.
The shifting interpretations that these visual artifacts can help perpetuate, then, have varied consequences. For, as Robert Hariman and John Louis Lucaites note, popular media and the arts (specifically photojournalism, as they discuss) “can extend an essential but imperfect capacity for connecting with and caring for others”; to do so, however, “they have to be capable of being misleading or misused” (92). As Hariman and Lucaites describe of iconic photographs, and as I also suggest can be the case, though to different ends, with visual and material artifacts such as cartographic representations, green spaces, and public monuments,
[t]hey provide models for action and assurances that we need not lose what we value most. Ultimately, they function as evidence of things unseen, referring not just to what has past but to what always is outside of our given frame of perception. Whether such images will serve the ends of mystification [. . .] or movement towards a better life they cannot themselves represent, remains to be seen. (92)
As I hope to show in this book, our perceptions of visual and material artifacts and the interpretations that such artifacts help foster can have varied consequences not only on our understandings of history but also on our individual, lived experiences and for broader societal issues such as legislation and policy-making. To understand visual artifacts (like photographs and maps) or physical sites (like green spaces and public monuments) as able to shape our understanding of the world around us means understanding these artifacts as rhetorical, or as Carole Blair has put it, as “partisan, meaningful, and influential,” to the extent that they have the capacity for consequence, have the ability to persuade, and may influence our interpretations and understandings of specific contexts in ways that impact both the mind and body (Blair and Michel, “Commemorating” 72). Rhetorical criticism is typically concerned with the study of text and discourse in order to achieve “a greater understanding of human action” (Segal 2). To account also for the visual and material within rhetorical criticism then involves two main components: first, as Finnegan argues in “Doing Rhetorical History of the Visual,” we must understand the visual and textual and, as this book will soon argue, the material, not from the point of their distinction but from the point of their interplay; second, we must understand visual and, again, material rhetorics “as something more than merely a genre category or product.” That is, on the one hand, a photograph or map would count as an artifact of visual rhetoric because “it consists of non-textual or non-discursive features.” On the other hand, to understand the photo or map in this way not only serves to perpetuate a visual-verbal divide, but may also be viewed as subordinating visual rhetoric to broader studies of text and discourse, which then get to count as “just rhetoric.” To account for a more inclusive understanding of the artifacts of rhetorical criticism, Finnegan suggests that we “conceptualize visual rhetoric as a mode of inquiry, defined as a critical and theoretical orientation that makes issues of visuality relevant to rhetorical theory.” As such, she says, the “visual rhetoric project would urge us to explore our understandings of visual culture in light of the questions of rhetorical theory, and at the same time encourage us to (re)consider aspects of rhetorical theory” relative to the