Book Reviews / Computers and Composition 18 (2001) 83–91 85

References

Kress, Gunther. (1997). Before writing: Rethinking the paths to literacy. London: Routledge.
Halliday, M. A. K. (1978). Language as social semiotic: The social interpretation of language and meaning.
Baltimore: University Park Press.
PII: S8755-4615(00)00050-5

Reading Images: The Grammar of Visual Design

Gunther Kress and Theo van Leeuwen; London, Routledge, 1996

Published a year earlier than Before Writing (1997), in Reading Images: The Grammar of
Visual Design Gunther Kress and Theo van Leeuwen (1996) discuss education. In particular,
the authors consider the role of images in education and conclude that “in terms of this new
visual literacy, education produces illiterates” (p. 15). As such, Reading Images is a response
to the visual illiteracy problem, and an attempt to resolve “the staggering inability on all of
our parts to talk and think in any way seriously about what is actually communicated by
means of images and visual design” (p. 16). And this is what they proceed to do: offer the
theory and vocabulary—their grammar—needed to talk about and read images. Indeed, their
confidence in this undertaking is reflected by the use of the definite article in the title; this
is not just “a” grammar book. And without question, with its numerous black and white
images and its eight visual plates, Reading Images is, arguably, the most visually pleasing
grammar book ever published.
In the introduction and the first chapter, “The Semiotic Landscape,” the authors establish
a theory of reading images. In chapters two and three they discuss narrative and conceptual
representations in images, and then move through the representative and interactive elements
of images and their modalities in chapters four and five. In chapter six they examine the
integration of these elements in the composition as a whole, particularly in terms of the
image’s information value, the salience of its constituents, and the way it is framed. In the
remaining three chapters, the authors conclude with issues of materiality, the three dimen-
sionality of sculpture, and a brief postscript. Although the later chapters are valuable, it is the
authors’ grammar of visual design and numerous applications of that grammar that stand out.
Drawing on Halliday (1978), Kress and van Leeuwen’s “grammar” is a descriptive,
western one: they draw all of their examples from western sources, and do not discuss the
role of the image in eastern cultures. Thus, in another departure from Chomsky, they are
quick to point out that theirs is by no means a universal grammar. The authors’ visual design
is broadly defined, one applicable to oil paintings, magazine layout, comic strips, children’s
drawings, pop culture advertisements, scientific diagrams, and—implicitly—images on the
Web. Curiously, this is a weakness in the text, because they discuss only static images and
neglect the newest source of image-making and image-reading: the World Wide Web, a topic
Kress (1998) later discusses. Despite this omission, the text’s strength is providing a theory,
and perhaps more importantly, a vocabulary for discussing images.
Although heavily influenced by Roland Barthes’ semiotics, Kress and van Leeuwen
86 Book Reviews / Computers and Composition 18 (2001) 83–91

challenge Barthes’ (1977) position in “The Rhetoric of the Image,” in which Barthes argued
that because images are so “polysemous,” they become “uncertain signs” and “floating
chains of signifieds,” ones without a readily identifiable meaning (pp. 38 –39). Because of
this supposed uncertainty, Barthes wrote, “in every society various techniques are developed
intended to fix the floating chain of signifieds in such a way as to counter the terror of
uncertain signs: the linguistic message is one of these techniques” (p. 39). Kress and van
Leeuwen argue that although images might be connected to linguistic text, they are in no way
dependent on that text, and may well have been created independently of that text. That is,
Kress and van Leeuwen are not disturbed by images without text. This is another strength:
their willingness to examine images without text. The relationship between images and text
is still uncertain, and many, including Edward Tufte (1997) and Jacques Bertin (1983), find
the two nearly inseparable, especially in terms of producing images. Although Kress and van
Leeuwen have not solved the relationship between text and image, they do engage in a
dialogue about images without text.
The authors also depart from Barthes and other earlier semioticians by drawing on
linguistics, specifically discourse analysis, when they examine images’ signifying capabili-
ties. As such, theirs is a contextualized and politicized grammar, fully aware of the ideo-
logical functions which images, like language, possess. Indeed, Kress and van Leeuwen take
a strong position on the image’s ability to signify by asserting that:
language and visual communication both realize the same more fundamental and far-reaching
systems of meaning that constitute our cultures, but that each does so by means of its own
specific forms, and independently. (p. 17)

That is, although language and images use grammars, they are dissimilar grammars with
altogether different structures. However, language and images do share similarities, espe-
cially because both consist of smaller units. For example, the authors include a shot from the
famous chariot race scene in Ben Hur, in which Charlton Heston guides the four white horses
pulling his chariot. In the background one sees three other chariot racers, some spectators,
and some armed guards. When analyzed for constituents (when “parsed”), this image
contains: Heston, his chariot, his horses and their harnesses, the dirt race track, the other
chariot racers, their horses and harnesses, the spectators, and so on. These are the smaller
constituents that comprise the image as a whole, and each constituent could be represented
in a different way. For example, Heston’s horses are white, and the other racers’ horses are
brown or black. The other racers wear helmets; Heston does not. Great variation is possible
within each unit (there could be only two horses, or five chariot racers, or Heston’s chariot
could have an NRA sticker on it). Although it’s difficult, perhaps impossible, to label each
item as one might in a sentence diagram (hence Kress and van Leeuwen’s discourse
perspective), the arrangement of these varying units conveys the meaning. For the authors,
the arrangement is the design, and it’s the design that must be read, for the design has been
carefully arranged by the sign-maker, and has been done so in a rhetorical sense. The design
is the rhetorical system.
Although the theoretical elements of this text are dense at times, and occasionally the
examples are a bit too systematic (like Halliday and Hasan’s [1976] numerous exceptions in
Cohesion in English), Reading Images is nevertheless accessible and stimulating, suitable for
 Book Reviews / Computers and Composition 18 (2001) 83–91 87

advanced undergraduates and graduate students. Although the authors do examine a wide
range of images, like Barthes, their analyses are often advertising-oriented. It could be argued
that advertisements are a rather safe genre to examine, primarily because they are more
narrowly defined in their rhetorical purposes than other genres, genres in which the image’s
potential for plurisignification might be more readily unleashed. The book is, nevertheless,
quite valuable in offering a theory and vocabulary with which to discuss images. In a
concerted effort to refine and expand our ability to discuss the way that images are designed,
Kress and van Leeuwen provide a valuable theoretical and lexical resource for this discus-
sion.

References

Kress, Gunther, & van Leeuwen, Theo. (1997). Reading images: The grammar of visual design. London:
Routledge.
Barthes, Roland. (1977). The rhetoric of the image. In Stephen Heath (Ed.), Image, music, text. New York: Hill
and Wang.
Bertin, Jacques. (1983) Semiology of graphics. (William J. Berg, Trans.). Madison, WI: University of Wisconsin
Press.
Halliday, M. A. K. (1978). Language as social semiotic: The social interpretation of language and meaning.
Baltimore: University Park Press.
Halliday, M. A. K., & Hasan, Ruqaiya. (1976). Cohesion in English. London: Longman.
Tufte, Edward R. (1997). Visual explanations: Images and quantities, evidence and narrative. Cheshire, CT:
Graphics Press.
PII: S8755-4615(00)00050-5

Good Looking: Essays on the Virtue of Images

Barbara Stafford; Cambridge, MIT Press, 1997

Barbara Stafford would agree with Kress and van Leeuwen on many points, especially that
cognition is not primarily linguistic and that fundamental changes in education must be made
to address the prevalence of the image in today’s world. Good Looking is organized into three
sections. The first section, “Enlightenment/Re-Enlightenment,” examines eighteenth-century
approaches to images, and also considers that period as being critical in the West’s separation
of image and text, a separation that led to the perceived denigration of the image’s capacity
to signify. In the second section, “Practicing Vision,” Stafford considers both a disciplinary
model for the study of images, and also what such a discipline would have to offer current
visual- and text-based disciplines. The final section, “Aesthetical Ethics,” proposes that
non-humanities disciplines and professions, especially the medical industry, would benefit
from instruction in aesthetics. Like the other books reviewed here, Good Looking contains
multiple black and white images and reproductions: paintings, diagrams, medical drawings,
Web site reproductions, and an MRI.