Journal of Visual Literacy, Spring 2002

Volume 22, Number 1,29-52

Sociocultural Perspectives on
Visual Communication

Michael Griffin, Ph.D.

Macalester College
Saint Paul, Minnesota, U.S.A.

Abstract
This article discusses four sources of socio-cultural reference in
visual communication studies - art history, film studies, the
psychology of art and visual representation, and the anthropology
of visual communication - and suggests that socio-culturally nested
analyses of visual textsstill offer the greatestpromisefor illuminating
the nature of pictorial communication and the particular role of
visual form in media production, reception, interpretation and use.
The article specifically calls for a re-invigorated use of social-
semiotics: analyses of cultural texts within the concrete social
contexts of visual media production and reception, and with a
heightened awareness of the impact of shifting technology,industrial
synergy, and trans-cultural media activity.

I ncreasing attention to the role of visual imagery in communication and

media studies has, not surprisingly, coincided with the growing
prominence of both the semiotic and sociocultural paradigms in
communication theory. This is undoubtedly related to the analogic nature of
pictures, the traditionally linguistic and cognitive preoccupations of rhetorical
and psychological paradigms, and the inherently digital nature of cybernetic
theories of information processing. Semiotic approaches can be seen as an
explicit attempt to bridge the linguistic and analogic nature of visual
communication, with provocative but mixed results. However, since the early
1970s the sociocultural seems to have increasingly subsumed and eclipsed
 31

consensus. Further, if a strong argument for construct validity can be made,

that is, if measuring the frequency of these features does indeed tell us
something pertinent regarding the theoretical questions posed by the research,
then these conventional methods of analysis may prove adequate for studying
certain aspects of the visual in media representations. Still, the analogic nature
of the visual field, even more than the connotativenature oflanguage, routinely
resists attempts to measure the frequencies of discrete, yet meaningful,
elements. The mere presence or absence of identifiable features, or even the
measurable co-occurrence of some cluster of attributes, rarely reveals
sufficient insight into how and why pictures communicate. This is why
attention to social context and an historical understanding of cultural codes
is so vital, but also why specific training in visual analysis, not just content
analysis, is essential.
It is with regard to the peculiarly visual aspects of communication media
that a need for socioculturalunderstanding seems most apparent.Just as Weber
argued that human reality is an ever evolving historical and cultural
phenomenon, and that the sciences of history and culture are comprehending
sciences not susceptible to "complete" explanation or the application of
nomothetic laws of predictability (Weber, 1948), so visual representation is a
fundamentally historical and cultural process demanding the Verstehen (or
holistic understanding) that results only from immersion in the sociocultural
context in which images take their meaning. This point is sometimes obscured
by the shifting levels at which scholars discuss pictorial communication;
whether they are identifying processes of basic perception and apprehension,
personal expression and interpretation, or social communication, the operation
of what Mead (1934) called "significant symbolizers."
I was reminded of the social theories of both Weber and G. H. Mead at a
recent symposium on documentary photography when the topic of discussion
predictably turned to the age-old issue of photography as record vs.
photography as art. In arguing for photography as a form of artistic expression,
several people noted that everyone draws their own meaning from a
photograph and that, therefore, photographs are not reliable as shared
information about an external reality. Since photographic meaning is
ambiguous and intuitive, some went on, it represents a personal artistic
experience, for both the photographer and the viewer, whose significance
cannot be pinned down and analyzed. However,othersresponded that although
it is undoubtedly true that the meaning of pictures is never fixed, and always
represents a denotative and connotative range of referential, implicit, and
ideological potential, it is equally the case that perceptions and interpretations
are rarely idiosyncratic. When participants at the symposium were asked to

Griffin - Sociocultural Perspectives on Visual Communication

30

the semiotic as a prime framework for addressingquestions of visual meaning.

It is now,perhaps, best seen as a meta paradigm within which various methods
of research, such as semiotic, phenomenological, rhetorical, critical,
categorical and quantitative, derive their significance (Craig, 1999).
In this essay I will briefly discuss four sources of sociocultural study in
visual communication research, and suggest that emphasis on the semiotic
within a broader context of sociocultural theory and ethnographic observation
seems to provide the most promise for future studies of visual media
production, representation, and interpretation. In doing so it is not my intention
to dismiss other theoretical paradigms or approaches to visual communication
research. To the contrary the accompanying essays of this issue amply
demonstrate that attention to rhetorical practice, semiotic systems,
phenomenological experience, information process, sociopsychological
interaction and influence, as well as critical theory and reflection can each
offer useful insights and perhaps more importantly, particular issues for
attention and debate, pertinent to the specific nature of the visual mode of
communication. However, I will argue that universal conceptions of
communication, including the visual, are severely limited in the degree to
which they can ever successfully describe or analyze concrete communication
practices and events. Specific communication processes, whether identified
as rhetorical, phenomenological, cybernetic, sociopsychological, or semiotic,
can be fully understood only in relation to the primary axes of sociocultural
meaning: the historical, that is, the body of cultural conventions that constitute
historical traditions and trajectories; and the social, those contemporaneous
contexts of human organization, social structure, and community life that
give communication patterns and events shared significance within and across
groups.
Sociopsychological methods of content analysis provide a particularly
good example of the need to view communication practices within
sociocultural context, and this is perhaps never more apparent than when
dealing with the inherent ambiguity of pictures. The difficulty of quantifying
and measuring pictorial qualities and characteristics, as opposed to the more
stable denotative field of lexical notation, is often noted and bemoaned by
those wishing to construct more scientific accounts of media texts. Some
features of visual media can certainly be identified and categorized reliably,
and their relative frequency measured, through the use of accepted methods
of content classification and coding. For example, the presence and absence
of certain types of manifest content, easily recognized shapes or figures, salient
attributes of setting, color, or size, or even apparent visual techniques such as
low or high camera angles, may potentially be coded with a high degree of

Journal of Visual Literacy, Volume 22, Number 1

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comment on particular photographs on display, they did notice many of the

same elements within the picture frame and drew many similar inferences
concerning the picture's subject matter and the photographer's intent.
What makes overlappingand sharedmeaning possible, that is, what makes
communication possible, is shared culture: mutual participation in systems
of cultural conventions and an understanding (Verstehen)of the cultural ethos
and contexts in which signs are generated, used, and considered significant.
There will certainly always be variation in the perception and understanding
of a photograph, but the variation tends to occur within the parameters of
socially shared experience and interpretive practice. Conclusions that fall
outside of the shared agreements of a social membership are considered
idiosyncratic, perhaps irrelevant, and possibly even irrational. We learn, as
Mead would stress, through a lifetime of symbolic interaction, continually
gauging our perceptions and responses against our surroundings, and the
perceptions and responses of the others around us. Verstehencomes from the
growing accumulation of those experiences.
The point for this discussion is that the inherent ambiguity of pictures,
relative to the more precise declarations of language, foregrounds the issue
of reception and interpretive latitude in communication, and therefore makes
apparent the importance in communication of context and social patterns of
mediation. Debates concerning the degree of convention versus nature in
visual perception and apprehension, or the degree to which the formal
properties of texts structure interpretive responses, must inevitably be
conducted relative to the historical and cultural traditionsof picture production,
distribution, exhibition, access, and shared interpretive response. InDowncast
Eyes: the Denigration o/Vision in Twentieth-century French Thought (1993)
Martin Jay argues that the history of French structuralism and semiotics can
be interpreted as a programmatic attempt to reign in this very imprecision
and potential autonomy of the visual by investing it with systemic (and
textually predictable) properties analogous to language. An underlying motif
of Jay's analysis is the anxiety induced for analysts such as Barthes by the
obtuse meanings they found in pictures, especially photographs and film,
that often defied description in linguistic terms (1993, p. 444-445). Yet
regardless of such debates over the text-centered limitation of semiotic
interests and methods, semiotic inquiry has made one thing clear: that images,
like words, can only be understood through their relationship to cultural
patterns of making meaning. The sociocultural paradigm, broad and eclectic
with regard to specific methods, makes it equally clear that cultural codes,
such as the placement of ~endered male and female fisures within a visual
field, can only be understood within the discursive practices of a production

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system (such as commercial advertising) and the social organization (local,

national, transnational) of which advertising is a part. As Birdwhistell writes,

Research on human communication as a systematic and structured

organization could not be initiated until we had some idea about the
organization of society itself (1970: , p.2).

History and Theory: Art, Culture, and VISual Communication

Before attempting to employ methodological models from either mass
communication research or structural linguistics, it might be wise to consider
the ways in which imageshave been studied and understood within a discipline
specifically devoted to pictures, art history. Doing so suggests myriad
possibilities for the study of visual producers, visual style, the role of pictures
in social order, and pictures as reflections of time and culture. The
historiography of art history reveals a clear and steady movement towards
the study of art as the product of particular social relationships affirmed
through the discourse of social and cultural convention. As art historians have
gradually moved away from explanations of art based on personal biography,
or on the stylistic formalism launched by Heinrich Wolfflin's Principles of
Art History (1915), they have moved closer and closer to a conception of art
as communication (Gross, 1973).They have done this by refocusing attention
away from the artist as singular genius, or the work of art as a self-contained
text, to the social circles and cultural discourses that invest the art work with
meaning. From Haskell's Patronsand Painters (1963) and White and White's
Canvasses and Careers (1965), to Baxandall's Painting and Experience in
Fifteenth Century Italy (1972) to Gombrich's collected essays The Use of
Images: Studies in the Social Function of Art and Visual Communication
(1999) - to name a few important books - studies of the visual arts have
demonstrated the richness and insight provided by a sociocultural approach
to understanding the production, use and social functions of pictorial
communication. Aestheticians have responded with studies of "institutional
aesthetics" (Danto, 1964, 1973; Dickie, 1975), and sociologists have turned
their attention to the study of "art worlds," specific social communities of
interaction, discourse and meaning making within which visual characteristics
have significance (Becker, 1982; Crane, 1987).
In a parallel way, the symbolic interactionist work of Erving Goffman,
when extended to worlds of image production in such works as Gender
Advertisements (1976), demonstrates how patterns of pictorial display reflect
cultural "hyper-ritualizations" of social roles and gender relations. Goffman's
work on hyper-ritualizations provides a prime example of the use of semiotic

Griffin - Sociocultural Perspectives on Visual Communication

34

methods, not just to reveal the relational logic and syntactical structure of a
textual sign system, but to identify the roots of signifying practice in
conventions of social behavior and culturally prescribed interpersonal display.
Semiotic work, at its best, is always about revealing sociocultural patterns in
the process of symbolic production, and part of this process involves the
need to situate the study of images historically and socially.

A communication practice, or discursive practice, is an actual means of

expression in a community, given that community's specific scenes and
historical circumstances, in the broadest sense (Carbaugh, 1996, p. 14).

Of course, the last quarter century has also seen a significant influence
of British and American cultural studies on communication studies, making
any call for a sociocultural approach to visual communication research seem
perhaps obvious or even superfluous. The concepts of ritual, naturalization,
socialization, production contexts and practices, local community contexts
of reception and issues of cultural identity, have all entered the lexicon of
visual communication studies. The work of cultural studies scholars such as
Hebdige (1979, 1989) and Carbaugh (1996) have demonstrated the important
link between visual imagery and display, sub-cultural memberships, and
sociocultural identity.But the widespread acceptance of cultural studies within
communications has sometimes served to blur media-specific distinctions
and research paradigms. The specifically visual concerns of visual
communication studies can become lost when the term is used to encompass
any scholarship that concerns itself with some aspect of a medium that happens
to include images.
If it is important that there be a sub-field of visual communication studies
that concerns itself specifically with the visual mode, then a sociocultural
paradigm will not necessarily help us to clarify its definition. Cultural studies
shows us that the sociocultural, as a range of hybrid theories rather than a
single coherent theoretical paradigm, encompassing both micro levels of
sociocultural interactions and processes and macro levels of social and
economic structure, is a double-edged sword. It provides essential historical
and theoretical context without which specific visual analysis has little
significance. Yet it can also draw attention away from the specifics of visual
form, substituting theories of sociocultural content and behavior for the
defining practice of visual communication studies.
A central point is that visual communication studies need to emphasize
the tools of distinctly visual analysis within a sociocultural framework. In
this regard it is useful to remember that the rise of contemporary visual

Journal of Visual Literacy, Volume 22, Number 1

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communication studies was preceded by centuries of thought and writing

specificallyconcerningthe arts and the visual image.Although the last decades
of the twentieth century have seen a renewed philosophical concern with the
visual, a move that Mitchell (1994) has called "the pictorial turn," a long-
standing tradition of scholarship in aesthetics, art history, and the sociology
of art provides instructive and well-tested models for the sociocultural analysis
of visual forms.
The social history of art, particularly in the work of writers such as
Svetlana Alpers (1983), Michael Baxandall (1972, 1985), or Michael Fried
(1980), offers many clues for investigating relationships between the
production of images and the social contexts of their sponsorship, use, and
interpretation.Alpers has explored the relationship of picture making to verbal
and literal description, from the ekphrastic tradition of the Sophists, in which
they used the subject matter of paintings as jumping-off points for discursive
monologues and storytelling - a template, she argues, for Vasari's famous
descriptions of Renaissance paintings (Alpers, 1960) - to the seventeenth
century tradition of Dutch painting, when Northern European painters broke
with the narrative tradition of Italian painting to create a new "descriptive
pictorial mode."
Baxandall's (1972) study of painting and experience in fifteenth century
Italy provides a prime historical example of what Gross (1974a) calls "doing
the ethnography of visual communication." It demonstrates how patronage
and contractual obligations, on the one hand, and viewer expectations and
understandings of convention, on the other, combined to make of painting a
currency of social communication, a socially shared system of conventions
in which viewers could infer the social status and wealth of the patron, the
ecclesiastical and religious functions of the picture, the theological, elemental,
and even astrological messages encoded in colors, forms and symbols, and
the institutional ends to which paintings were attached. The use of
contractually prescribed amounts of aquamarine or gold leaf, for example,
might contribute to the color composition or religious iconography of a
painting, but also sent clear social messages concerning the identity and
position of the patron commissioning the work. In this way paintings served
as social announcements for important rites of status, such as weddings, as
well as advertisements for the success or power of benefactors. Evidence
indicates that these social signals were widely recognized and understood by
fifteenth century viewers and made paintings multi-faceted forms of
communication about religious doctrine, social order, cultural traditions and
artistic competence (Gross 1973, 1974a, 1974b).

Griffin - Sociocultural Perspectives on Visual Communication

36

Becker's Art Worlds (1982) applies a similar approach to more

contemporary worlds of visual art by examining the collective social
relationships involved in the production, exhibition, and reception of cultural
products such as painting and photography. The influence of the "art worlds"
approach to sociocultural analysis is apparent in Rosenblum's Photographers
at Work (1978), in which she contrasts the social organizational settings of
news, fashion advertising, and commercial studio photography and finds that
each operates within a distinct web of production influences and sociocultural
meaning. Gross' On the Margin of Art Worlds (1995) follows in this vein
with a collection of studies explicitly devoted to the social definitions and
boundaries that have emerged among worlds of visual art and communication,
and the changing significance that pictures have as they move from one
sociocultural context to another.
Related to these extra-textual studies of visual communication practice
and meaning is a long history of attention to the intertextual relationships
between word and image. Whether in studies of specific relationships between
religious painting and scripture, pictures and narratives, newspaper photos
and their captions, or attempts to pursue the more general study of iconology
(overall fields of images and their relation to discourse), the existence of
pictures within larger multi-textual contexts has led to several rich traditions
of scholarship. When exploring the complex relationships between words
and pictures it becomes especially apparent that the boundaries of visual
communication studies bleed quickly and easily into other areas of textual
and contextual analysis involving rhetoric, literature, scripture, ritual
ceremony, history, science, or news reporting. It is only in rare circumstances
that pictures stand on their own, or that studying them as discrete objects
makes sense. Therefore, philosophical and theoretical concerns with the
subject/spectator (and such topics as the gaze, the glance, observation,
surveillance, and visual pleasure (Mulvey, 1989)) or with the interpreter/
reader (decipherment, decoding, visual experience, visual literacy, or cultures
of vision (Burnett, 1995)) necessarily imply the analysis of visual signifying
systems as codes nested within other sociocultural codes and contexts.
It is impossible for me to survey, or even briefly catalog, this expansive
literature on "scopic regimes" and the myriad historical attempts to investigate
the interactions of verbal and visual representation in the study of the "Sister
Arts," painting and literature, ut pictura poesis, icon and logos, image/text,
languages of art, semiotics - all attempts to treat representation and discourse
in one master theory of pictures, language, and the science of representation.
For those interested in a detailed and erudite exploration of these traditions
and their relevance to our contemporary "culture of images," "society of the

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37

spectacle," "world of semblances and simulacra," I recommend the companion

books ofW.J .T. Mitchell, Iconology: Image, Text, Ideology (1986), and Picture
Theory (1994). For those interested in an extensive and provocative history
oftwentieth century French philosophy's attempt to explain (and subjugate?)
the visual within structuralist and post-structuralist theory, see Jay (1993).

Contributions From Film Studies

Another source of sociocultural insight into the study of visual
representation comes from the nearly century-long contributions of film
studies. The heart of the matter, and arguably the central question of all visual
communication study,is the precise status of the image as a copy or analogue.
The parameters of debate that have characterized film theory over the decades
primarily involve the distinction between formative and realist theories of
cinematic construction (Andrew, 1976, 1984). As Andrew (1976) writes of
the work of Bazin and Mitry:

...Bazin spent his life discussing the importance of the "snugness"

with which the filmic analogue fits the world, whereas Mitry has
spent his life investigating the crucial differences which keep this
asymptote forever distinct from the world it runs beside and so
faithfully mirrors (p. 190).

Historically, film and photographic theory and criticism were absorbed

with these questions as they pertained to the properties of the image-text
itself. The key point is that the study of pictures brought into even greater
relief questions of reflection and construction in human representation. And
although these issues are not confined to modem visual media, and perhaps
are questions that cannot be asked of pictures as if they were a purely visual
medium, somehow outside of inter-textual contexts, they have become
defining issues for visual communication study in an era of photographic
reproduction that so often takes for granted that visual media technologically
mimic reality. Various technical advances have seemed to provide an
inexorable progression toward ever more convincing recreations of the "real
world" and have consistently raised the ante on illusion and simulation. Yet
film theory has persistently directed attention towards the processes of
constructing visual representations, constantly reminding us of the inherent
tension between the craft of picture making and the perception of pictures as
records. Against the common sense assumptions so often made that visual
media give us a window on the world with which to witness "reality," film
theory from the beginning has interrogated the ways in which such

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38

"windows" are socioculturally created and structured to shape our view.

Even in the practice of documentary film, theorists such as Nichols (1991)
show us the patterns or "modes" of representational strategy that make each
documentary a formal and rhetorical articulation. Writers on still
photography, perhaps ironically, followed the development of film theory
in fully theorizing the ontology of the photograph, but in the last fifty years
have also contributed an extensive literature on the relationship of photo
images to their subjects.l

The Psychology of Art and Visual Representation

An important benchmark in establishing the cultural conventionality of
visual images is the work of E. H. Gombrich, particularly his book Art and
Illusion: The Psychology of Visual Representation (1960). In it he makes a
powerful case for the conventionality of schemes for visual representation.
Using an eminent art historian's knowledge of the traditions of Western art,
and particularly the development of linear perspective in Renaissance art, he
argues that picture forms of all kinds are conventionally constructed according
to learned schemata, not simply copied from nature. Building from the idea
that perceptual gestalts are not necessarily innate but often learned (a concept
fully developed in the perceptual research of R. L. Gregory, 1966, 1970),
Gombrich argued that perceptions of visual representations in art operate by
means of gestalts that are culturally based and socially learned and that, in
this sense, pictures are read based on prior sociocultural knowledge.2
Gombrich develops the metaphor of "reading images" in his article, "The
Visual Image," written for Scientific American in 1972. Here he reiterates the
ways in which images are intertwined within cultural systems of language
and function and depend upon "code, caption, and context" for understanding.
Pictures rarely stand alone, and rarely communicate unambiguously when
they do. The mutual support of language and image facilitates memory and
interpretation, making visual communication, as distinct from artistic
expression, possible.
Gombrich used the pictorial plaque placed on the side of the Pioneer
space probe as a prime example of the naivete with which even highly educated
people assume that pictures communicate naturally and directly, without prior
knowledge of the message system. The plaque was designed by NASA
scientists as a universal greeting, "on the off chance that somewhere on the
way it is intercepted by intelligent scientifically educated beings" (NASA
press release). Breaking down each part of the pictorial greeting, Gombrich
points out that outside of certain culturally specific conventions of abstract
line drawing, perspective, foreshortening, and symbols, such as an arrow

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showing direction of flight and a hand waving to indicate "hello" (all uniquely
specific to a tradition of Western art practiced in only particular regions of
earth), this configuration of lines looks "like nothing on earth." Without prior
knowledge of the particular Anglo-American use of symbols and visual forms,
Gombrich writes, "Our 'scientifically educated' fellow creatures in space
might be forgiven if they saw the figures as wire constructs with loose bits
and pieces hovering weightlessly in between" (1972, p. 257). Indeed, given
the collection of highly conventionalized drawings and symbols that make
up this plaque, it would be a miracle if many people on earth, much less from
other worlds, were able to clearly decipher the message. Yet, the fact that it is
visual seems to have masked this realization from its creators.

The Anthropology (and Sociology) of Visual Communication

Research that came to be identified under this title emerged in the 1960s
and 1970slargely in associationwith the work of Sol Worth,Jay Ruby,Richard
Chalfen, Larry Gross, Howard S. Becker, and their students. It was carried
forward by scholars particularly interested in the cultural codes and social
contexts of image making within particular communities, sub-cultures, and
social groups. This movement was influenced by previous work in the social
history of art, the psychology of art and representation, film theory, and
semiotics, but attempted to apply knowledge of historical and cultural
conventionality in visual representation to empirical study of the social use
of pictures in context.
For example, attempts to assess and compare the types of psychological
schemata suggested by Gombrich in image making and image interpretation
across different cultures suggested that processes of visual communication
were not universal and needed to be explored within specific sociocultural
settings. Hudson (1960), Deregowski (1968,1973) and Cook (1981) compared
perceptions of depth perspective in pictures and susceptibility to visual
illusions grounded in expectations of linear perspective, such as the Ponzo
illusion, across Westernand non-Westerncultures.Attention was also directed
towards a history of anecdotal reports suggesting that people in different
cultures of the world, and especially those isolated from industrial culture,
read photographic images in divergent ways and sometimes struggled to
decipher the relationships between two dimensional shapes and tones and
three dimensional referents in photographic prints. .

Messaris (1994, p. 60-70) reviewed the research on cultural differences

in pictorial perception and suggested that the empirical evidence on this
question does not, in fact, conclusively support the idea that basic pictorial
apprehension is a learned cultural skill. Nevertheless, the idea that people

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40

raised in different cultures may see and picture the world differently provided
a stimulus for expanding sociocultural research in visual communication,
and today I am aware of no visual communication scholars that contest the
fact that interpretations of meaning in pictures remains heavily dependent on
specific cultural experience and convention, whether or not basic pictorial
apprehension is more natural than cultural theorists previously believed.
The anthropology of visual communication also was influenced heavily
by new approaches to the study of linguistics, not only by structuralist
tendencies and the semiologicaltheoriesand methods that structurallinguistics
engendered, but in particular by the rise of soiolinguistics in the work of
Hymes (1964; 1967), Labov (1966), Bernstein (1971), and others. These
sociolinguistswere not contentto assume that the structural system oflanguage
(or la langue in de Saussure's terms) generated and determined language use
(la parole) and began to examine specifically occurring language use across
subcultures, social classes, and ethnic groups. Such "ethnographies of
communication," as Hymes (1964) called them, provided exemplars for the
similar study of picture making and use in varying social contexts.
A key figure in adapting these influences to the study of visual
communication was Sol Worth.The collection of his writings, Studying Visual
Communication (1981), edited posthumously by his colleague and coauthor
Larry Gross, is perhaps the best starting point for those interested in gaining
a sense of the origins of a sociocultural focus in visual communication
research. Inthe introduction Gross writes, "The central threadthat runs through
Worth's research and writings is the question of how meaning is communicated
through visual images" (Worth, 1981, p. 1). And it is precisely this focus on
meaning that demands that images be analyzed within both the cultural
conventions of the historical tradition from which they evolve, and the
contemporaneous social contexts in which such conventions have shared
significance. Initially,Worthwas fascinatedby novice filmmaking,particularly
what he called the "bio-documentary" films made by his students, as
manifestations of individually subjective, psychological issues. But before
long he began to shift the focus of his attention to the nature of film as cultural
communication, both as a reflection the of the world views, values, and
concerns of a filmmaker's cultural group, and as a reflection of the codes and
conventions of image making and film construction shared by that group -
agreements about the status of sign-events, syntax rules, rules by which actual
social groups in existing communities make inferences from sequences of
signs.
These interests led to the landmark Navajo Filmmakers Project, in which
Worth collaborated with anthropologist John Adair and graduate assistant

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Richard Chalfen to train Navajo students in Arizona to make their own 16mm
films, and then screened and studied these films, not as records about their
culture, but as examples of Navajo culture, "reflecting the value systems,
coding patterns, and cognitiveprocesses of the maker" (Worth, 1972;reprinted
as chapter 3 in Worth, 1981).Worth,Adair, and Chalfen reasoned that studying
the filmmaking products of Navajo people, rather than making films about
them, "would come closer to capturing his vision of his world" (Worth and
Adair, 1972: italics in original).
The Navajo films (now in the collection of the Museum of Modern Art
in New York), and the published results of the project, including the book,
Through Navajo Eyes: An Exploration in Film Communication and
Anthropology (Worth and Adair, 1972), were praised by such commentators
as Margaret Mead as a "breakthrough in cross-cultural communications"
(Mead, 1977, p. 67). This new approach to documentary practice led Worth
to propose "a shift from visual anthropology to the anthropology of visual
communication" (1980). This "shift" suggested the need to abandon taken-
for-granted assumptions about the capacity of film and photography to portray
culture from the outside and instead, to study the forms and uses given to
visual media in everyday life by the members of different cultures and social
groups themselves. Worth vigorously distinguished this work from traditional
"visual anthropology," much of which he considered naive and unreflective
in its reliance on photographic records about culture. Instead he urged that
visual communication scholars study forms of image making as examples of
culture, to be analyzed for the sociocultural patterns that they reveal.
The Navajo Film Project inspired a stream of subsequent research on
visual media as coded cultural texts tied to particular social functions within
specific communities. Worth's idea of an "anthropology of visual
communication" dovetailed with the work of numerous students, colleagues,
and scholars working along cognate trajectories. These included, among other
related research: groundbreaking studies of family (or "home-mode")
photography and home moviemaking (Chalfen, 1975; 1987; Musello, 1980),
the study of "symbolic strategies" for pictorial perception, interpretation, and
learning among different ages and social groups (Worth and Gross, 1974;
Gross, 1974b; Messaris and Gross, 1977; Messaris and Pallenik, 1977;
Messaris, 1982; Custen, 1982), the socialization of children to view and use
visual media in particular ways (Pallenik, 1976; Messaris and Sarrett, 1981;
Eadie, Sutton-Smith, and Griffin, 1983; Griffin, 1985, Gross 1985), the social
establishment of institutionalized standards and practices in picture making
and use - both professional and amateur (Worth and Ruby, 1977; Ruby, 1975,
1981,1995,1999; Schiller,1981;Hardt andOhm, 1981;Becker,1985;Schwartz

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42

1992; Griffin, 1992; Griffin 1995), explorations of the nature and limits of
sociocultural representation in documentary work (Ruby, 1975, 1981, 1982;
Ruby and Taureg, 1987;Nichols, 1991, 1994;Linton, 1992;Comer, 1996),the
study of social worlds of visual production and legitimization - from art, to
advertising,to news (Thchman,1978;Rosenblum, 1978;Becker, 1974a; 1974b;
1982; Schwartz, 1986; Schwartz and Griffin, 1987; Gross, ed., 1995), and the
cultural ethics of visual representation (Gross, Katz, and Ruby, eds., 1988).
The Worth legacy is an attempt to link semiotic concerns for the systemic
properties of form and syntax in pictorial construction and the social
anthropologist's concern with the processes of reception, interpretation and
use within specific sociocultural contexts. A point he emphasizes again and
again is the inadequacy of the "reflectionhypothesis" or correspondencetheory
that pictures operate by simple, direct resemblance to "reality." Echoing
Gombrich, he reiterates that the nature of pictorial "realism" is not visual
correspondence with "reality,"but rather visual correspondence to recognized
cultural conventions of representation within social communities.

I have briefly outlined earlier why I think the notion of matching to

the real world is insufficient to explain how pictures mean. Now I
can say that I don't believe this is what one matches pictures to at
all. Correspondence, if it makes any sense as a concept, is not
correspondence to "reality," but rather correspondence to
conventions, rules, forms, and structures for structuring the world
around us. What we use as a standard for correspondence is our
knowledge of how people makepictures-pictorial structures-how
they made them in the past, how they make them now, and how they
will make them for various purposes in various contexts. We do not
use as our standard of correspondence how the world is made (Worth,
1981, p. 181).

Conclusion
Barthes wrote that photography, "by virtue of its absolutely analogical
nature, seems to constitute a message without a code" (1977, p. 42-43). The
power of images to simulate reality, based on many of the properties of non-
conventionality that Messaris (1994) explores and analyzes, sidesteps
traditional rhetorical concerns with truth, falsity, or logical consistency.
Instead, images seem to merely imply existence. This quality not only lends
itself to the proliferation of pseudo-events (Boorstin, 1961), and the ever
new developments and consequences of virtual realities and "transparent
immediacy" (Barrett and Redmond, eds., 1995; Heim, 1998; Bolter and

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Grusin, 1999), but gives images a persuasive power not easily matched by
other lexical and notational modes of communication; the power to simulate
reality, present apparently prima facie evidence, and construct implied
propositions Messaris (1997). Each of these persuasive strategies is rhetorical
in nature yet inevitably depends upon sociocultural expectations and patterns
of media use.
Consider a familiar television commercial for Intel Processors. We may
assume that the ad's simulations of movement through the interior of a
computer processing unit are valid (perhaps even veridical) illustrations
because of our cultural assumptions about:
1. the verisimilitude of photography,
2. our learned acceptance of computer animated forms that mimic
the perspective and chiaroscuro qualities of photography,
3. our patterned use and acceptance of digitally generated forms
as part of the routine picturing material of computer and
television programming,
4. our patterns of television viewing and negotiation of the
television "flow" of commercial entertainment, and
5. our immersion in a consumer culture that gives legitimacy and
value to advertising, technology and the inherent value of
purchasing new products.

To the extent that we are uncomfortable or unaccepting of any of these

sociocultural assumptions or normative viewing patterns we may well begin
to question, or even ridicule, the idea that we are witnessing a valid illustration
of the internal workings of a computer processing unit.
These compounded theoretical issues continually re-emerge in nearly
every area of visual communication studies. Recent studies of documentary
representation identify different "modes of representation," or simulated
reality, that take on the role of evidence, and consequently rhetorical
proposition, in different ways. The expository mode, observational mode,
interactive mode, and reflexive mode are useful analytical categories for
studying the historical evolution of documentary representation (Nichols,
1991). Yetthey are often confounded by the "blurred boundaries" of "reality
TV," infotainment, and fictional nonfiction that dominate "postmodern"
television (Nichols, 1994). In other words, just as television news
programming cannot be studied apart from the flow of television advertising,
entertainment, and "infotainment" in which it is embedded, the process of
visual documentation itself cannot be studied or understood in isolation from

Griffin - Sociocultural Perspectives on Visual Communication

44

the complicated fonns of programming in which it appears. A great but still

largely unmet challenge for visual communication scholars is to scan, chart,
and interrogatethe various levels at which images seem to operate: as evidence
in visual rhetoric, as simulatedreality bolstering and legitimizing the presence
and status of media operations themselves, as abstract symbols and textual
indices, and as "stylistic excess," the self conscious perfonnance of style
(Caldwell, 1995). Visual style itself, apart from content-related denotation,
connotation, and allusion, can be a powerful index of culture: subcultures,
professional cultures, political cultures, commercial fashion. Initial forays
suggest that scrutinizing visual fonns of simulated "reality" tell us a great
deal not only about the nature of media rhetoric, or the limits of veridical
representation, but about the self-conscious perfonnance of cultural style in
newspapers (Barnhurst, 1994; Barnhurst & Nerone, 2001), photojournalism
(Schwartz, 1992),TV news (Griffin, 1992, Hartley, 1992),political advertising
(Griffin & Kagan, 1996), and the various hybrid fonns of infotainment, docu-
drama, reality TV, and simulated reality (Nichols, 1994; Caldwell, 1995;
Corner, 1995; Messaris, 1997). These issues are perhaps more significant
than ever for the processes of "remediation" that characterize "new" digital
media and the emphases on "transparent immediacy" and "hypennediacy"
that distinguish digital visualization (Bolter & Grusin, 1999).
The research above reiterates the importance of studying not just images
themselves but the social worlds out of which tbey are produced and in which
they are received and used (Worth, 1981;Becker, 1982).As the various essays
in Gross' On the Margins of Art Worlds (1995) illustrate, cultural production
is always implicated in the communication and reproduction of social
distinction, historical memory, and cultural identity (see also Bourdieu, 1984,
1965/1990). Recently, an increasing number of studies have turned their
attention to the role of visual images in the maintenance of collective memory,
historical mythology, and "cultures of vision" (Perlmutter, 1992, 1999;
Burnett, 1995;Zelizer, 1993, 1998;Brennen and Hardt, eds., 1999).The entire
movement of the last quarter century towards new, "critical" histories of
photography has largely been an attempt to replace the concept of photographs
as mechanical artifacts of reality with that of photographs as expressions of
cultural vision (Sekula, 1975; Bolton, 1989).
Now, at the turn of the century, we struggle with the new challenge of
relating some sense of a natural world with the artifice of cyber space and
interactive design. Postmodern theorists have long since thrown in the towel
on referentiality, but it is still very unclear where we go "after photography."
Are we destined to abandon the analogic project of realist exploration and
resign ourselves to digitally generated symbols? Interestingly, at the same

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 45

time that some are concerned with the "postlinguistic, postsemiotic

rediscovery of the picture," not as naive mimesis but as "a complex interplay
between visuality, apparatus, institutions, discourse, bodies, and figurality"
(Mitchell, 1994) the more mundane world of daily media production and
consumption continues to subscribe to a relatively simple correspondence
theory of representation. The relationships of visual representations to either
external or intertextual references maybe ambiguous, but the "reality" of
such representationsoften seemsto be assumed nonetheless, both by producers
and spectators.
The central task for visual communication scholarship in this new
technological and intertextual context continues to be specifying the particular
role of visual media representations in the sociocultural mix. A continuing
challenge in this endeavor is to coordinate the study of formal systems of
visual media production as (through close visual and semiotic analysis) with
the study of the cultural currency and social functions of representations within
communities. A factor that makes such research increasingly difficult is the
accelerating change in the nature and definitions of nations, cultures, and
communities. In that emerging condition referred to as "globalization,"
characterized by migration and diaspora, changing national boundaries, new
transnational networks of information, finance, trade, and communication,
and new post-Cold War forms of regional and international relations, the
sociocultural parameters of relationships seem to be in flux. Inthe new "global
media environment" visual images are increasingly part of a shifting
transnational currency of cultural forms and creolization; not the "universal
language" that promoters such as Eastman Kodak Company claimed for
photography earlier in the century, but a currency of media penetration,
exchange, control, and power,often indices of the predominant cultural visions
of predominant media industries. Western ideals of feminine and masculine
appearance, for example, have proliferated around the world in commercial
and entertainment portrayals, making the peculiar look of Western fashion
models a kind of global standard of beauty and sexual glamour (Griffin,
Viswanath, and Schwartz, 1994; Lutz and Collins, 1993; Davis, 1999).3
Similarly, the visual forms of news, entertainment, and the internet are rapidly
becoming consolidated with the synergistic activities of global media
conglomerates.
Almost thirty years ago John Berger's Ways of Seeing (1972) television
series and book offered a provocative demonstration of how a sociocultural
framework could reveal historical shifts and continuities in the way that a
culture (in this case Western European culture) pictured themselves and their
world. Berger especially focused attention on how Western societies had used

Griffin - Sociocultural Perspectives on Visual Communication

46

specific traditions of image-making to reaffirm social and economic

relationships. More recently, in Reading National Geographic (1993), Lutz
and Collins investigated the patterns by which Western media pictured the
rest of the world on the pages of National Geographic magazine. Like Berger,
they found consistent patterns of pictorial representation, in this case serving
to consolidate particular ethnocentric and colonial views of cultural "others."
Today we are faced with the prospect of studying competing "ways of
seeing" that jostle with each other across global networks. Often, these
developments are characterized primarily as technological phenomena. But
it has perhaps never been so clear that our understanding of the emerging
role of visual media in the world will depend on our ability to grasp the
sociocultural implications of visual representation across cultures. The
tensions and battles that will inevitably accompany these global changes will
be conflicts of sociocultural friction, as increasingly standardized technical
and economic systems traverse, penetrate, and link diverse cultural and social
settings. And the way that we visually represent one another, and understand
those representations as social and cultural comment, will be at the heart of
media production and media analysis.

Notes
1. See Barthes(1977, 1981),Berger(1980),Burgin(1982),Eco
(1986),Sontag(1977),Sekula(1975),Tagg(1988).
2. For comprehensive reviews of psychological theories of visual
perception and controversies surrounding the nature of images
and visual apprehension see Messaris, Visual Literacy (1994)
and Barry, Visual Intelligence (1997).
3. On India see Griffin, Viswanath, and Schwartz (1994) Gender
Advertising in the U.S. and India: Exporting Cultural
Stereotypes. On Tahiti and traditions of gender representation
in National Geographic see Lutz and Collins (1993) Reading
National Geographic. On South Korea see Davis (1999)
Representations of Caucasians in Korean Print Advertisements.

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