Abstract
The main premise behind this edited volume is the assumption that many forms of multimodal communication are becoming increasingly image-centric due to material-technological advances and sociocultural changes that emphasize the role of images. In this context, ‘image’ serves as an umbrella term for photographs, illustrations, data visualizations, ‘new writing’ and other predominantly visual modes of expression (p. 8). Image-centricity, in turn, is understood as a broader trend that has emerged in diverse mass media whereby images take on central communicative functions in multimodal discourse. According to the editors, this development poses questions about the relative status of images and text, which have been discussed extensively in previous research on multimodality and semiotics (pp. 6–7). This orientation also anchors the discussion of image-centricity mainly to the level of multimodal discourse: the volume focuses on text–image relations and genre patterns, rather than investigating how particular kinds of ‘images’ operate multimodally.
The volume itself is organized into four parts, which conclude with commentaries from established scholars in the field. The first part, which comprises three chapters, is dedicated to theoretical advances related to image-centricity. Chapters by Hartmut Stöckl, Nina-Maria Klug and Theo van Leeuwen consider image-centricity at various levels of abstraction: whereas Stöckl performs a fine-grained analysis of image-centric news story genres in newspapers, Nina-Maria Klug shows how powerful instances of news photography can be recontextualized across diverse media to create entire discursive fields. Van Leeuwen, in turn, focuses on ‘new writing’ from a social semiotic perspective to examine how written language is shaped by its co-deployment with other modes of expression. These chapters illustrate the breadth of contexts in which images perform central communicative functions but, as John Bateman points out in the commentary, a deeper understanding of image-centricity requires that all analyses are clearly related back to theories of multimodality.
The second part, which is dedicated to historical developments in image-centric practices, focuses on journalism. Jana Pflaeging traces the development of image-centric genres in National Geographic from both synchronic and diachronic perspectives, and convincingly shows how an image-centric genre evolved from its predecessor. Sameera Durrani examines photojournalism in Time Asia over three decades, proposing a framework for analysing cohesion in images and in their context of occurrence. Whereas Pflaeging makes a convincing case for the benefits of studying genre evolution from multiple perspectives, Durrani’s contribution highlights how cohesive devices can lead to diverse interpretations of photographic media. In the commentary, Martin Lüginbuhl suggests that analyses of images in media would also benefit from attending to the journalistic cultures that use and reproduce them.
The third part of the book is concerned with the relative status of image and language. In the first chapter, Helen Caple studies how humans use Instagram accounts dedicated to their pets to comment on elections and politics, as this practice allows conflating multiple speaker roles. Christina Margit Siever and Torsten Siever continue with a detailed analysis of emoji–text relations on Instagram. Treating emojis as an ‘iconographetic mode’, they show how emojis participate in syntactic structures and take on discourse functions above the sentence level. Finally, Michele Zappavigna studies image macros – a particular type of ‘template’ meme – focusing on their multimodal structure and their means of creating intersubjectivity. These chapters illustrate how rapidly new modes of expression (e.g. emojis as an iconographetic mode) have been embraced and integrated into existing communicative practices, and the new affordances of social media in terms of shifting speaker roles, stance-taking and genre patterns. As Carey Jewitt observes in the commentary, changes in the media landscape set increasing demands to theory – in order to support empirical investigation, the theoretical concepts used must be sufficiently well defined.
The fourth and final part of the book is dedicated to image-centric practices as global design strategies. John Knox discusses the role of images in the design of tablet-based news applications, observing that image-centricity may be exhibited by both individual ‘newsbites’ and the ‘page’ that carries them, which suggests that the phenomenon of image-centricity may occur on multiple levels. Peter Wignell and colleagues, in turn, examine how magazines published by the terrorist group ISIS used images as ‘bonding icons’ for their ideology, and trace their re-use online with the help of reverse image searches. The final chapter by Martin Engebretsen returns to more traditional media and discusses the use of data visualizations as an example of image-centricity in journalism. In the final commentary, Teal Triggs calls for increased attention to the role of designers as producers and storytellers and their intended audiences.
Overall, the contributions in this volume provide valuable insights into image-centricity and lay a foundation for further research, particularly in the domains outlined in each part. In addition to the wide range of multimodal phenomena covered by the individual chapters, the commentaries are a fresh addition (to any edited volume), succinctly discussing the implications of the contributions in each part and suggesting possible ways forward. However, one may also ask whether current theories of multimodality are sufficiently well developed to take on a phenomenon like image-centricity. More specifically, to what extent can we confidently identify image-centricity across media and genres, describe its characteristics and understand its variation? Answering this question is naturally beyond a single edited volume as this would require consolidating what we already know about image-centricity – on the basis of this volume and previous work – and relating these insights systematically to theories of multimodality. This volume takes a step towards this goal, but also underlines how much work remains to be done in the emerging discipline of multimodality research in terms of being able to tackle phenomena such as image-centricity (Wildfeuer et al., 2020).
