INTRODUCING VISUAL METAPHOR

It is the contention of this essay that there are visual metaphors. That is, there are some visual images that function in the same way that verbal metaphors do and whose point is identified by a viewer in roughly the same way that the point of a verbal metaphor is identified by a reader or a listener.

The term “image” here is intended to refer only to human artifacts. It is not, for instance, meant to apply to the outlines of animals or the suggestions of faces discernible in clouds. The visual images that I have in mind in this essay are the products of intentional human activity.

By calling the images in question “visual,” I wish to signal that these images are of the sort whose reference is recognized simply by looking, rather than by some process such as decoding or reading. One looks at a motion picture screen and recognizes that a woman is represented; one looks at her hand and recognizes that she is holding a gardenia.

Such images, of course, are symbols. But comprehending such image-symbols does not rely upon codes nor could there be a dictionary according to which one might decipher or read such images. Rather one looks at the screen and recognizes that which the images represent, that is, wherever one is capable of recognizing the referents of the images in what we might call normal perception (perception not mediated by codes).