Visual Political Communication

Sage Handbook of Political Communication, 2012

Visual Political Communication, 2019

Human culture is a visual culture. Early man left their mark in the form of cave paintings which we are unable to decipher but we presume they told stories about their day to day lives, perhaps educating their young about the world they needed to navigate. From the 20th century it has been the moving image, on television, cinema screens and via digital platforms, that is most likely to capture attention and offer representations of human life and the human imagination. While books or radio has been argued to allow imaginations to make their own images (Street, 2013), the pictures in our head form out of our understanding of the world around us. Philosopher David Hume, writing in the 18 th Century, argued mankind's imagination was finite and could only create unique compositions of elements that already existed. Hence the images we store in our brains allow us to imagine unicorns, dragons as well as different lives for ourselves. Imagery is used in religion, with scenes of devotion and pilgrimage; in creating social norms, family scenes, depictions of aberrance and justice; images are produced to bring pleasure, entertainment, humour or sexual arousal; and images are used for state control through

Visuals are integral part of our life, and it is also true for political communication. Political posters and advertisements are not only visible on television, the streets but everywhere on the Internet, especially on social media. It is highly unlikely to go through our Facebook newsfeed without seeing any political visuals, such as photos, videos, or gifs. These visuals have a huge influencing impact, as they are processed quicker than verbal and textual information, sometimes even unconsciously. This is well-known by the political actors as well, and they are using images as part of their strategic toolkit to influence voters. However, political communication research has not reflected on these processes for a long period. Fortunately, this tendency started to change in the past decade, and research on visual political communication, or as Bucy and Joo (2021) calls it, visual politics, gained momentum. The present article-based dissertation aims to contribute to this emerging re...

Research Handbook on Visual Politics, 2023

SAGE Publications, 2019

The chapter discusses unique communication strategy methods deployed by the Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP) under the leadership of the emergent Prime Minister Narendra Modi. The methods used were not only unconventional in the Indian scenario but they also brought the ‘western mode’ of fighting elections. This chapter brings to light the most effective factors impacting and facilitating political communication through photographs, forthcoming after a detailed data-driven analysis of election-time visual communication. This chapter introduces a set of unique visual communication strategy model developed by the author. The research study presented in this chapter attempts to fill the lacuna in the existing literature regarding the use of photographs in political communication. Little or no research exists on the Indian subcontinent in this aspect. By focusing only on the use of photographs in political communication during the 2014 Indian General Elections, this research has attempted to balance the scale that has always been tipped in favour of text and audio-visual content. Author employed grounded theory which has not only enabled extraction of cohesive themes out of largely fragmented numerical data. Moreover, it has also allowed for the creation of a grounded theory model of visual communication that was used by the BJP during the 2014 elections. The patterns that emerged from the analysis are a clear indica¬tion of a robust and well-thought photographic communication strategy in place; it does not seem to be just happenstance or coincidence.

This thesis was presented in part fulfillment of the requirements for the degree of Master of Arts at University College Dublin. The following is an examination of the visual culture of the 2016 American Elections, looking explicitly at how the Republican and Democratic parties utilised their visual culture to construct and communicate a certain image of their respective candidates to voters throughout the campaign period. This thesis will explore the visual culture of both the Donald Trump and Hillary Clinton campaigns to compile a fully realised study of the 2016 U.S. elections through visual culture. As political campaigns usually aspire to emulate the successes of their predecessors, a portion of this thesis will be devoted to the discussion of one of the most successful visual political campaigns of recent years- Barack Obama 2008. This campaign is seen as the 'gold standard' for political imagery and indeed this legacy often eclipsed the visual culture of the 2016 elections. By looking at the Obama 2008 campaign, one can get a sense of how good graphic design can be a valuable aspect of a successful political campaign. To balance the propagandistic bias of examining solely the official imagery of the Republican and Democratic parties, this thesis will also examine how unofficial imagery challenged and ridiculed the carefully constructed personas of the candidates. Assessing political cartoons produced in 2016, which deal with manipulating and adapting the official visual culture, will demonstrate the more critical sides of both campaign's imagery and beliefs. By looking at the way in which both the Donald Trump and Hillary Clinton campaigns chose to portray their candidates through visual means, one can assess how effective good graphic design was on the overall campaign and whether both candidates effectively projected their political message across to the voting public. This thesis will primarily look at the ways in which visual political propaganda can influence voters and challenge perceptions of a candidate.

International Journal of Academic Research in Business and Social Sciences

Images have the power to influence people's emotions, and social movement processes heavily rely on visual interpretation of events to forward their goals and objectives. When it comes to social movements, photos and images are often utilized as a tool to spread ideas, pique interest, and build support and certainty. The way images contribute to the development and dynamics of social movement and civic engagement have undergone significant changes in today's world of intertwined mobile devices and social networks. This article is the result of a thorough analysis of previous works on the subject of image persuasiveness and the power of media to sway public opinion through visual cues. The authors feel that it is critical to understand how consumers react to visuals in marketing and manufacturing contexts in order to get knowledge and a detailed understanding of how photographs help to encourage civic involvement among viewers in social movement settings. Finally, this work suggests Kansei engineering as a tool to study how emotions are evoked by images as well as a workable way to quantify image components that have the power to influence public opinion and stir up social movements.

Journal of digital social research, 2024

This special issue draws together five articles in the arena of methods in visual politics and protest. It addresses three core methodological challenges across the research process (data access, collection, analysis, visualisation): the proliferation of visual social media, the emergence of novel visual practices, and the increasing application of digital methods. Their key contributions lie in the development of mixed visual methods approaches, new techniques for constructing and curating visual datasets, and methodological explorations of visual anti-publics.

The Poster

Images are effective tools of political persuasion. While not aiming at a comprehensive overview, this article tries to capture the visual mode of political communication by studying how the portrayal of politicians provides the public with knowledge about the world of politics during different information eras. The main question is how the development of new forms of media, each with individual possibilities and restrictions regarding display, access, reach and storage, facilitate specific forms of visual politics. Visual presentations of politicians are analyzed in their face-to-face interaction with a public, as well as in sculptures, paintings, photographs, film, television and digital media. Central questions are what images are displayed, how are they displayed and with what media technology. Also examined are rhetorical functions, the images' institutional anchorage and forms of interaction. The examples range from the Greek agora, where citizens could assemble and be taken in 'at a single view', to the Nordic prime ministers' profile pictures on Facebook.