Visual Language

Images communicate many different meanings in many different ways.  There is said to be a "visual language" which are resources of the common patterns used to produce meaning in the photographs we take. Our eyes and minds are trained to associate relationships and signify images.  The images of street signs use this visual language to help us signify what things mean.  We see this language in photography journalism,  advertisement, everyday photos, and even children's art.

A lot of this visual language has to do with social and cultural constructions.  When studying visual communication it is important to understand the values and interests which inform and benefit or do not benefit from signs used in any given social construct.  There are many common patterns we use in our images to display truth or in other words "what was really going on at the exact moment in time.  Kress and van Leeuwen identify eight markers that help determine this truth: color saturation, color differentiation, color modulation, contextualization, representation, depth, illumination, and brightness.

• Color Saturation, a scale running from full color saturation to the absence of color, that is to black and white.
• Color differentiation, a scale running from a maximally diversified range of colors to monochrome.
• Color modulation, a scale running from fully modulated color, with for example, the use of many different shades of red
• These are the three markers that deal with color. It is important to realize that high scales of all these will dilute the truth to the image by creating a mess of colors; the message would be extremely distorted if these three are not adjusted correctly. 
• Contextualization, a scale running from the absence of background to the most fully articulated and detailed background.
• Representation, a scale running from maximum abstraction to maximum representation of pictorial detail.
• Depth, a scale running from the absence of depth to maximally deep perspective.
• Illumination, a scale running from the fullest respresentation of the play of light and shade to its absence.
• Brightness, a scale running from a maximum number of different degrees of brightness to just two degrees: black and white, or dark grey and lighter grey, or two brightness values of the same color.

Kress and van Leeuwen basically argue that any extreme to one of these markers will cause the image to lack truth.  

It is important that we understand these patterns because the truth and meaning of an image lies under these forms of visual language.