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Reading Images The Grammar of Visual Design Gunther Kress and Theo van Leeuwen 1^st edition 1996 2^nd edition 2006 291 pages Complementary Texts Rudolf Arnheim Guy Cook Roland Barthes Keywords Advertising Semiotics and Grammars Copyright © 2007 Isabel Pedersen

An excellent resource that focuses upon the nature and practice of visual rhetoric. Kress and van Leeuwen mention their three mentors in the introduction: Rudolph Arnheim, Roland Barthes and Michael Halliday; one can see the heavy influence. However, this work comprises completely new theory and it posits a new way of seeing and understanding visual text. Drawing on Michael Halliday’s linguistics, Kress and van Leeuwen analyze the ways that texts operate simultaneously within the ideational, interpersonal, and textual metafunctions. Out of this framework, they construct an extensive grammar of terms, which they use to analyze countless examples across a large range of visual discourses.