A
response focusing on Chapter 3 of Ben Barton and Marthalee Barton’s Professional Communication: The Social
Perspective and Chapter 6 of Gunther Kress and Theo van Leeuwen’s Reading Images: The Grammar of Visual Design
In the later
pages of their text, Barton and Barton discuss denaturalizing the acts of
production and reception in regard to maps, graphs, etc. The authors examine
Harley’s (1989) particular praise of the Historical
Atlas of Canada of which Harley writes: “Bar graphs, flow lines and
proportional circles survive but they are enriched by architectural and
archeological drawings, by original maps and town views of the past, and by
landscapes with people and artefacts” (Barton
& Barton, 74; Harley, 88). A
classic book associated with popular culture serves as exemplary for Harley’s
statement.
Robert Venturi,
Denise Scott Brown, and Steven Izenour’s 1972 Learning from Los Vegas offers an excellent example of the concepts
and techniques Harley describes (and those which Barton and Barton reiterate in
their text). According to the MIT Press[1], Learning from Los Vegas “call[s] for
architects to be more receptive to the tastes and values of ‘common’ people.” Although
the book is grounded in architecture and design, it places a great deal of
attention on the importance of appropriate maps, their visual presence on the
page and their salience to surrounding information (both text and visual).
The following
images are from Learning from Las Vegas and
they help illustrate those concepts which Harley and Barton and Barton explain.
The final
picture is of Venturi and Brown. It shows the architects on a 1968 field trip
to Las Vegas. These images allow viewers to “begin to know what it might have
felt like to have lived in old Canada (Barton
& Barton, 74; Harley, 88) and
further illustrate the techniques Barton and Barton deem important for maps and
images. Of course, in this sense the location is Las Vegas. Just like the Historical Atlas of Canada, so too does Learning from Las Vegas include a
narrative that “unfolds expanding rather than denying the rhetorical power of
the map” (Barton & Barton, 74; Harley, 88). The New York Times writes, “Learning
from Las Vegas was one of the last big architectural manifestos and a heartfelt
embrace of American popular culture that be would be hard to imagine anyone
attempting today.[2]”
Figure 6.20: Water parks of the damned, is an
interesting illustration to include in Reading
Images. The comic strip has a resemblance to the childhood classic
favorite, “Where’s Waldo?” Whereas
the strip has a bold headline that “predisposes us to start our reading top
left,” these textual elements are not present in most “Where’s Waldo?” illustrations. Thus, it is not as easy to determine
a starting point for “Where’s Waldo?” or
similar displays (Kress and Leeuwn, 208).
Take the
following “Where’s Waldo?” illustration
(I apologize for the poor quality):
In this image,
viewers might be hesitant on where to start. Do they begin with “Hotel” and “Saloon”
simply because they are in the top left corner, or do viewers look instead at
what they might find most salient? If it is the latter, viewers might first see
“The Pioneer Saloon” as it is larger and in the center of the photo. Regardless
of the starting point, one thing is certain: “but where the eye will move from
here is difficult to predict.” (Kress and Leeuwn, 208).
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