Visual Rhetoric on Aesthetic Dental Restorations

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Visual Rhetoric on Aesthetic Dental Restorations
Introduction
The aspect of visual rhetoric, which is the use of images as argument, has gained much popularity in the contemporary world. In her article titled The Image Culture, Christine Rosen notes that even though the image of both natural and man-made disasters have long been presented in newspapers and television, the number and range of images in the wake of Hurricane Katrina shows the complexity, speed, and power of images in modern American culture. According to Rosen, satellite photographs taken from space gave a new face to the devastating effects of the storm that had ravaged the nation. These images not only made the American people realize how helpless they were in dealing with the chaos brought by the storm, but it also influenced the understanding of the effects it generated. Today, an increase in the number of cameras has increased the number of images something that has significantly diluted the power of the image. However, this increase of images has also strengthened images over text as more people turn to images to express themselves (Rosen 26). After examining the image that I have chosen on aesthetic dental restorations through the eyes of Rosen’s argument and visual rhetoric, I find the argument unable to represent the facts and, therefore, flawed.
According to Rosen, technology has considerably undermined our ability to trust what we see. While Rosen has tried to explain the reason this is the case, she fails to offer any conclusive evidence to prove that people no longer trust images. The proof that images are still capable of passing messages can be seen in the highly rising number of images in the society today. While it is true that images have led to a decline of the written and the spoken word, claiming that people no longer trust an image is erroneous and a misrepresentation of the facts. Images, I believe, are powerful tools that can make us realize what we do not see or rather what we could have.
While quoting the talented Susan Sontag on her extended essay titled On Photography, Rosen notes that images "carry the risk of undermining true things and genuine experiences, as well as the danger of upending our understanding of art" (31). The reason for this is because people are often disappointed when they realize that they had been deceived into having the wrong image of a particular thing. What Rosen and Susan are trying to point out in this piece of literature is that images cannot be relied upon to create understanding of the things themselves. In short, Rosen seems to be disagreeing with the visual rhetoric enthusiasts who point out that images can be used to tell a story. According to Rosen and other critics, the danger of relying on images is that they breed fantasies.
Fig 1.1 Aesthetic Dental Restorations (Dental Art Lab)
The image above on aesthetic dental restorations is a clear indication of how misleading Rosen’s argument is. If we were to follow Rosen’s argument, the above image should make people wary, as one would be "disappointed, surprised, unmoved when they see the real thing" (31). This assumption is n...