WJT Mitchell asked, "What do pictures want?" The obvious answer might be "nothing" because it is a picture not conscious being. However, I think his question invokes the idea of Barthes' "death of the author" here in terms of asking what the image is arguing without asking what the producer of the image is arguing. Like Barthes, he is asking us to set aside authorial intention and look at the finished product in deciphering what it "means". To do so, puts less emphasis on what the author or producer of image was trying to do and instead puts the emphasis on how the viewer of the image perceives it. This also allows us to pull from our visual rhetoric tool box in interpreting images.
As I think more about this idea, it makes me wonder how much rhetorical effect is actually planned in a given image. I suppose it matters to ask who produced it and why they produced it. However, answering these questions will not represent the entire story. Knowing the "audience, purpose, and context"--the rhetorically necessary givens, definitely helps when one is asking what the image wants the viewer to think or feel, but these terms are all related to authorial intention and may or may not touch the actual affect that an image has when viewed by any given person.
Here are a few affective images I have selected for possible work with "the usual suspects" project:
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