Gunther Kress - Reading Images: The Grammar of Visual Design

In thinking about a third edition of this book we asked ourselves What might this book be like were we to start writing it today? So much had changed in the nearly 30 years since we had begun our work in this field, in mid-1986. Could we do the usual new edition, integrating some significant changes in our understanding of the field into an otherwise stable foundation of theory?

Despite the deep changes in the social, the technological and hence the semiotic world, which had urged the idea of a new book, we did stay with the idea of a new edition. There were persuasive reasons: the pace of change has not been and is not now equally intense in the three domains of the world involved. Semiotic change necessarily follows on from social change, so that the semiotic resources inevitably lag behind. While superficial aspects of technologies new apps change with enormous speed and frequency, much more so than do the social givens, the fundamental aspects of the grammar of the mode of image as we had set them out in the first two editions of this book have not changed in significant, discernible ways.

What is everywhere evident are deep changes in the use in the reach of the semiotic resource of image and of its categories. The changes in the social and semiotic world have, taken together, produced a major change in the environment in which the image exists. To put it directly, at this point the mode of image (as is the case with every mode) has to be considered in the frame of a social-semiotic world, which is and has to be treated as thoroughly multimodal. So while fundamental categories remain, social and semiotic change has nevertheless brought far-reaching implications: in aspects of theory, reflected, for instance, in a need for new naming. So while things remain familiar in outline and in some detail, yet this part of the semiotic world is profoundly different to what it had been for edition 1 of Reading Images.

With the big decision new book or third edition? out of the way, the questions were relatively straightforward, clustering around what needs to be said, beyond that which is already known?

We can start by pointing to what remains. Our theoretical take continues to be that of social semiotics, with its assumption that meanings are made in social action and interaction, using existing, socially made, semiotic resources that change ceaselessly in their use. We retain the category of mode, together with the principles of modal use in compositions, as multimodal complexes. That realization about stability despite change encouraged us keep the notion of grammar.

We are clear that the visual is one among a number of modes the central resources for making meanings materially evident. Given their specific affordances, meanings are realized differently in each mode. We also stay with the (Hallidayan) assumption (somewhat re-worded) that semiotic resources are as they are because of the functions they fulfil in a given social group.