Rhetoric of the image: contributions to a philosophy of photography

Photography is a peculiar and powerful medium, based on an inherent rhetoric of the image capable of influencing the viewers. This article conceptualizes and problematizes such power of the image, addressing to a critical and reflexive perspective on the visual rhetoric language of photography. Following a theoretical and conceptual approach in the framework of a philosophy of photography, the purpose of this article is a) to argue the relevance and the practical and social effects of visual rhetoric and its relation to press photographs, i.e. understand visual rhetoric applied to photographic images in journalism; and b) to understand the repercussions of this approach on visual communication to the relevant and emergent perspective of a philosophy of photography, when the cultures are more and more visual in a civilization of the image, which is mixed with the social phenomenon of misinformation in a digital age.