METAPHOR AND VISUAL METAPHOR

Metaphor is the concept of understanding one thing in terms of another. A metaphor is a figure of speech that constructs an analogy between two things or ideas; the analogy is conveyed by the use of a metaphorical word in place of some other word. For example: "Her eyes were glistening jewels".

Metaphor is or was also occasionally used to denote rhetorical figures of speech that achieve their effects via association, comparison or resemblance (e.g., antithesis, hyperbole,metonymy and simile, which are then all considered types of metaphor). Aristotle used both this sense and the regular, current sense above.^[1]

The word metaphor derives from the 16th century Old French métaphore, in turn from the Latin metaphora, "carrying over", which is the latinisation of the Greek μεταφορά (metaphorá), “transfer”,^[2] from μεταφέρω (metaphero), “to carry over”, “to transfer”,^[3] itself a compound of μετά (meta), “between”^[4] + φέρω (pherō), “to bear”, “to carry”.^[5

A visual metaphor, also called a pictorial metaphor, is a metaphor in which something (the metaphor's "target") that is presented visually is compared to something that belongs to another category (the metaphor's "source") of things than the first, also presented visually. As in verbal metaphors (such as "football is war" or "the world is a stage"), at least one feature or association is "mapped" from the source to the target. Often, a whole set of (interrelated) features is mapped from source to target. Visual/pictorial metaphors are used often in advertising, but also in political cartoons and films. Many examples of visual/pictorial metaphor, as well as discussions of them, are discussed in my book Pictorial Metaphor in Advertising (Routledge 1996), which also contains references to the work of other authors who discuss metaphor in images and film, for instance the perception psychologist John Kennedy, the film scholar Trevor Whittock, and the film philosopher Noel Carroll.


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