Modality

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modality (Semiotics) linguistic modality

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=Visual Rhetoric/Modality and Visual Representations of Reality=

From Wikibooks, the open-content textbooks collection
We expect images to relay some kind of truth. Whether it is a graph or a picture, there are certain qualities that they possess to portray the highest level of truth. This is the modality of the image. “Each realism has its naturalism, that is, a realism is a definition of what counts as real, a set of criteria for the real, and it will find its expression in the “right”, the best, the (most) “natural” form of representing that kind of reality, be it a photograph or a diagram.”

In //Reading Images: The Grammar of Visual Design//, Kress and van Leeuwen identify eight markers that help determine the modality of an image: > Kress and van Leeuwen basically argue that any extreme of their particular modality sub-catagories will cause the believability of an image to suffer. For example, too much color saturation or too much brightness cause an inherent dissonance that conveys a sub-reality. However, all their catagories have a "Mid-range" and this is where the believability of an image is strongest.
 * “Color Saturation, a scale running from full color saturation to the absence of color, that is to black and white.
 * Color differentiation, a scale running from a maximally diversified range of colors to monochrome.
 * Color modulation, a scale running from fully modulated color, with for example, the use of many different shades of red, to plan, unmodulated color.”
 * “Contextualization, a scale running from the absence of background to the most fully articulated and detailed background.”
 * “Representation, a scale running from maximum abstraction to maximum representation of pictorial detail.”
 * “Depth, a scale running from the absence of depth to maximally deep perspective.”
 * “Illumination, a scale running from the fullest respresentation of the play of light and shade to its absence.”
 * “Brightness, a scale running from a maximum number of different degrees of brightness to just two degrees: black and white, or dark grey and lighter grey, or two brightness values of the same color.”

Kress, Gunther and Theo van Leeuwen. Reading Images: The Grammar of Visual Design. London: Routledge, 2001.