Visual representations of silence

This contribution focuses on visual representations of silence. Rather than considering works of art, it is concerned with more mundane visual discourse reflected in photographs deposited on the Shutterstock database of pictures that can be used, e.g., for the purposes of creating marketing material. This means that we can expect a lower degree of idiosyncratic and a higher degree of (stereo-)typical visual representations of silence that might reflect common perceptions of, and references to, different types of silences. By using both German and English search words in the database, pictures that have been tagged as representing silence/Schweigen will be included in the analysis. The results show that the pictures relate to different forms of silence that have been distinguished in previous research related to silence, mainly a) silencing and obstruction, b) introspection and relaxation, c) stillness and absence of sound. Some visual representations also seem to d) refer to previously noted qualities of silence, such as vagueness, ambiguity, and, as far as conceptualisation is concerned, fuzziness. While it can be interesting to relate such visual representations of silence to the existing scholarship about silence, the images on the database are de-contextualised. From the perspective of multimodal discourse analysis, they do not show us much about how such representations of silence as per a)-d) above might figure and function in discourse contexts. To follow the previously identified patterns of visual representations of (different types of) silences at least to some extent into specific discourse contexts, I provide examples of recurrences of these visual patterns of representation, using the example of book covers. I will study the covers of books involving silence/Schweigen in the title and relate the above findings of patterns a)-d) to different genres such as self-help advice and thriller