Revisiting Figure 6
Let us revisit Figure 6 and its text to examine how the three
metafunctions work together to make a visual message for
the viewer, and why the image and text work so effectively
together as a rhetorical unit. On the Web page, the image
appeared above the first paragraph in the text, as shown in
Figure 12.
I have already discussed the representational metafunction
of the photograph, and the way in which the RPs
and their vectors create a strong narrative structure (that is,
a podiatrist taking good care of a newborn). The interpersonal
metafunction for this image is “realized” through the
use of intimate distance, the horizontal frontal angle, and
the medium vertical angle, which heighten viewers’ sense
of personal involvement and identification with the RPs.
The compositional metafunction effectively integrates the
first two metafunctions through a variety of elements