The Levels of Visual Framing (Report‪)‬

Introduction Despite the increasing number of framing studies, the tenets of framing theory have been applied mainly to analyzing texts (Berger, 1991). The question of how issues are framed through images that stand alone or accompany text has remained relatively under-researched (Bell, 2001). This imbalance has to be corrected considering that images as modes of communication have properties that either "enhance or mitigate their consequences" (Messaris&Abraham, 2001, p. 215) or sometimes even override the messages embedded in the text (Wischmann, 1987). As Coleman recently noted, "visual framing provides an important new direction for theory building and future research" (2010, p. 233).