ABSTRACT
Chapter 2 considers how human forms act as agents in pictures—in Kenneth Burke’s terms acting purposefully in a given situation with the available tools. Early applied images with human forms show agents empowered with new technology and often acting alone as hero-agents, which also appear in fine arts pictures of practical activities. Today hero-agents have been democratized across a broader array of activities and rhetorical strategies and conventions. Agency is also represented with groups of human figures that distribute agency across a range of activities but work collectively toward a common goal, often in hierarchical relationships. Sometimes agency is visualized indirectly and transferred to objects through personification as well as envisioned abstractly in organizational charts and through graphical elements showing motion.
