Zwingli had considered the word of God to be the privileged medium precisely because it made no appeal (in his view) to the sensuous domain of the body as constructed by sight. "Why," he asked rhetorically, "do we not send images to unbelievers so that they can learn belief from them?" Why indeed, Sallman's publishers may well have asked, for they supplied a global market with images of Jesus, which church groups and religious organizations sent around the world during World War II and after. Yet, to take Zwingli's point, which was, in effect, substantially expanded and explored by Roland Barthes: the message of the photographic image is imbricated with the textual codes of discourse, which connote something other than what we see. But we naturalize the codes by taking the image to signify them. This operation of connotation or imbrication is not limited to the photograph, however. Sallman's imagery naturalizes what his viewers think or have been told to think, and it is able to do so in no small way because of the massive dissemination of his work. People often see it and have continually seen it since childhood in so many places that it acquires a kind of de facto normative stature. As many people say, it's what Jesus looks like.

—David Morgan, Icons of American Protestantism: The Art of Warner Sallman