The study addresses a number of research questions related to the role of visual rhetoric in the representation of power relations in society with reference to the political Theory of Hegemony elaborated by Laclau and the Semiotics of Culture of Lotman. The detailed qualitative analysis presented is based on the exploration of tropes, metaphors, and metonymies in the photos of the Song Festival (1950) in Soviet Estonia in the attempt to outline the hegemonic signification process and how the concept of rhetoric may contribute to define this process. In his conclusions, the author claims that the previous analysis has demonstrated how rhetoric works as a meta-system, consolidating the society and shaping its self-consciousness, especially in political processes of meaning construction where metaphorical-continual coding is predominant.