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After reading the Lucaites and Harriman article, write one-two paragraphs about a photo or video that made a significant impression on you or made you consider taking some action. Describe the circumstances and the image as well as you can.
Visual Rhetoric, Photojournalism, and Democratic Public Culture
Author(s): John Louis Lucaites and Robert Hariman
Source: Rhetoric Review, Vol. 20, No. 1/2 (Spring, 2001), pp. 37-42
Published by: Taylor & Francis, Ltd.
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The Changing Culture of Rhetorical Studies
The Changing Culture of Rhetorical Studies
Andrew King is HopKins Professor of Communication and Chair of the Department of Speech
Communication at Louisiana State University. He is past editor of SCJ (1993-1996) and is present
editor of QJS. He is the author of several books and articles, is the past President of the Kenneth
Burke Society (1996-1999), and received his doctorate under Robert L. Scott.
John Louis Lucaites and Robert Hariman
Indiana University
Visual Rhetoric, Photojournalism, and Democratic Public Culture
Rhetoricians have traditionally focused their attention on the power of the
word as it is enacted in public contexts. More recently, increasing attention has
been devoted to the rhetoric of the image (Barthes; Mitchell), or what is being
dubbed “visual rhetoric.” Visual rhetoric refers to a large body of visual and ma-
terial practices, from architecture to cartography and from interior design to pub-
lic memorials (e.g., see Blair; Foss; Twigg; MacDonald; Mirzeoff; Stafford).
The focus of our own work in visual rhetoric is twentieth-century American
photojournalism and, more particularly still, those photographs that have
achieved the status of iconicity. “Iconic photographs” are photographic images
produced in print, electronic, or digital media that are (1) recognized by every-
one within a public culture, (2) understood to be representations of historically
significant events, (3) objects of strong emotional identification or response, and
(4) regularly reproduced or copied across a range of media, genres, and topics
(Hariman and Lucaites). Examples abound and should come readily to mind: the
“Migrant Mother” with her children staring into the camera amidst the Great
Depression, six marines raising an American flag on Iwo Jima, the na-
palm-scorched body of a naked Vietnamese girl running from the blast, the ae-
rial display of plumes of smoke as the Challenger explodes, and so on.
We hope to explain the role that iconic photographs play in American, lib-
eral-democratic public culture. We begin by assuming that such photographs re-
flect social knowledge and dominant ideologies, shape and mediate understand-
ing of specific events and periods (both at the time of their initial enactment and
subsequently as they are recollected within a tableau of public memory), influ-
ence political behavior and identity, and provide inventional (figurative) re-
Andrew King is HopKins Professor of Communication and Chair of the Department of Speech
Communication at Louisiana State University. He is past editor of SCJ (1993-1996) and is present
editor of QJS. He is the author of several books and articles, is the past President of the Kenneth
Burke Society (1996-1999), and received his doctorate under Robert L. Scott.
John Louis Lucaites and Robert Hariman
Indiana University
Visual Rhetoric, Photojournalism, and Democratic Public Culture
Rhetoricians have traditionally focused their attention on the power of the
word as it is enacted in public contexts. More recently, increasing attention has
been devoted to the rhetoric of the image (Barthes; Mitchell), or what is being
dubbed “visual rhetoric.” Visual rhetoric refers to a large body of visual and ma-
terial practices, from architecture to cartography and from interior design to pub-
lic memorials (e.g., see Blair; Foss; Twigg; MacDonald; Mirzeoff; Stafford).
The focus of our own work in visual rhetoric is twentieth-century American
photojournalism and, more particularly still, those photographs that have
achieved the status of iconicity. “Iconic photographs” are photographic images
produced in print, electronic, or digital media that are (1) recognized by every-
one within a public culture, (2) understood to be representations of historically
significant events, (3) objects of strong emotional identification or response, and
(4) regularly reproduced or copied across a range of media, genres, and topics
(Hariman and Lucaites). Examples abound and should come readily to mind: the
“Migrant Mother” with her children staring into the camera amidst the Great
Depression, six marines raising an American flag on Iwo Jima, the na-
palm-scorched body of a naked Vietnamese girl running from the blast, the ae-
rial display of plumes of smoke as the Challenger explodes, and so on.
We hope to explain the role that iconic photographs play in American, lib-
eral-democratic public culture. We begin by assuming that such photographs re-
flect social knowledge and dominant ideologies, shape and mediate understand-
ing of specific events and periods (both at the time of their initial enactment and
subsequently as they are recollected within a tableau of public memory), influ-
ence political behavior and identity, and provide inventional (figurative) re-
37 37
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Rhetoric Review
sources for subsequent communicative action. Additionally, we believe that they
mark fundamental relationships between the practice of photojournalism and
twentieth-century American democratic public culture. It is this last theme that
we will sketch out here as a way of suggesting one avenue of current work in vi-
sual rhetoric and its implication for contemporary rhetorical studies.
The key point we wish to advance is that in general, photojournalism under-
writes liberal-democratic public culture. From Plato to Neal Postman (Plato;
Jay; Postman), Western philosophers and social critics alike have expressed a
deep and abiding fear of the threat that visual practices pose to the public’s de-
liberative capacity for rational decision-making. By contrast, we argue that the
practice of photojournalism operates as a political aesthetic (Hariman, cf.
Hartley) that provides crucial social, emotional, and mnemonic resources for an-
imating the collective identity and action necessary to a liberal-democratic poli-
tics (Zelizer).
One possible response to this problem, which emerges in a number of twenti-
eth-century iconic photographs, is the “individuated aggregate” (Lucaites 278-80;
Hariman and Lucaites). The individuated aggregate is a trope whereby the popula-
tion as a whole is represented solely by specific individuals. This is the contrary
tendency of democracies to aggregate individual actions, such as votes or public
opinion polls; instead, the impetus for action comes from acting as if an aggregate
were an individual. Think here in particular of Dorothea Lange’s “Migrant
Mother,” a photograph shot in 1936 at the height of the Great Depression in which a
migrant pea picker sits holding her scared children while staring back at the viewer
in a display of both victimage and strength. The photograph activates the tension
between individual worth and collective identity at a moment of severe economic
crisis by representing a common fear that transcends class and gender and by defin-
ing the viewer as one who can marshal collective resources to combat fear localized
by class, gender, and family relations. It allows one to acknowledge paralyzing fear
at the same time that it triggers an impulse to do something about it. This formal de-
sign reveals an implicit movement from the aestheticization of poverty to a rhetori-
cal engagement with the audience, from a compelling portrait to compelling action
by the audience on behalf of the class of subjects depicted. The problem of poverty
will not be solved by helping only the migrant mother, but any state action is un-
likely to gain support if it cannot be assented to by citizens habituated to see them-
selves as individuals first and last.
Iconic photographs are especially revealing in this regard, for among other
things, they contribute to the representation and constitution of specific concep-
tions of civic identity that have developed as key features of liberal-democratic
polity. The articulation of liberal-democracy in American public culture operates
in an apparently irresolvable tension between individual sovereignty and collec-
38
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The Changing Culture of Rhetorical Studies 39
“Migrant Mother”
Library of Congress, Prints and Photographs Division [LC-USF34-9058C]
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Rhetoric Review
tive agency. The individual is the locus of value, but the collective is the locus of
power. Models of civic identity are thus caught at any given moment between af-
firming the self but catering to class interests, or heralding individual autonomy
but legitimizing public authority, or celebrating competition but reassuring those
who lose. These tensions are especially pronounced during moments of crisis
and disaster such as war or economic depression, where any political response
has to be oriented toward large-scale measures designed to meet needs defined
in the aggregate, while still maintaining the ideological commitment to the pri-
macy of the individual.
In a liberal-democratic public culture increasingly dominated by collective
enterprises, the continual reproduction of such iconic photographs maintain the
form of individual agency while habituating the public to institutional manage-
ment of collective behavior. For those who initially encountered the “Migrant
Mother” in the 1930s, it captured a profound, generalized sense of vulnerability
while simultaneously providing a localized means for breaking its spell through
state action. With the passage of time, the photograph has become an icon for
the Great Depression and the New Deal policies instituted to deal with it, an
aide-memoire for activating a “structure of feeling” (Williams) that helps to col-
lapse past and present so as to legitimate a particular response to the tension be-
tween the individual and the collective at moments of crisis and despair. In one
such example drawn from the 1970s, the “Migrant Mother” was appropriated by
a Black Panther artist who rendered the photograph as a drawing that racialized
the mother and her children, thus drawing from the original photograph’s char-
acterization of unwarranted victimage and its moral appeal for state action to the
relationship between race and economic oppression (Heyman 61). Explicit re-
productions of the photograph are numerous, appearing in everything from pop-
ular histories and textbooks invoking the Great Depression to advertisements for
an A&E television documentary, titled “California and the Dream Seekers.” A
particularly interesting reproduction occurred in President Clinton’s 1996 cam-
paign film “A Place Called America” (Bloodworth-Thomason), where the photo-
graph appears in the very middle of what is represented as the American family
photo album amidst shots of military service, a clear attempt to level the hierar-
chy in forms of national service that had been used against Clinton due to his
lack of a military record. More recently, it was imitated on a 1999 Time maga-
zine cover that displays an ethnic Albanian woman suckling her baby while be-
ing expelled from Kosovo (“Are Ground Troops The Answer?”). In each in-
stance the rationale remains essentially the same. Guided by an emotional rather
than a programmatic logic, the photographs work primarily to activate and man-
age feelings of both vulnerability and obligation that are endemic to liberal-dem-
ocratic culture. These conventions then become standard means of persuasion
40
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The Changing Culture of Rhetorical Studies
that illustrate how people must be portrayed to be deemed worthy of redemption
from practices of destruction accompanying the social order.
The individuated aggregate is not unique to photography, of course, but it
seems to fit comfortably within the conventions of photojournalistic practice that
rely on realist assumptions of representation, even as they situate the viewer in
an emotional register that activates the tension between private and public life.
Put somewhat differently, we conclude by suggesting that iconic photographs
and the photojouralistic practices that they animate may well function as a
performative ritual of civic identity in literate, liberal-democratic societies. It is
important that we emphasize the word literate in the previous sentence, for in
such a world the assumption is that the logos is sovereign. And yet there is no
easy economy of words for invoking the grandeur and sublimity of nature (or
technology), the horrors of war, or the despair of victimage, let alone the struc-
tures of feeling that manage the paradoxical tension between individual auton-
omy and collective authority. In illiterate societies performance is the primary
medium through which the “unsayable” (typically the sacred) is enacted and
given presence. By “performance” we mean to focus attention on aesthetically
marked and intensified communicative behavior put on display for an audience
toward the general goal of maintaining collective life (Bauman). Photojournal-
ism (and especially the iconic photograph) seems to meet the terms of perfor-
mance quite naturally. It is aesthetically marked, both by the conventions of real-
ist photography and photojournalistic practices (e.g., perspective, placement,
captions, etc.). Its freezing of a critical moment in time intensifies the journalis-
tic experience, focusing the viewer’s attention on a particular enactment of the
tensions that define the public culture. But more than this, it does so ritualisti-
cally, as it repetitively conjures images of what is unsayable (e.g., because emo-
tional) in print discourses otherwise defining the public culture. This repetition,
in newspapers, magazines, coffee table books, textbooks, political advertise-
ments, and so forth, provides the public audience with the important assurances
and other resources necessary for participation in modern democratic polity.
Works Cited
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Bloodworth-Thomason, Linda. A Place Called America. Mozark Productions, 1996.
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Rhetoric Review
Foss, Sonja K. “A Rhetorical Scheme for the Evaluation of Visual Imagery.” Communication Studies
45 (1994): 213-24.
Hariman, Robert. Political Styles: The Artistry of Power. Chicago: U of Chicago P, 1995.
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Lange, Dorothea. “Migrant Mother.” Library of Congress, February 1936. LC-USF34-9058C.
Lucaites, John Louis. “Visualizing ‘The People’: Individualism and Collectivism in Let Us Now
Praise Famous Men.” Quarterly Journal of Speech 83 (1997): 269-89.
MacDonald, Sharon, ed. The Politics of Display: Museums, Science, Culture. New York: Routledge,
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John Louis Lucaites is an associate professor in the Department of Communication and Cul-
ture, Indiana University. His work focuses on the relationship between rhetoric and social theory and
the critique of liberal-democratic public culture. His work includes Crafting Equality: America’s An-
glo-African Word (1993, with Celeste Condit).
Robert Hariman is a professor in the Department of Rhetoric and Communication Studies,
Drake University. He is the author of Political Styles: The Artistry of Power (1995) and editor of
Popular Trials: Rhetoric, Mass Media, and the Law (1990) and Post-Realism: The Rhetorical Turn
in International Relations (1996, with Francis A. Beer).
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- Article Contents
- Issue Table of Contents
p. 37
p. 38
p. 39
p. 40
p. 41
p. 42
Rhetoric Review, Vol. 20, No. 1/2 (Spring, 2001), pp. 1-198
Volume Information [pp. 180 – 187]
Front Matter [pp. 1 – 4]
Symposium: The Changing Culture of Rhetorical Studies
Preface: An Allegory [pp. 5 – 9]
Rhetorical Feminism [pp. 9 – 12]
Rhetorical Formations of Genetics in Science and Society [pp. 12 – 17]
Creating the “New Person”: The Rhetoric of Reconstitutive Discourse [pp. 18 – 22]
Rhetorical Studies and the Future of Postcolonial Theories and Practices [pp. 22 – 28]
Evolving Protest Rhetoric: From the 1960s to the 1990s [pp. 28 – 32]
Burkean Theory Reborn: How Burkean Studies Assimilated Its Postmodern Critics [pp. 32 – 37]
Visual Rhetoric, Photojournalism, and Democratic Public Culture [pp. 37 – 42]
Revisiting the Rhetoric of Racism [pp. 43 – 46]
History, Culture, and Political Rhetoric [pp. 46 – 50]
Readers and a Cultural Rhetorical Studies [pp. 51 – 56]
White Guy, Black Texts: Appropriateness and Appropriation across Racial Difference [pp. 56 – 60]
Rhetorical Criticism in New Media Environments [pp. 60 – 65]
When Ideology Motivates Theory: The Case of the Man from Weaverville [pp. 66 – 93]
Effacing Difference in the Royal Society: The Homogenizing Nature of Disciplinary Dialogue [pp. 94 – 112]
The Passion of Conviction: Reclaiming Polemic for a Reading of Second-Wave Feminism [pp. 113 – 129]
Called to the Law: Tales of Pleasure and Obedience [pp. 130 – 146]
Making Use of the Nineteenth Century: The Writings of Robert Connors and Recent Histories of Rhetoric and Composition [pp. 147 – 157]
Review Essays
untitled [pp. 158 – 161]
untitled [pp. 161 – 167]
untitled [pp. 168 – 173]
untitled [pp. 173 – 176]
untitled [pp. 177 – 179]
Back Matter [pp. 188 – 198]
