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
37
Andrew King is HopKins Professorof Communicationand Chairof the Departmentof Speech
Communicationat Louisiana State University.He is past editor of SCJ (1993-1996) and is present
editor of QJS. He is the authorof several books and articles, is the past President of the Kenneth
Burke Society (1996-1999), and received his doctorateunderRobertL. Scott.
John Louis Lucaites and Robert Hariman
Indiana University
VisualRhetoric,Photojournalism,and DemocraticPublic Culture
Rhetoricianshave traditionallyfocused their attention on the power of the
word as it is enacted in public contexts. More recently, increasing attentionhas
been devoted to the rhetoricof the image (Barthes;Mitchell), or what is being
dubbed"visualrhetoric."Visual rhetoricrefers to a large body of visual and materialpractices,from architectureto cartographyand from interiordesign to public memorials (e.g., see Blair; Foss; Twigg; MacDonald; Mirzeoff; Stafford).
The focus of our own work in visual rhetoric is twentieth-centuryAmerican
photojournalism and, more particularly still, those photographs that have
achieved the status of iconicity. "Iconic photographs"are photographicimages
producedin print, electronic, or digital media that are (1) recognized by everyone within a public culture, (2) understoodto be representationsof historically
significantevents, (3) objects of strongemotional identificationor response, and
(4) regularlyreproducedor copied across a range of media, genres, and topics
(Harimanand Lucaites). Examples aboundand should come readily to mind: the
"MigrantMother" with her children staring into the camera amidst the Great
Depression, six marines raising an American flag on Iwo Jima, the napalm-scorchedbody of a naked Vietnamese girl runningfrom the blast, the aerial display of plumes of smoke as the Challengerexplodes, and so on.
We hope to explain the role that iconic photographsplay in American, liberal-democraticpublic culture.We begin by assuming that such photographsreflect social knowledge and dominantideologies, shape and mediate understanding of specific events and periods (both at the time of their initial enactmentand
subsequentlyas they are recollected within a tableau of public memory), influence political behavior and identity, and provide inventional (figurative) re-
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RhetoricReview
sources for subsequentcommunicativeaction. Additionally,we believe that they
mark fundamentalrelationships between the practice of photojournalismand
twentieth-centuryAmerican democraticpublic culture. It is this last theme that
we will sketch out here as a way of suggesting one avenue of currentwork in visual rhetoricand its implicationfor contemporaryrhetoricalstudies.
The key point we wish to advanceis thatin general,photojournalismunderwrites liberal-democraticpublic culture. From Plato to Neal Postman (Plato;
Jay; Postman), Westernphilosophers and social critics alike have expressed a
deep and abiding fear of the threatthat visual practices pose to the public's deliberativecapacity for rational decision-making.By contrast,we argue that the
practice of photojournalism operates as a political aesthetic (Hariman, cf.
Hartley)that providescrucial social, emotional, and mnemonicresourcesfor animating the collective identity and action necessary to a liberal-democraticpolitics (Zelizer).
One possible responseto this problem,which emerges in a numberof twentieth-centuryiconic photographs,is the "individuatedaggregate"(Lucaites278-80;
HarimanandLucaites).The individuatedaggregateis a tropewherebythe population as a whole is representedsolely by specific individuals.This is the contrary
tendency of democraciesto aggregateindividualactions, such as votes or public
opinion polls; instead,the impetusfor actioncomes from actingas if an aggregate
were an individual. Think here in particularof Dorothea Lange's "Migrant
Mother,"a photographshot in 1936 at the heightof the GreatDepressionin which a
migrantpea pickersits holdingher scaredchildrenwhile staringback at the viewer
in a display of both victimage and strength.The photographactivatesthe tension
between individualworthand collective identity at a momentof severe economic
crisis by representinga commonfearthattranscendsclass andgenderandby defining the viewer as one who can marshalcollective resourcesto combatfearlocalized
by class, gender,andfamily relations.It allows one to acknowledgeparalyzingfear
at the sametime thatit triggersan impulseto do somethingaboutit. This formaldesign revealsan implicitmovementfromthe aestheticizationof povertyto a rhetorical engagementwith the audience,froma compellingportraitto compellingaction
by the audienceon behalf of the class of subjectsdepicted.The problemof poverty
will not be solved by helping only the migrantmother,but any state action is unlikely to gain supportif it cannotbe assentedto by citizens habituatedto see themselves as individualsfirst and last.
Iconic photographsare especially revealing in this regard,for among other
things, they contributeto the representationand constitutionof specific conceptions of civic identity that have developed as key features of liberal-democratic
polity. The articulationof liberal-democracyin Americanpublic cultureoperates
in an apparentlyirresolvabletension between individual sovereigntyand collec-
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The Changing Culture of Rhetorical Studies
"MigrantMother"
Libraryof Congress, Printsand PhotographsDivision [LC-USF34-9058C]
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Rhetoric Review
tive agency. The individualis the locus of value, but the collective is the locus of
power.Models of civic identity are thus caught at any given momentbetween affirming the self but cateringto class interests,or heraldingindividualautonomy
but legitimizing public authority,or celebratingcompetitionbut reassuringthose
who lose. These tensions are especially pronouncedduring moments of crisis
and disaster such as war or economic depression, where any political response
has to be oriented towardlarge-scale measures designed to meet needs defined
in the aggregate,while still maintainingthe ideological commitmentto the primacy of the individual.
In a liberal-democraticpublic culture increasingly dominatedby collective
enterprises,the continual reproductionof such iconic photographsmaintainthe
form of individual agency while habituatingthe public to institutionalmanagement of collective behavior. For those who initially encounteredthe "Migrant
Mother"in the 1930s, it captureda profound,generalized sense of vulnerability
while simultaneouslyproviding a localized means for breakingits spell through
state action. With the passage of time, the photographhas become an icon for
the Great Depression and the New Deal policies instituted to deal with it, an
aide-memoirefor activatinga "structureof feeling" (Williams)that helps to collapse past and present so as to legitimate a particularresponse to the tension between the individualand the collective at moments of crisis and despair.In one
such example drawnfrom the 1970s, the "MigrantMother"was appropriatedby
a Black Pantherartistwho renderedthe photographas a drawingthat racialized
the mother and her children, thus drawing from the original photograph'scharacterizationof unwarrantedvictimage and its moral appealfor state action to the
relationshipbetween race and economic oppression (Heyman 61). Explicit reproductionsof the photographare numerous,appearingin everythingfrom popular histories and textbooks invoking the GreatDepression to advertisementsfor
an A&E television documentary,titled "Californiaand the Dream Seekers."A
particularlyinterestingreproductionoccurredin PresidentClinton's 1996 campaign film "A Place Called America"(Bloodworth-Thomason),where the photographappearsin the very middle of what is representedas the Americanfamily
photo album amidst shots of military service, a clear attemptto level the hierarchy 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 Timemagazine cover that displays an ethnic Albanian woman suckling her baby while being expelled from Kosovo ("Are Ground Troops The Answer?"). In each instance the rationaleremainsessentially the same. Guidedby an emotionalrather
than a programmaticlogic, the photographswork primarilyto activateand manage feelings of both vulnerabilityand obligationthat are endemic to liberal-democratic culture. These conventions then become standardmeans of persuasion
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The Changing Culture of Rhetorical Studies
41
that illustratehow people must be portrayedto be deemed worthyof redemption
from practicesof destructionaccompanyingthe social order.
The individuatedaggregate is not unique to photography,of course, but it
seems to fit comfortablywithin the conventionsof photojournalisticpracticethat
rely on realist assumptionsof 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
performativeritual of civic identity in literate, liberal-democraticsocieties. It is
importantthat we emphasize the word literate in the previous sentence, for in
such a world the assumptionis that the logos is sovereign. And yet there is no
easy economy of words for invoking the grandeurand sublimity of nature (or
technology), the horrorsof war, or the despair of victimage, let alone the structures of feeling that manage the paradoxicaltension between individual autonomy and collective authority.In illiterate societies performanceis the primary
medium through which the "unsayable"(typically the sacred) is enacted and
given presence. By "performance"we mean to focus attentionon aesthetically
markedand intensified communicativebehavior put on display for an audience
toward the general goal of maintainingcollective life (Bauman). Photojournalism (and especially the iconic photograph)seems to meet the terms of performance quite naturally.It is aestheticallymarked,both by the conventionsof realist photography and photojournalisticpractices (e.g., perspective, placement,
captions, etc.). Its freezing of a critical moment in time intensifies the journalistic experience, focusing the viewer's attentionon a particularenactment of the
tensions that define the public culture. But more than this, it does so ritualistically, as it repetitivelyconjuresimages of what is unsayable(e.g., because emotional) in print discourses otherwise defining the public culture. This repetition,
in newspapers, magazines, coffee table books, textbooks, political advertisements, and so forth, provides the public audience with the importantassurances
and other resourcesnecessary for participationin moderndemocraticpolity.
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John Louis Lucaites is an associate professor in the Departmentof Communicationand Culture, IndianaUniversity.His work focuses on the relationshipbetween rhetoricand social theory and
the critiqueof liberal-democraticpublic culture.His work includes CraftingEquality:America'sAnglo-African Word(1993, with Celeste Condit).
Robert Hariman is a professor in the Departmentof Rhetoric and CommunicationStudies,
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 InternationalRelations (1996, with FrancisA. Beer).
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