Visual Rhetoric, Photojournalism, and Democratic Public Culture

Abstract

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 rhetoric. Visual rhetoric refers to a large body of visual and material practices, from architecture to cartography and from interior design to public 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 that have achieved the status of iconicity. Iconic photographs are photographic images produced in print, electronic, or digital media that are (1) recognized by everyone 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 napalm-scorched body of a naked Vietnamese girl running from the blast, the aerial display of plumes of smoke as the Challenger explodes, and so on. We hope to explain the role that iconic play in American, liberal-democratic public culture. We begin by assuming that such reflect social knowledge and dominant ideologies, shape and mediate understanding 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), influence political behavior and identity, and provide inventional (figurative) ree King is HopKins Profess r of Commun cation and Chair of the Department of Speech unication at Lou si na State University. He i pas editor of SCJ ( 993-1996) and is present r of QJS. He is the author of several books and articles, is the past President of th Kenneth e Society (1 96-1999), and rec ived his doc orate under Robert L. Scott. 37