photograph and many like it in the FSA accounts were posed carefully. For example, four of the older children of the family were excluded from the final portrait for fear of upsetting the cultural norms of the intended audience, who likely would have disapproved of such a large family among the poor (Curtis 53–55). Let Us Now Praise Famous Men, the much-loved chronicle of Alabama sharecroppers by James Agee and Evans, also was staged to emphasize its subjects’ courage and steadfast character. Evans and Agee, who lived among the sharecroppers, produced conflicting visual and verbal accounts. Whereas Agee wrote of a certain bed as “stale, and moist, and [. . .] morbid with bed bugs, with fleas and, I believe, with lice” (qtd. in Curtis 37), Evans photographed the spare geometric shape of the bed and the contrast of a white bedspread against the dark walls of the room, producing the clean and cared-for interior of poverty that constituted one of his many art photographs in the book.
Recent analysis by John Tagg in The Burden of Representation reveals that weighty political and social injustices have been committed by means of what is labeled blandly “documentary photography” when its products are used in institutional recordkeeping. The poor, the weak, and the powerless have, throughout the history of photography, been victimized by prison, institutional, and other bureaucratic photographers. An example of how documentary photography can disempower its subjects is provided by the work of Edward Curtis, who, with the backing of financier John Pierpont Morgan, photographed American Indians in contrived settings and costumes (Newhall 136). More recently, Richard Billingham’s photography documents in livid detail the life of his chronically alcoholic father. These images, which have appeared in major art venues including the Royal Academy, by virtue of representing an inebriated subject who likely was not able to give informed consent to having his photographs taken, exhibited, and mass marketed, may also be exploitative. We might add to this list the photography of Abu Ghraib prison torture and ask to what extent the mainstream media, in reproducing the photographs, have further exploited their subjects.
Gender and Women’s Studies
Many poststructuralist accounts of women and the visual are available. Berger discusses in his chapter on the female nude the central questions of who looks and who is looked at. Laura Mulvey’s useful article on “the gaze” addresses both portraits and film. Carol David offers in “Investitures of Power: Portraits of Women Executives” an account of the representations of women that traces painting styles through the last three centuries. She describes how representations of beautiful women traditionally were objects desired and possessed by men, with the exception of those of a few powerful sitters who demanded they be the subject rather than the object of a viewer’s gaze. Queen Elizabeth, for instance, was careful to be painted in imperial settings. Likewise, certain suffragists, accounted plain in their simple black dresses, nevertheless looked directly at the camera—a pose owned by men and the rare powerful woman. The notorious “Madame X,” by John Singer Sargent, casts a disdainful gaze at her viewers, a pose that scorned cultural expectations. Despite Sargent’s social banishment from France for this scandalous portrait, Madame Gatreaux was an instant sensation and continues to rivet audiences more than a century later. David Blakesley’s “Defining Film Rhetoric: The Case of Hitchcock’s Vertigo” offers psychological insight into “the gaze” by suggesting that it can be read as a sign of the masculine need to identify and to become consubstantial with the feminine. “Pushed to the extreme,” Blakesley notes, the male voyeur wishes “to become the other, to inhabit that psychological and physical space” (117).
Julia Margaret Cameron challenged Victorian social hierarchy in her photographic portraits of women. Instead of portraying the rich and famous, she often chose as subjects servants or peasants from her home on the Isle of Wight, dressing them in period costumes to represent religious or classical characters. She also chose as sitters members of her own family, including Julia Stephens, the mother of Virginia Wolfe. Unlike the popular photographs of the day, which depicted women as tranquil and expressionless, Cameron’s portraits depicted her sitters as pensive, longing, or suffering (Wolf). Frances Benjamin Johnston flouted the gender norms of the same era by photographing herself with beer mug, cigarette, and petticoats hiked up to her knees, as if engaged in debate with an imaginary partner or with the portraits of men arranged on her fireplace mantel (Figure 2). Contemporary artist Cindy Sherman has photographed herself posing in a variety of settings that depict the restricted roles available to women.
Current tensions and ambiguities arising from the outworking of women’s emancipation are alluded to in J. Cherie Strachan and Kathleen E. Kendall’s study of convention films viewed during the 2000 U.S. presidential election. Strachan and Kendall note that the presentation of George W. Bush as a “kinder and gentler” Bush candidate and the choice to downplay his position as Governor of Texas and to focus on Laura and Barbara rather than on George Senior—that is, “to distance [George W.] Bush from stereotypical masculine institutions and activities”—may have been intentional strategies to gain favor with women voters, who had not yet proved a reliable base of support, and to distance him from his father, so that the son would seem “his own man” (150).
As Diane S. Hope explains, “Like verbal rhetoric, visual rhetoric depends on strategies of identification; advertising’s rhetoric is dominated by appeals to gender as the primary marker of consumer identity. Constructs of masculine and feminine contextualize fantasies of social role, power, status, and security” (155). Hope’s study of advertising images that appropriate feminine (passive, fertile, receptive) and masculine (active, dominating, aggressive) iconographies in natural settings notes that this “rhetoric of gendered environments works to obscure the connections between environmental degradation and consumption” (156). According to Hope, advertising that incorporated natural images before the mechanical revolution tended to present the earth as a powerful mother; later images, on the other hand, presented the earth as a sexualized other awaiting exploitation. Viewers in the United States respond favorably to the latter because so many of us have intent and means to use the earth’s resources as we see fit. At the same time, women viewers are disempowered by omnipresent advertising imagery that equates femininity with an idealized physical presence and an undernourished agency (173).
Science Studies
Elizabeth Tebeaux records in “From Orality to Textuality: Technical Description and the Emergence of Visual and Verbal Presentation” that before the explosion of print technology, the visual in technical contexts was much more closely aligned with orality than with discourse. That the usefulness of visual representation to instruction already was recognized helps explain its ready adoption in the earliest print manuscripts on technical subjects. According to Tebeaux, “the increasingly integrated verbal and visual presentation of objects and concepts captured and molded into text” has been a feature of English technical communication since at least the time of Chaucer, and bivocality had emerged as conventional by 1640 (176).
Goggin states that by the late 1600s, the craft of embroidered samplers “was on the cusp of a radical shift from invention to demonstration of knowledge” (101), an observation confirming that utilitarianism was gaining momentum in England with the increasing use of the printing press. At this time, a revolution fueled by the burgeoning need for informative text among newly literate and upwardly mobile readers was occurring in the use and the construction of images. Two centuries before, Leonardo had resurrected the cadaver as an object of scrutiny, and as a result anatomical representations appeared vitalized. As the technology of visual reproduction evolved—as copyists no longer were depended upon to reproduce illustrations; as copper etchings, which allowed for much greater detail work than woodcuts had, became the norm; and as three-point perspective became widely used and understood—the possibility for verisimilitude exploded. As illustrators struggled to create ever-more convincingly realistic representations, a technical culture in which a vast audience of readers relied increasingly on illustrated texts, at the expense of the oral tradition, emerged (Tebeaux, “Emergence,” passim).
Bruno Latour and Steve Woolgar argue in Laboratory Life: The Construction of Scientific
