and series editor Marguerite Helmers reviewed the proposal with enthusiasm and offered guidance and important suggestions. Marguerite graciously provided an early manuscript review that helped me to further conceptualize the book’s theoretical work. Both Dave and Marguerite provided great support in preparation and revision of the manuscript and answered my many questions along the way. Madeleine Sorapure at the University of California Santa Barbara provided a highly useful manuscript review; her suggestions allowed me to better contextualize my analyses and forge a clear path for the reader. I am also very grateful for the careful and constructive copyediting performed by Kristen Seas Trader.
I would like to thank my family: Beverly, Michael, Mindy, and David Propen, for their continued support throughout the years. My grandfather, Fred Schoen, and my aunt, Doris Pritt, are not here to see this project completed, but their generosity and unconditional support continue to be a source of motivation and inspiration for me.
Finally, I thank my partner, Karen Dias, whose perspective, encouragement, and unique capacity for patience ultimately made this book possible.
Introduction
Every year, nearly 700,000 people visit the Lowell Mills National Historical Park in Lowell, Massachusetts. Home to the historic mills of the early New England textile industry, the park tells the story of the industrial revolution through its restored mills and boarding houses, exhibits, parks, green spaces, and public art installations (Lowell National Historical Park). When describing visitors’ first reactions upon entering the park and seeing the historic textile mills where female workers labored in the 1800s, a long-time park ranger there notes without hesitation that visitors “are struck by the size of the buildings.” Even those visitors who come to the park with knowledge of the textile industry in early New England, or who have ancestors who worked at the Lowell Mills, the ranger says, “see the high ceilings [. . .] they see the brick [. . .] the physicality of the buildings,” and experience the site differently than they have through texts. Visitors are struck by the fact that the mill workers lived next to the huge factories where they labored for fourteen hours a day. Moreover, when visitors juxtapose the size of the boardinghouses with that of the Agent’s House, they begin to make connections about the unfairness of the workers’ living conditions; that is, the Agent’s House (now the Park Headquarters) was home to the agent’s family, “but is about the same size as a boardinghouse, which housed up to 250 women” (Park Ranger). Thus the visual and cultural landscape of the park “drives home the tension between emerging classes” (Park Ranger). As the ranger describes, many visitors soon note that they “don’t feel like they’re getting the big picture” of the history of the Lowell Mills unless they make the time to “see everything.” For visitors to the Lowell Mills National Historical Park, then, “seeing comes before words” (Berger 7).
When, in 1972, the art historian and critic John Berger first wrote that now-familiar sentence, “seeing comes before words,” he might not have guessed that his influential essay, “Ways of Seeing,” would be invoked to support a park ranger’s ideas about how visitors’ initial experiences of an historic site are visual and corporeal rather than expressly verbal. Nor might he have guessed that his essay would later be anthologized in collections such as Bartholomae and Petrosky’s Ways of Reading and subsequently become the inspiration for many a first-year writing assignment, or that his ideas would be used to help describe the subdiscipline of visual rhetoric at the beginning of a book about the rhetorical elements of national parks, maps used in environmental debates, and in-car navigational devices like the global positioning system (GPS). Nonetheless, Berger’s ideas about how we see in many ways constitute what we might refer to as visual culture and can serve as an accessible point of entry for understanding what, in the mid-1990s, became known among scholars of rhetoric and composition as the burgeoning subdiscipline of visual rhetoric.1 “Ways of Seeing” is perhaps most well-known, at least among those who have taught the essay in their first-year composition courses, for its ability to prompt discussions about how we see based on what we know. That is, our prior knowledge, cultural contexts, and learned assumptions about the world around us influence our interpretations of visual artifacts like, as Berger argues, paintings and photographs and, as this book will soon discuss, physical sites and material artifacts such as parks, green spaces, and public monuments. In the well-known quotation that opens the essay, Berger emphasizes the prevalence of the visual within society when writes that “seeing comes before words” (7). Rather than create a binary between word and image, he sees an ongoing interplay between them: “It is seeing which establishes our place in the surrounding world; we explain that world with words, but words can never undo the fact that we are surrounded by it. The relation between what we see and what we know is never settled” (7). While this book starts from the point of assuming a wider array of devices than just words to help “explain the world”—again, public monuments, cartographic representations, and even multimodal devices like the GPS are all artifacts that help us interpret and explain the world and, as we will see, are themselves products of visual culture—Berger’s larger point is well-received and holds true today: the relationship between what we see and what we know is always shifting and is a product of changing cultural contexts, public understanding, and modes of human communication. Thus, what Berger alludes to here is in fact a working definition of what may be understood as visual culture.
As visual rhetoric scholar Cara A. Finnegan notes, there are many ways to understand the concept of visual culture, but broadly construed, it “recognizes that visuality frames our experience and acknowledges ‘that vision is a mode of cultural expression and human communication as fundamental and widespread as language’” (“Recognizing Lincoln” 62). Visual rhetoric then draws on visual culture to consider the ways in which rhetorical action is “enacted primarily through visual means, made meaningful through culturally derived ways of looking and seeing and endeavoring to influence diverse publics” (Olson et al. 3). Visual rhetoric is likewise attuned to the many persuasive components of visual artifacts and how they function relative to specific audiences, or the social contexts that shape how such artifacts might be interpreted by their viewer. Berger’s focus in “Ways of Seeing,” for example, is largely on the assumptions that viewers bring to their interpretation of a given work of art. Through his analysis of two portraits created by the painter Frans Hals, Berger argues that works of art can serve to obscure or revise history, as viewers bring their own learned assumptions to bear on interpretations of these visual objects. When we interpret works of art or other visual artifacts based on our own learned assumptions about “beauty, truth, genius, civilization, form, status, taste, etc.,” he writes, we perpetuate what he calls an obscuring or “mystification” of the image, one that may work to distance the viewer from the artifact’s original meaning or context (Berger 11). Moreover, images are invariably reproduced over time (for example, in advertisements or photographs, or in sculptures or on websites). On the one hand, reproductions and appropriations make famous works of art accessible to the public. On the other hand, because those reproductions tend to manifest mostly in advertising images and in the mass media, they not only perpetuate capitalism, as Richards and David suggest in their discussion of “Ways of Seeing,” but also create a sort of mystification that distances viewers from the work’s original context and meaning (7). As social understandings continue to change, our interpretations of that which was originally represented by the image will likewise continue to shift.
The shifting interpretations that these visual artifacts can help perpetuate, then, have varied consequences. For, as Robert Hariman and John Louis Lucaites note, popular media and the arts (specifically photojournalism, as they discuss) “can extend an essential but imperfect capacity for connecting with and caring for others”; to do so, however, “they have to be capable of being misleading or misused” (92). As Hariman and Lucaites describe of iconic photographs, and as I also suggest can be the case, though to different ends, with visual and material artifacts such as cartographic representations, green spaces, and public monuments,
[t]hey provide models for action and assurances that we need not lose what we value most. Ultimately, they function as evidence of things unseen, referring not just to what has past but to what always is
