remains to be seen. (92)
As I hope to show in this book, our perceptions of visual and material artifacts and the interpretations that such artifacts help foster can have varied consequences not only on our understandings of history but also on our individual, lived experiences and for broader societal issues such as legislation and policy-making. To understand visual artifacts (like photographs and maps) or physical sites (like green spaces and public monuments) as able to shape our understanding of the world around us means understanding these artifacts as rhetorical, or as Carole Blair has put it, as “partisan, meaningful, and influential,” to the extent that they have the capacity for consequence, have the ability to persuade, and may influence our interpretations and understandings of specific contexts in ways that impact both the mind and body (Blair and Michel, “Commemorating” 72). Rhetorical criticism is typically concerned with the study of text and discourse in order to achieve “a greater understanding of human action” (Segal 2). To account also for the visual and material within rhetorical criticism then involves two main components: first, as Finnegan argues in “Doing Rhetorical History of the Visual,” we must understand the visual and textual and, as this book will soon argue, the material, not from the point of their distinction but from the point of their interplay; second, we must understand visual and, again, material rhetorics “as something more than merely a genre category or product.” That is, on the one hand, a photograph or map would count as an artifact of visual rhetoric because “it consists of non-textual or non-discursive features.” On the other hand, to understand the photo or map in this way not only serves to perpetuate a visual-verbal divide, but may also be viewed as subordinating visual rhetoric to broader studies of text and discourse, which then get to count as “just rhetoric.” To account for a more inclusive understanding of the artifacts of rhetorical criticism, Finnegan suggests that we “conceptualize visual rhetoric as a mode of inquiry, defined as a critical and theoretical orientation that makes issues of visuality relevant to rhetorical theory.” As such, she says, the “visual rhetoric project would urge us to explore our understandings of visual culture in light of the questions of rhetorical theory, and at the same time encourage us to (re)consider aspects of rhetorical theory” relative to the new challenges brought about through analyses of visual artifacts. Projects of visual rhetoric would then understand visual culture as able “to illuminate the complex dynamics of power and knowledge at play in and around images”; they would also understand the “complexities of the relationships between images and texts” as opening up rather than closing off interpretive possibilities (Finnegan, “Rhetorical History” 198). As I will soon discuss in more depth, it is a task of this book to show how material and multimodal rhetorical artifacts are also implicated in the projects of visual rhetoric, and subsequently, to illuminate a more inclusive understanding of the projects of visual rhetoric through what I will call visual-material rhetorical analysis.
Before moving forward, however, it is necessary to better explain what we mean by “the projects of visual rhetoric” in the first place, or how we might apply an understanding of visual rhetoric as a mode or project of inquiry. To do so, I highlight two such projects stemming from the recent work of Finnegan and Hariman and Lucaites, who focus primarily on the visual genre of photography, arguably one of the genres most readily associated with studies of visual rhetoric.2 I should note that my aim here is not necessarily to provide an extensive review of scholarship in visual rhetoric, nor is it to paint an overly narrow picture of what studies of visual rhetoric ought to resemble. Rather, I am interested in describing for the reader who is perhaps less familiar with the subdiscipline some clear ideas about what approaches to visual rhetoric might entail or what it might mean to understand visual rhetoric as a mode of inquiry. Namely, Finnegan’s study of Abraham Lincoln and what she calls image vernaculars, and Hariman and Lucaites’s work with iconic photographs, engage nicely the components necessary for understanding visual rhetoric as more than a product or mere genre category. Thus, a general understanding of the goals of their work and what visual rhetoric projects can “look” like will help provide a more solid foundation or schema for discussing visual rhetoric, thereby allowing the reader to build on that understanding when, following these initial discussions, I will situate visual rhetoric more specifically in terms of its relationship to studies of space, place, and cartography and describe its more material and embodied components.
Using the tools of rhetoric and informed by understandings of visual culture, Finnegan analyzes the earliest known photograph of Abraham Lincoln, a daguerreotype that dates to the 1840s and was later published in McClure’s magazine in 1895. To carry out her analysis, she says, “requires careful, situated investigation of the social, cultural, and political work that visual communication is meant to do” (“Recognizing Lincoln” 62). She situates the rare photo of an uncharacteristically well-coifed, youthful-looking, head-to-shoulders portrait of Lincoln in what she calls the “image vernaculars of late nineteenth-century visual culture” (“Recognizing” 62). Doing so allows her to fulfill the three main criteria of a visual rhetoric project. First, by understanding image vernaculars as “enthymematic modes of reasoning employed by audiences in the context of specific practices of reading and viewing in visual cultures” (“Recognizing Lincoln” 62–3), she is able to understand the artifacts of visual culture “in light of the questions of rhetorical theory,” while simultaneously situating rhetorical theory relative to analyses of visual artifacts (“Rhetorical History” 198).3 This approach then paves the way for fulfillment of the subsequent criteria of the visual rhetoric project. That is, next, Finnegan’s analytical approach “illuminate[s] the complex dynamics of power and knowledge at play in and around images” (“Rhetorical History” 198) by revealing that readers’ overwhelming responses to the daguerreotype reproduction in McClure’s “tapped into myths about Lincoln circulating in the late nineteenth century” (“Recognizing” 62). Based on their understandings of photography at the time and interpretations of the “‘scientific’ discourses of character such as physiognomy and phrenology,” readers felt comfortable analyzing the physical qualities of the Lincoln they saw in the photo (“Recognizing” 62). They then recognized these traits as evidence of his moral character and used the photo “to elaborate an Anglo-Saxon national ideal at a time when elites were consumed by fin-de-siecle anxieties about the fate of ‘American’ identity” (“Recognizing” 62). Finnegan again invokes the tools of rhetoric when acknowledging that, “in the nineteenth century, portraits were thought to be ekphrastic—that is, they were thought to reveal or bring before the eyes something vital and almost mysterious about their subjects” (“Recognizing” 68). By juxtaposing her analysis of the history of how the image itself came to be reproduced and published in McClure’s with a historically and socially contextualized analysis of readers’ written responses to the photo, Finnegan demonstrates how the complex interplay of image and text can open up new possibilities for the creation of rhetorical histories, one that “illustrat[es] how visual rhetoric constitutes a powerful world-making discourse” and a viable mode of inquiry (“Recognizing Lincoln” 74).
Hariman and Lucaites’s extensive work with iconic photographs provides additional examples of visual rhetorical analysis that speak to Finnegan’s criteria for the visual rhetoric project. Specifically, their analysis of the photo of the flag raising at Iwo Jima and its subsequent reproduction in society, as well as its echoes in the more recent image of the three firefighters raising the American flag after the events of September 11, 2001 not only provides a helpful example of important work in visual rhetoric but also allows us to transition into a discussion of the material and spatial components of visual rhetoric.
Like Finnegan, Hariman and Lucaites are concerned with the ways in which visual artifacts draw upon, communicate, and reproduce social knowledge. More specifically, they are concerned with the connections between iconic photographs and the shaping of public opinion and specific events, not only during the time of a particular photo’s publication but over the course of its subsequent reception within society (11). They define the photojournalistic icon as “those photographic images appearing in print, electronic, or digital media that are widely recognized and remembered, are understood to be representations of historically significant events, activate strong emotional identification or response, and are reproduced across a range of media, genres, or topics” (Hariman and Lucaites 27). While
