Studying Visual Modes of Public Address

• In Event: Stability and Change in Public Address Research

Abstract

Students of public address typically come to the study of visual rhetoric through a more general interest in rhetoric; engaged by visual artifacts, they wonder precisely how to proceed. In this essay I present five approaches to analyzing visual images in terms of their production, composition, reproduction, circulation, and reception. The five approaches are not mutually exclusive, nor must a single case study include all approaches or work in a linear fashion through them. Instead, they offer the critic multiple ways to answer particular questions about the roles images play in public culture. Taken together, the approaches constitute a critical perspective that recognizes images’ political, cultural, and historical specificity as well as their fluidity as circulating objects in public culture. After I present each of the five approaches, I illustrate how they may be employed in a case study of a photograph-text assemblage produced by Progressive Era child labor reformer Lewis Hine. Combining attention to image composition with a study of production and a single reproduction of the image, I show how Hine’s work visually punctuated broader arguments about child labor, national health, and the value of children and childhood

Author

• Cara Finnegan, University of Illinois, Urbana-Champaign