viz.

In the fall of 2008 Viz. contributor Nate Kreuter interviewed Robert Hariman and John Louis Lucaties about their book No Caption Needed and their blog of the same name. Here is the transcript of that interview.

* * *

Viz: In the “New Media” environment, where so many sources of news and media outlets are competing for our attention, are iconic images as you define them in No Caption Needed still possible? Will we see new iconic images in the future?

Hariman: Well, we suggest in the book that there should continue to be iconic images for several reasons. Precisely because of the information overload there’s a need for some sort of common lingua franca visually. People simply can’t see the jillions of images that are available every day, and so in fact you’re likely to see a relatively small number of images circulate much more than others. Within that circulation there might be some iconic images. And one of the things about iconic images is that they clearly travel across media, across genres, across topics, and so they seem to flourish and be defined in part by circulation. So as more media get interactive, as images can be transferred ever more cheaply and easily, all of that should provide the conditions for the continued emergence and use of iconic imagery.

Lucaites: I think we’ve seen this already. Certainly the picture of the guy in the Christ-like pose in Abu Graib, with the hood on, achieved in some measure, its iconicity as a function of precisely the process of distribution and circulation that Robert just talked about. Not that that might not have happened anyway, but it wouldn’t have happened in quite the same way and maybe not as quickly. So, I don’t think we’ll see a lack of iconic images in the future as a result of that changing media environment.

Viz: If anything then, images might become iconic more quickly and more cross-culturally because of their wider distribution?

Hariman & Lucaites: Possibly.

Viz: There’s a line in the final chapter of the book No Caption Needed where you say that we already have the vocabulary for talking about images and that much of our traditional rhetorical vocabulary can be applied to talk about images. But it seems that a lot of people in our field are still intimidated by the idea of writing and talking about images, still have some reluctance about it. Do you see that reluctance changing at all, and if so, how?

Hariman: Well, clearly there’s some interest in it. There are blogs. Cara Finnegan, ourselves, Debra Hawhee, Josh Gunn, the Blogora, and there are others, and you’ll see discussions of images on all of those, some more intense than others. It’s still costly to publish images in journals and so you’re less likely to see change occur there. So it depends where you look. I know that John [Lucaites] and I are certainly encouraging students to write about images in our classrooms. I think if you just look across the university more and more subjects are being taught of necessity in smart rooms all the time. So visual literacy is becoming more and more widespread, and the disciplines that don’t get on that bandwagon are going to be left behind.

Lucaites: Yeah, and I think that you’re finding more and more people are actually writing about images. A book just came out edited by Cara Finnegan and Lester Olson and Diane Hope [Visual Rhetoric: A Reader in Communication and American Culture] on rhetorical culture and visual rhetorics. It’s an anthology, so it’s pulling together work from a range of people who are working in that arena. There are some people who still resist it. You know, deliberative democrats still think that the visual can be problematic, but I think increasingly more and more people are comfortable with looking at the visual as a site of the constitution and the reproduction of public culture and central to what we used to call “public address studies.” So I’m kind of optimistic about the possibilities, although I think we need to do a lot more.

Viz: Along those lines, in this year’s MLA listings a lot of jobs ask for or express some sort of desire for a visual rhetoric competency. Do you think we’re getting to a point in the field where that sort of competency is expected, rather than simply desired?

Luacites: I don’t know. It depends how you define it. Is it sort of like asking if you can use Word? That used to be a standard question for people in the secretarial field and now it’s taken for granted. So, are they asking that you have an interest in the visual or that you do research in that area, and can teach courses in that area and so forth? So, I’d have to say, what are they really looking for? You’d have to go behind the job ad to get a sense of that. Right now this [visual rhetoric] is hot. I think every research program has a half-life, some longer and some shorter, so it’s probably going to wax for awhile, but then I would expect it to wane.

Hariman: I think it would be productive if we could create an environment where visual literacy was not just something else that one could do but was seen as really important to the production of a humanistic scholar or a productive citizen.

Viz: Related to that, for those of us in this bull market of visual literacy and who consider ourselves to be working in it, most of our attention is oriented toward consuming images to understand them, do you think we should be asking students to compose in images as well? The New Media craze is asking students to compose in video and images. Do you think there’s some merit in that, or should we be focusing on having students learn to read images?

Lucaites: I think we should be doing both, but I don’t feel particularly competent about doing both myself.

Hariman: There are already programs—film studies, journalism, so forth and so on—there are already places where you can do production. We were just trying to hire for a New Media arts position and we wanted someone who could do both production and scholarship and it was tough. We ended up not filling it. It’s tough to find someone who’s really good in both and much easier to hire for one or the other.

Viz: How you do deal with images in the classroom? How do you have students deal with images interpretively or in terms of composition?

Lucaites: I teach a course on visualizing war and a significant part of the class is devoted to developing strategies for interpretation and reading images. But of course, that’s a double-edged sword. Just as I try to teach students a range of what I consider the topoi of visual war discourse or visual war rhetorics, by the end of the semester I ask them to put together group projects in which they employ these topoi or themes or inventional strategies in a project that would engage a public audience on the issues and problems raised in thinking about war in a visual register. And so, I try to get them to translate their interpretive skills into a critical engagement that employs visual practices, either incorporating the conventions we’ve been talking about or by trying to call attention to them in a critical register.

Hariman: What I’ve been doing is having students write blog posts, and I’ve found that’s a very effective way to improve their writing, just as I think having to write for the blog improves my writing. So, they post on particular images. I think it helps having to write for a public reader, rather than a solely academic reader.

Viz: Related to these writing issues, co-authored books tend not to be the norm in the humanities—can you talk about the process of writing collaboratively? Also, do you think we should be encouraging students to write collaboratively more often?

Hariman: [laughs] We get asked this question a lot. Well, for us it works, and what we do wouldn’t necessarily work for any other two people in the universe. What we’ve found is that we really enjoy working together. We’ve also found you don’t save a minute of time. If anything it takes longer to work collaboratively than to work on single author projects, but it’s a lot more fun.

Lucaites: And it produces better work, across the board, because you’ve got two voices that are engaging, and correcting and pushing.

Viz: Well, what’s the process? Does one of you generate something and then pass it along to the other? How does that work?

Hariman: The first thing we do is we get together and we cook Greek food for a couple days.

Lucaites: It’s true.

Hariman: And our wives say “what are you doing?” and we say “research” and we get very funny looks. After that we send a lot of email back and forth. Once in a while we have “grand strategy” meetings which are almost never followed thereafter. For the most part it’s a really interactive process and we’ll have a certain division of labor, you know “who’s starting with this chapter, who’s starting with that chapter?” Generally if we had to divide it up John does more of the hardcore research, because he’s better at that than I am. Things like that. So we divide up some of the tasks. Mostly it just clicks.

Lucaites: We have an idea and we run with it. Somebody starts writing and then we go back and forth. We’ll get fifty or sixty pages and then throw them away and start all over again. I’ve collaborated with a lot of people and the collaborations are always different. The other part of your question was whether or not students should be encouraged to write collaboratively or not, and I’m really ambivalent about that. On the one hand, my collaborations, and especially this one, have been incredibly gratifying and I think I’ve been very productive in the areas where scholars are traditionally rewarded for being productive, publications and whatnot. But I think the way the academy and the humanities in particular are configured you take a big risk if early in your career you dedicate yourself to doing this kind of work because it is still in some measure held to be suspect when you get to tenure and promotion types of considerations. So, I always want [grad] students to be cautious about that.

Hariman: I just did a tenure review of someone who the majority of her work was collaborative and it made it difficult to evaluate. So, I’d say doing some collaborative work is a very good idea, but we did this only after we were established as individual authors.

Viz: So if it’s a risk for graduate students, what about for undergraduates who may be entering into entirely nonacademic fields?

Hariman: They’ve been writing collaboratively since middle school. They do that all the time before they get to college. The deal there is that you have to solve the free writer problem, because what typically happens is that the one or two people in the group who are smart and concerned about their grades will do all the work. People are not freely entering into collaboration when it’s pushed upon them in a classroom. Students are very skilled socially, very adept at networking. They can collaborate in their sleep, so what are you really teaching them? They don’t need to learn how to collaborate. They probably do need to learn how to write. I think that’s much more likely to happen if they’re having to write as individual authors and then editing each others’ work, which is a very useful procedure for teaching writing.

Viz: At this point I think we’ve all heard some Facebook horror stories, which indicate that students might not be aware of the audiences that might be out there for their own images that they think are private. Based on your own classroom experience, can you generalize about whether or not the proliferation of digital imaging technologies has made students more aware of the power of images, or is that technology simply something they take for granted?

Lucaites: I don’t have a clue. I assume they’re more aware. But that doesn’t mean I know how they use images, how they read them. They may be very attuned to visual media, but they may also see photographs as hopelessly traditional media.

Hariman: Our general position is that all the problems in communication are typically attributed to the newest medium, or the seemingly supplemental, marginal medium. So, Susan Sontag inveighs against photography for what are general hermeneutical problems, problems that apply to texts as much as they do to imagery. The problems of new media are the problems of media for the most part. There are always particular inflections that have to be accounted for, and issues of succession and supplementarity, but for the most part the response is significantly overheated and the real issue is, whether you’re talking about new media or old, whether you’re talking about images or texts, most people are lousy readers. So there’s plenty for us to do as scholars and teachers. Whether you’re talking about students forty years ago looking at a sonnet or students today looking at an advertisement, to start with, they’re not going to get most of what’s there. But as you get them going, give them some tools, and get them engaged with it, then they can discover a great deal.

Viz: Is there then a risk of putting too much stock in these new media forms if we’re not grounded in one form or another of reading, we’re doing a disservice to students?

Hariman: Well, one thing we’re trying to do with the blog, and what people seem to really appreciate from the feedback we get, is read images. So, there is certainly an appetite for that, and part of what we do is to just slow down, and just attend to one or two images at a time. All forms of reading are changing because of media. We scan much more than we read now, simply because it’s more functional to do so.

Lucaites: Each new technology also adds something to the equation, and we have to attend to the ways in which they operate somewhat differently, or require different kinds of skills. But I don’t think we should see the end of the world, in good ways or bad, with the changes in media and interpretive practices.

Viz: Are there any new projects you’re working that we should be looking forward to? Has there been any Greek cooking going on?

Hariman: Well, a couple things, some independent, article-length projects, but no joint book-length projects at this point.

Lucaites: I think if there’s one theme that we’re interested in though, it’s that if someone wanted to launch a critique of No Caption Needed, the book, one way to do it would be to say “you’re looking at these canonical images and in some measure recreating the Great Books approach with images.” And if the argument of the book, which is that photojournalism underwrites liberal democratic culture, can be sustained, you’ve got to be able to do that by looking at something other than just the command performances, the more quotidian and the every day.

Hariman: That’s what the blog’s all about.

Lucaites: I think you need to look at the more “everyday” images, so that’s one of the things that drives what we do on the blog, as well as some of the other things we’re working on. We’re trying to look at more everyday types of photojournalistic practices and to take account of the ways in which they work. So, we do some stuff with the normalization of war, and how civil rights imagery is reconstituted and remembered.

Hariman: We started the book thinking that we were going to talk only about iconic photographs, identify the genre and figure out how the genre works, so we could say “we can now account for this class of images.” As the book progressed we realized that we were identifying processes that occur comprehensively. Not that there’s no longer such thing as iconic photographs, but that there’s an intensification of processes that occur across photojournalism or across visual culture. We thought that appropriation was something that fundamentally distinguishes the icon and have come to see that appropriation happens in myriad ways. So, we started out being interested in the question, what is the iconic photograph and why is it so appealing? That became, what is the visual public culture, what is the visual dimension of a liberal democratic culture? -- and that’s where we are with the blog. I’m really proud of the book, but I’m really proud of the blog too.

Lucaites: Absolutely.

Hariman: I more proud, perhaps, of the blog than some of the other journal projects we’re doing right now. It’s certainly more immediate.

Viz: Is it more fulfilling because the blog has a potentially much larger audience than the journal articles?

Hariman: Well, there is that. [laughs] I don’t want to knock journal publications, which are still really important. But, go to the blog and let us know what you think.