viz.

Image credit: Food for the Poor, Inc.: www.foodforthepoor.org 

H/T: Nhi Lieu

This week my students and I were working our way through our lesson on visual rhetoric that ends with my students working collaboratively to analyze Dorthea Lange’s “Migrant Mother” using many of the tools that our previous classes and readings have provided.  Rather than supply my students with the context surrounding this image, I thought I’d see what shared cultural knowledge we had as a group and so asked them to jot down what they know already about the iconic photograph.  In No Caption Needed (a book and a blog), Michael Hariman and John Louis Lucaites argue that iconic photographs circulate broadly as a vital part of public discourse in a liberal democratic society. Not surprisingly, my students were able to draw on their collective knowledge to identify most of the contextual framing I would have been able to provide in my brief introduction to the image.

Our brief exercise in identifying context, however, brought one of my students to question whether we even needed to know the specific cultural context surrounding the original image to be able to identify the pathetic appeal.   My students considered the emotional appeal within the image divorced from context.  They  also questioned how much context one needed to know to respond to the photograph; one student arguing that the work of the image in the current moment is to simply stand in as an icon for the Great Depression.  

These questions and comments connected directly to those posed by Lucaites and Hariman who consider the many instances in which the original photograph of the “icon of poverty” has been excised from its original context and altered or reproduced for contemporary purposes—as when, for instance, a recent commercial for Allstate includes the photograph and connects the economic troubles of the recent downturn to those in the ‘thirties in an attempt to sell car insurance.  Within this same class, we also considered a mailer distributed by Food for the Poor, Inc. that solicits empathy and donations by drawing explicit links between the images taken by photographers working for the Farm Security Administration and more recent images of poverty that visually echo the earlier photographs.  These two examples of reproduction and rephotography provided our class an excellent opportunity for discussing the relationship between context and pathos in social documentary photography.

Image credit: Food for the Poor, Inc.: www.foodforthepoor.org