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.

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.

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