Viewers Reading Photographs
Studies of photography’s historical viewers are rare, and with good reason. It is not easy to access the experiences of historical viewers. The critic seeking to account for such experiences inevitably runs up against the problem that the act of viewing typically leaves no discursive traces.1 To say the least, this puts one at a loss for evidence. David Freedberg outlines the core problem: “How can one say anything at all about popular response and popular attitudes to images in history in the absence of living witnesses?”2 I address this critical dilemma by using my training as a scholar of rhetoric to seek out and analyze the public discursive traces of people’s responses to their photographic encounters. I argue that it is within these documented encounters between viewers and photographs that we may come to understand the complex and historically specific relationships that shape viewers’ participation in photography.
Focusing on the period between the Civil War and the Great Depression—a period when photography became a dominant medium of cultural life—I study discourse produced by viewers in response to specific photographs they encountered in public. In the cases I examine, viewers left evidence of their responses in newspaper and magazine articles, letters to the editor, trial testimony, books, speeches, photographs, and comment cards left at an exhibit. My analysis shows how engagement with photography in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries helped viewers negotiate emergent anxieties and crises of U.S. public life. I argue that encounters with photography fostered in viewers a rhetorical consciousness—that is, “a manner of thinking that invents possibilities for persuasion, conviction, action, and judgment.”3 As we shall see, viewers performed that rhetorical consciousness not only by describing or analyzing the photographs they encountered but also by mobilizing a sophisticated (though often implicit) rhetorical repertoire that grounded their arguments about war, empire, national identity, child labor, citizenship, and economic depression. Part of the goal of this project is to identify and elaborate features of that repertoire.
Before going further, let us take a more detailed look at the viewer responses that I take up here:
In October 1862 Harper’s Weekly published engravings of photographs made after the Battle of Antietam, thus displaying images of the battlefield dead to Americans for the first time. Although the magazine’s readers did not see actual photographs in print yet (that came later, with the rise of halftone in the 1880s), the knowledge that the engravings were based on actual photographs made real and graphic the losses of war. At about the same time, a photographer in Boston claimed to be able to conjure the spirits of dead loved ones and make them appear alongside the grief-stricken subjects of photographic portraits. Such new and previously unimaginable images of death (and the afterlife) forced viewers to directly encounter the grief and trauma of the Civil War. In their responses to such images, viewers made sense of these new and troubling photographs by writing texts that highlighted the role of imagination in photographic viewership and acknowledged the capacity of photography to produce presence in the face of profound, and often permanent, absence.
In November 1895 McClure’s magazine published a newly discovered photograph of Abraham Lincoln as a young man. McClure’s invited a handful of its readers to comment on the photograph’s publication. Although the photograph was new, the mythic man was not. Thirty years after Lincoln’s death, when some Americans were anxious about the fate of American identity in an age of dawning empire, Lincoln’s photograph forced viewers to reconcile their beliefs about an iconic figure with this new visual information. They did so by arguing that the photograph revealed Lincoln’s superior moral character and, by extension, the nation’s. The letter writers made sense of the portrait of the younger Lincoln by invoking photography’s capacity to communicate character.
In 1912 author and political gadfly T. R. Dawley Jr. published a heavily illustrated book called The Child That Toileth Not. By the turn of the twentieth century, visual fictions of childhood—grounded in beliefs about citizenship and anxieties about the future of the “white race”—had come to dominate political debate. In response to what he viewed as a one-sided visual debate about child labor, Dawley used both his own photographs and those made by Lewis Hine for an anti–child labor group to argue that child labor was in fact good for children. In a time when the value of a healthy childhood was becoming politically more important, Dawley problematically but shrewdly made sense of the working child’s role as proto-citizen by activating photography’s capacity for appropriation.
In April 1938 an already Depression-weary nation was in the midst of the “Roosevelt Recession,” a new and severe economic downturn. The Farm Security Administration (FSA) mounted an exhibit of its documentary work as part of the First International Photographic Exposition in New York City. At the invitation of FSA organizers, more than five hundred viewers left responses to the exhibit on comment cards at the exit. The exhibit’s unexpected photographs of rural poverty and depression struck viewers as a stark contrast to the commercial spectacular of the exposition. Those who left comments addressed the photographs’ overwhelming documentation by inserting themselves into the stories the photographs told. In a time of economic anxiety, commenters made sense of the FSA’s photographs of rural poverty by managing photography’s capacity to mobilize magnitude.
The events I examine stretch across photography’s first one hundred years and address four periods of political and social upheaval in the United States: the “republic of suffering” during and after the Civil War; the dawn of U.S. empire and the closing of the frontier at the end of the nineteenth century; early twentieth-century debates about citizenship, race, and child labor; and the economic, political, and social strains of the Great Depression.4 Each instance I explore posed for viewers a particular reading problem that needed to be confronted and navigated. In the case of battlefield and spirit photography, viewers were forced to confront the stark novelty of photographs that pictured death (and perhaps even the ghostly afterlife) in a time of national upheaval. The Lincoln portrait forced viewers to reconcile a newer but younger and enigmatic Lincoln with the mythologized man represented thirty years after his death as the very embodiment of American national identity. Photographs and other frequently circulated visual representations of the “priceless” children of white, well-off Americans in the early twentieth century posed a reading problem for T. R. Dawley, whose political commitments to child labor required him to devise shrewd ways to visualize working-class children as worthy of citizenship. And finally, viewers of the FSA’s 1938 exhibit faced the reading problem of how to engage photographs picturing real-time conditions of poverty and want in the midst of a commercial spectacular devoted to the consumption of photography.
Although I might have explored situations other than or in addition to these, my goal is not to offer a comprehensive history of photographic viewership during this period. What I do instead is explore cases that reveal how viewers responded to the various reading problems posed by specific public encounters with photographs. Despite their distinct historical contexts, each case illustrates that photography’s viewers possessed an implicit but distinct and readily available repertoire for talking about photography. That repertoire, emerging from viewers’ recognition of photography’s capacity to produce presence, communicate character, activate appropriation, and manage magnitude, helped viewers make sense of the photographs they were viewing and grapple with the reading problems posed by particular images. My focus on viewers means I am not offering a history of photography as a medium, a technology, or an art, but rather elaborating a rhetorical history that considers how photography animated particular ways of seeing and habits of response among viewers.5
Photography, Public Life, and Historical Viewers
The seeds of this project were planted during work on my 2003 book, Picturing Poverty: Print Culture and FSA Photographs, in which I studied how Depression-era photographs produced by the U.S. government’s Farm Security Administration were mobilized in three different magazines to picture poverty. In that project I focused primarily on the reproduction and circulation of the FSA’s images. During my work I came across the well-known story of the “skull controversy,” in which FSA photographer Arthur Rothstein was accused in 1936 of misrepresenting photographs he made of a bleached cow’s skull he had found in South Dakota. As I examined the various responses to Rothstein’s actions that circulated in the press, I became fascinated by the assumptions about photography that grounded the discourse of the controversy. The public arguments of those participating in the controversy made explicit a variety of typically implicit assumptions about the nature and functions of photography.6 These assumptions suggested to me that there was value in studying viewership and response, and I began to question how one might develop rhetorical histories of photographic viewership. In particular I wondered how viewership and response might work in situations outside of those times when controversy makes implicit assumptions explicit.7 This book is my answer to that question.
Conceived rhetorically, photography may be understood as an art of the contingent, a visual habit of picturing social, political, and cultural life. Studying photography rhetorically does not mean treating photographs as objects of pure evidence with fixed meanings nor merely as supplemental illustrations to texts. Neither does it mean treating photographers as intentional orchestrators of those supposedly fixed meanings. Rather, it means attending to what elsewhere I have called the “eventfulness” of the photographic encounter: to images’ specificity as rhetorical documents in the contexts in which they are produced and reproduced and to their fluidity as they circulate across space and time.8 It is this combination of situatedness and contingency that prompts Ariella Azoulay to argue that photography is best thought of as an event, one that can never be reduced to its component parts of camera, photograph, photographer, subject, or viewer.9 I contend that it is precisely the eventfulness of photography that makes it ripe for rhetorical study.
Rhetorical scholarship on photography, when it is done especially well, explores how photography visualizes the world we live in, shapes our perceptions of ourselves and others, guides our experiences of public life, and even constitutes us as citizens. On these topics the work of four authors on U.S. photography deserves particular mention. Alan Trachtenberg’s Reading American Photographs, a foundational text in the history and interpretation of U.S. photography, argues that photographs “become history when they are conceived as symbolic events in a shared culture,” and furthermore that “what an image shows depends on how and where and when, and by whom, it is seen.”10 Throughout his work Trachtenberg deftly shows how early photography functioned not only as a mass medium, a technology, and an art, but also as a rhetoric: a metaphor, an image, an idea.11 He urges scholars to study the history of photography not only by studying its images as rhetoric but also by studying its rhetoric about images—that is, its “history of picturing photography in the medium of language.”12
Communication and rhetoric scholars Barbie Zelizer and coauthors Robert Hariman and John Lucaites have studied how photojournalism of the twentieth and early twenty-first centuries built public memory and shaped our collective cultural and political experiences in the United States. Focusing primarily on images of unsettling or violent events produced by photojournalists for consumption as news, Zelizer argues that journalism historians’ attention to “the fact and actuality of photographic depiction” has left underdeveloped our sense of photographs’ relationships to emotion, contingency, and imagination, three concepts that inevitably shape viewers’ responses to photographs.13 This is especially problematic, Zelizer points out, because emotion, contingency, and imagination intersect with photography in a dynamic fashion: “Images regularly travel across circumstances that are transformative, sometimes playful and hypothetical, and often internally contradictory. This means that an image’s meaning relies not on individualistic whims but on fundamental collective impulses on hand to help people make sense of what they see.”14 In short, we cannot study photographs without engaging the interpretive communities surrounding them.
In their study of the highly visible roles that certain twentieth-century photographs have played in American culture, No Caption Needed: Iconic Photographs, Public Culture, and Liberal Democracy, Hariman and Lucaites offer a rich and compelling articulation of the power of photography in American public culture. They argue that particular images they term “iconic photographs” (“the images that you see again and again in the historical tableaus of the visual media”15) provide emotional and deliberative resources that enable their viewers to navigate the complexities of public life. Performing rich compositional analyses of famous photographs such as Dorothea Lange’s “Migrant Mother,” Joe Rosenthal’s flag raising at Iwo Jima, and others, and exploring subsequent circulation of those same images via a seemingly limitless procession of appropriations and parodies, Hariman and Lucaites refute those who persist in claiming that visual rhetoric denigrates, rather than enriches, public culture: “Instead of seeing visual practices as threats to practical reasoning or as ornamental devices . . . we believe they can provide crucial social, emotional, and mnemonic materials for political identity and action.”16
I share with Trachtenberg, Zelizer, and Hariman and Lucaites an appreciation for the complex role photographs play in public culture. Throughout my work I have framed photography as a site where social knowledge must be put to work in order to engage with images and puzzle out their structures and meanings in particular historical contexts.17 Yet while this work addresses multiple facets of photography’s eventfulness, it does not attend in detail to the rhetorical practices of historically specific viewers. While these authors (and I in some of my earlier work) lay claim to the capacities of photographs to invite particular interpretations, the readings they tend to privilege are their own. For example, when Trachtenberg articulates his interest in “the question of how we make sense of what we see,” there is some slippage in the “we” that he invokes.18 At times the “we” refers to historical viewers of photographs, but for the most part it turns out that the (skilled, profoundly talented) person doing the reading of the American photographs of the title is Trachtenberg himself. As a result, photography’s historical viewers are only tangentially addressed in the book.19 Furthermore, although Hariman and Lucaites study circulation and offer numerous examples of appropriations of iconic photographs, the appropriations themselves typically are not studied as rhetorical responses by specific viewers in particular situations; rather, they are presented mainly to illustrate more general public uptake of the images and ultimately serve as further evidence for the iconicity of the originals. If, following Azoulay, we conceive of the “event” of photography as what involves the camera, photographer, photograph, subject, and viewer in endless and always incomplete relation, then we may conclude that even those photography critics and historians who embrace these complex relations still tend to ignore the latter, thus leaving open the question of historical viewership.
Indeed, such work may leave a lingering impression that only critics are qualified to make critical arguments about photographs. By contrast, this project complicates an easy distinction between critical reading and viewing, illustrating in multiple ways how photography’s historical viewers have constituted themselves as critical interpreters of photography. In embracing the agency of viewers, I take up Leah Ceccarelli’s call for rhetorical critics to “explore all available evidence of reception to a work” in order to more richly “locate meaning in the interpretations of audiences.”20 Of course, I too am a critic. As Bonnie Dow points out, doing “audience-centered work” does not mean erasing the critic, but rather acknowledging the critic’s agency as a selector and interpreter of texts.21 Thus this project might best be described, to use Alan Trachtenberg’s formulation, as a series of “close readings of close readings” in which I privilege viewership by assembling, interpreting, and evaluating a series of texts produced by photography’s viewers.22
The Challenge of Studying Photography’s Viewers
In taking up the rhetorical traces of viewers’ encounters with particular photographs, I seek to avoid the extremes of conceptualizing viewership as, on the one hand, merely idiosyncratic and anecdotal or, on the other hand, an inevitable product of “the system” that leaves no room for the agency of individual viewers.23 My study privileges the agency of viewers; it is interested in, as W.J.T. Mitchell puts it, “what people liked to look at, how they described what they saw, how they understood visual experience.”24 Karlyn Kohrs Campbell defines agency as the “capacity to act, that is, to have the competence to speak or write in a way that will be recognized or heeded by others in one’s community.”25 Viewers are not passive spectators with no capacity for agency. Jacques Rancière, for example, points out that the spectator “observes, selects, compares, interprets. She links what she sees to a host of other things that she has seen,” to a “common sense” or “community of sensible data.”26 With regard to photography specifically, Ariella Azoulay agrees: “Photography has become a means of viewing the world, and the citizen has become a well-trained spectator, capable of reading what is visible in photographs.”27 While here Azoulay writes primarily about contemporary photography, the point still holds: if we are willing to reconstruct and enter into the interpretive communities in which viewers of the past lived and moved, then we too may access these viewers’ repertoires for engaging photography.
Such analysis poses a methodological challenge, however, because it requires the critic to reconstruct the ways audiences at different historical moments viewed and interpreted images and invites us to try to understand the various social, cultural, and political imaginaries that shaped their social knowledge, that “common sense,” community-based knowledge that we draw upon to navigate daily life.28 Vision and visual practices are historically situated, so it is no secret that people respond differently to images in different places and times; as Michael Ann Holly puts it, “The viewer of today not only sees things in a different way but also sees different things.”29 While such an observation might seem obvious enough, what may be less obvious is what differences those differences make in our understanding of the role of photography in the history of U.S. public life. The critic of historical viewers thus takes on a particular burden. Studying photographic viewership rhetorically requires special attention to the historically specific interpretive communities from within which photography’s viewers encounter photographs and build their critical interpretations of them.
Making Photography’s Viewers Matter
The viewers whose rhetorical practices I study in this book encountered photographs that addressed national anxieties and crises that animated public life in the period between the Civil War and the Great Depression. Each of the cases I study offers insight into the variety of ways that historical viewers used their social knowledge to navigate the reading problems posed by war photographs, spirit photographs, presidential portraits, child labor images, and pictures of poverty. Each example highlights a different way that viewers solved those reading problems by activating a rhetorical repertoire that recognized photography’s respective capacities to produce presence, communicate character, activate appropriation, and mobilize magnitude. In producing public arguments designed to help them navigate national anxieties and crises of the period, viewers also articulated the ways that photography itself could be mobilized to address those crises. If, following Thomas Farrell, we conceive of rhetoric as “the art, the fine and useful art, of making things matter,” then this is a book about how viewers made photography matter, how they understood and mobilized its potential for addressing anxieties and crises of U.S. public life.30 By showing how photography’s viewers recognized the contingency of photographic interpretation, mobilized their social knowledge, and constituted themselves as active participants in the event of photography, I, in turn, make photography’s viewers matter.