Rhetorical Exposures: Confrontation and Contradiction in US Social Documentary Photography

By Christopher Carter

Documentary photography aims to capture the material reality of life. In Rhetorical Exposures, Christopher Carter demonstrates how the creation and display of documentary photographs—often now called “imagetexts”—both invite analysis and raise persistent questions about the political and social causes for the bleak scenes of poverty and distress captured on film.
 
Carter’s carefully reasoned monograph examines both formal qualities of composition and the historical contexts of the production and display of documentary photographs. In Rhetorical Exposures, Carter explores Jacob Riis’s heartrending photos of Manhattan’s poor in late nineteenth-century New York, Walker Evans’s iconic images of tenant farmers in west Alabama, Ted Streshinsky’s images of 1960s social movements, Camilo José Vergara’s photographic landscapes of urban dereliction in the 1970s, and Chandra McCormick’s portraits of New Orleans’s Ninth Ward scarred by Hurricane Katrina.
 
While not ascribing specifically political or Marxist intentions to the photographers discussed, Carter frames his arguments in a class-based dialectic that addresses material want as an ineluctable result of social inequality. Carter argues that social documentary photography has the powerful capacity to disrupt complacent habits of viewing and to prompt viewers to confront injustice. Though photography may induce socially disruptive experiences, it remains vulnerable to the same power dynamics it subverts. Therefore, Carter offers a “rhetoric of exposure” that outlines how such social documentary images can be treated as highly tensioned rhetorical objects. His framework enables the analysis of photographs as heterogeneous records of the interaction of social classes and expressions of specific built environments. Rhetorical Exposures also discusses how photographs interact with oral and print media and relate to creations as diverse as public memorials, murals, and graphic novels.
 
As the creation and dissemination of new media continues to evolve in an environment of increasing anxiety about growing financial inequality, Rhetorical Exposures offers a very apt and timely discussion of the ways social documentary photography is created, employed, and understood.

• Language: English
• Publisher: University Alabama Press
• Release date: Apr 30, 2015
• ISBN: 9780817388102

Book preview

Rhetorical Exposures

RHETORIC, CULTURE, AND SOCIAL CRITIQUE

SERIES EDITOR

John Louis Lucaites

EDITORIAL BOARD

Jeffrey A. Bennett

Barbara Biesecker

Carole Blair

Joshua Gunn

Robert Hariman

Debra Hawhee

Claire Sisco King

Steven Mailloux

Raymie E. McKerrow

Toby Miller

Phaedra C. Pezzullo

Austin Sarat

Janet Staiger

Barbie Zelizer

Rhetorical Exposures

CONFRONTATION AND CONTRADICTION IN US SOCIAL DOCUMENTARY PHOTOGRAPHY

CHRISTOPHER CARTER

THE UNIVERSITY OF ALABAMA PRESS

TUSCALOOSA

The University of Alabama Press

Tuscaloosa, Alabama 35487–0380

uapress.ua.edu

Copyright © 2015 by the University of Alabama Press

All rights reserved.

Inquiries about reproducing material from this work should be addressed to the University of Alabama Press.

Typeface: Scala Pro and Scala Sans Pro

Manufactured in the United States of America

Cover photograph: Bethlehem, Pennsylvania, 1935. Photograph by

Walker Evans; courtesy of the Library of Congress, Prints and Photographs Divison.

Cover and interior design: Michele Myatt Quinn

∞

The paper on which this book is printed meets the minimum requirements of American National Standard for Information Sciences—Permanence of Paper for Printed Library Materials, ANSI Z39.48-1984.

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

Carter, Christopher, 1974–

     Rhetorical exposures : confrontation and contradiction in US social documentary photography / Christopher Carter.

     pages cm. — (Rhetoric, culture, and social critique)

     Includes bibliographical references and index.

     ISBN 978-0-8173-1862-8 (cloth : alk. paper) — ISBN 978-0-8173-8810-2 (E-book) 1. Documentary photography—United States—History. 2. Photography—Social aspects—United States—History. 3. United States—Social conditions. 4. Photojournalists—United States. I. Title.

TR820.C364 2015

070.4'9—dc23

2014036219

And this time

for Ben too

. . . the ghosts of old buildings are haunting parking lots in the city of good neighbors that history forgot.

—Ani DiFranco, Subdivision

Contents

List of Figures

Acknowledgments

Introduction

1 - Writing with Light: Jacob Riis’s Ambivalent Exposures

2 - Let Us Now Praise Manly Men: The Antidocumentary Heroics of James Agee and Walker Evans

3 - Picturing Capital: Ted Streshinsky’s Travels in Revolutionary California

4 - The Rhetoric of Ruins: Walking with Walter Benjamin and Camilo José Vergara

5 - Keeping Watch: Immersion in Post-Katrina Visual Culture

Conclusion

Notes

Works Cited

Index

Figures

1   Bandit’s Roost, c. 1890

2   Five Cents a Spot, c. 1890

3   Tramp in Mulberry Street Yard, c. 1890

4   Seward Park, Opening Day, c. 1890

5   Bethlehem, Pennsylvania, 1935

6   Ida Ruth Tengle, Hale County, Alabama, 1936

7   Allie Mae Burroughs, Hale County, Alabama, 1936

8   Washstand in the Dog Run and Kitchen of Floyd Burroughs’s Cabin, Hale County, Alabama, 1936

9   Part of the Bedroom of Floyd Burroughs’s Cabin, Hale County, Alabama, 1936

10   Jack Pandol, 1967

11   Student Challenging National Guard, 1969

12   People’s Park Riots: National Guard and Protester, 1969

13   Love-In, Golden Gate Park, San Francisco: Flower Children Blowing Bubble, 1967

14   Angelus Novus, 1920

15   Statler Hotel, Elevator Machinery, 1999

16   Brush Park, 1999

17   Grand Circus Park, 1999

18   Cover image for Katrina Exposed, 2006

19   The Shop, 1986

Acknowledgments

I must begin by thanking Dan Waterman, editor in chief at the University of Alabama Press, for his enthusiastic response to the manuscript and for helping bring the book to its current form. His guidance throughout each stage of the publishing process has proven invaluable, combining warmth of spirit with the highest professionalism. I am similarly grateful to the press’s anonymous reviewers, whose commentary led me to resources I might otherwise have overlooked and whose sensitive critiques made the work of revision a real pleasure.

Looking back from those revisions to the earliest phases of the project, I realize that the book began as a conversation with Francesca Sawaya, who after observing me teach on the subject of visual rhetoric asked whether I was writing a book on documentary photography. Although the question seems innocent enough in hindsight, it felt at the time like an invitation, and so I immediately began imagining a structure for the manuscript. That structure would undergo numerous transformations over the next six years, but it all began with Francesca’s encouragement. As the project developed, I received further encouragement from Larry Frank, whose skills as a critical listener I cannot rate highly enough. The passages that please me most I trace directly to lunchtime conversations with Larry at Hideaway Pizza. Beyond just enriching my book, those conversations linger in memory among my favorite and most sustaining experiences of life in Norman.

Francesca and Larry exemplify the goodwill of the University of Oklahoma (OU) faculty in English, many of whom offered stellar advice as I drafted the argument. I owe particular debts to Vincent Leitch and Kathleen Welch, who provided detailed feedback on the organization of the manuscript while helping me to specify its main contributions to the discourses of visual culture and composition-rhetoric. Thanks also to Daniela Garofalo, Catherine Hobbs, and Susan Kates for responding to early chapters with insights so expansive that they can be felt throughout the book. Catherine John and Joanna Rapf posed intriguing challenges late in the composing process, helping me see what to emphasize during final revisions. Dan Cottom, David Mair, and Ron Schleifer offered beneficial perspectives regarding readers’ reports, and Sandy Tarabochia proved an indispensable ally in the First-Year Composition Office as I moved between scholarly and administrative projects. They are all splendid colleagues, and it has been my great fortune to work alongside them.

Those colleagues and I have all been fortunate to work at the University of Oklahoma, which is a beautiful place to teach and a steadfast sponsor of faculty research. During the writing of Rhetorical Exposures, OU allotted me five different Faculty Enrichment grants that financed archival visits to the New York Public Library, the Metropolitan Museum of Art, the Bancroft Library at the University of California, Berkeley, and two trips to the Visual Literacies Conference at Mansfield College, Oxford. The librarians at the various archives gave me access to a remarkable assortment of photographs and materials, while the participants in the Visual Literacies Conferences offered feedback on two of my chapters-in-progress. Thanks to Shirley Streshinsky, James Eason, Camilo José Vergara, and Jonathan Traviesa for providing high-quality reproductions of a number of images in the book, to Phil Fitzsimmons and Edie Lanphar for their hospitality during the conferences, and to Ben De Bruyn for his incisive reaction to chapter four.

Numerous OU graduate students also made memorable contributions to various chapters, asking shrewd questions during my presentations at such events as the Conference on College Composition and Communication and the Thomas R. Watson Conference on Rhetoric and Composition. Some of those students have gone on to other programs or embarked on enviable careers, though I have not forgotten their generous commentary on slices of the overall argument. Key respondents include Elizabeth Bear, Rachel Jackson, Lynn Lewis, Alexandria Lockett, Shannon Madden, Michael Rifenburg, Jerry Stinnett, and Tara Wood. Along with the participants in my Visual Literacies, Activist Rhetorics and Multimodal Rhetoric courses, those people substantiate Catherine Hobbs’s maxim that faculty research benefits most from their interaction with gifted grad students.

My research has also benefited from friendships formed during my years as a graduate student at the University of Louisville. Marc Bousquet and Steven Wexler have been my trusted readers for fifteen years, and their notes on chapter one assured me that the overall project had merit. A version of chapter one appeared in College English in 2008, and it won the Richard Ohmann Award for Outstanding Article in the journal for 2008–2009. I credit a measure of that success to Marc and Steve. Thanks as well to John Schilb, past editor of College English, for first shepherding the piece into print.

My deepest and most heartfelt gratitude I reserve for my family, who give my work inspiration and purpose. My parents, Patty and Phil Carter, championed Rhetorical Exposures from its earliest days, spending entirely too much time listening to my ideas take shape during long-distance phone calls, and loving me anyway. Thanks to my father for teaching me what it means to have a discerning eye and for demonstrating forms of courage and toughness I can only hope to share. Thanks to my mother for similar resilience, for comforting me in trying times, and for being the first to read the complete manuscript. My sister Kelly also cheered me through multiple phases of the project, showing a spirited readiness to listen and an uncommon ability to put professional challenges in perspective.

My wife, Beth, has been my dearest friend through every phase of drafting, giving me confidence in my work while enriching everything else beyond measure. This book would not have been possible without her. Our son Jonah brings me more joy and satisfaction than I knew possible, and watching him mature has been an extraordinary education. With his combination of creativity and restless determination, he reminds me of why I write. His little brother Ben has the same happy intensity, the same wit, the same startling intelligence. He was born around the time I began this book, and he has grown along with it. I devote it to him, and to those family members both near and painfully distant who followed its progress from the outset.

Introduction

Hoping to publicize the horrors of tenement life in late nineteenth-century Manhattan, a photographer steals into workers’ lodgings at night so as to capture overcrowding and exhaustion at their most intense. More than forty years later in Depression-era Alabama, a similarly disposed documentarian positions a tenant farmer against her house so that the lines of her face achieve continuity with the backdrop of rough-hewn wood. Working under the influence of both predecessors, a third visual artist shoots an urban panorama repeatedly over the final three decades of the twentieth century, covering environmental deterioration in the wake of factory shutdowns and white flight. Shortly after the turn of the new century, still another photographer rides a raft atop the waters of post-Katrina New Orleans, framing with intimate precision the drowning of his own hometown.

Each of those photographers participates in a genre typically associated with description rather than suasion, as its adherents often aspire to neutrality while implicitly defining their efforts against the work of rhetoric.¹ Cara Finnegan attests in Picturing Poverty that documentary maintains its difference from other genres in large part by obscuring its craft, as many of its most accomplished contributors and commentators claim strict fidelity to events occurring before the camera. James Agee, for example, while writing about 1930s farm life while on assignment with photographer Walker Evans, describes his collaborator’s camera as an instrument of absolute, dry truth (206). Such claims perpetuate what Finnegan calls the paradox of documentary: It purports to offer ‘real’ and ‘natural’ views of the world but is able to do so only through the framing and construction of those views (xv). The choices of whom or what to photograph, from which angle and at what point(s) in time, against which background and for what purposes, all comprise efforts to limit the audience’s perspective and guide its gaze. Those decisions are rhetorical insofar as they exemplify acts of composition that contribute to the social construction of knowledge.

By associating rhetoric with the building of knowledge rather than the presentation of presumably stable truths, the present study differs from the tradition that defines the concept as the dress of thought, and simultaneously pays homage to James Berlin’s emphasis on the epistemic character of rhetorical endeavor. From the epistemic perspective, he claims, knowledge is not a static entity located in the external world. [. . .] Knowledge is dialectical, the result of a relationship involving the interaction of opposing elements. These elements in turn are the very ones that make up the communication process: interlocutor, audience, reality, language. The way they interact to constitute knowledge is not a matter of preexisting relationships waiting to be discovered. The way they interact with each other in forming knowledge emerges instead in acts of communication (Rhetoric 166). Those acts of communication involve not words alone but a host of semiotic modes including photographs and other forms of visual rhetoric. Documentary pictures, in particular, make an especially strong claim on reality by appearing to seize and deliver it, without manipulation or art, for consideration by the interlocutor’s audience. Such pictures at once emerge from and intervene in processes of knowledge formation that involve not just photographer and addressee but their larger social milieu.

Ironically, while aiming toward what Agee calls the cruel radiance of what is (9), the ostensibly objectivist documentary genre tends to serve politically charged purposes. The pictures of New York tenement conditions noted above, along with those of Alabama sharecroppers, decaying districts of urban Detroit, and a devastated New Orleans, may strive to present in direct and uncompromising terms the realities of American experience, yet they offer specifically situated and necessarily restricted points of view. These perspectives have proven nicely suited to—at times crucial to—the labor of cultural critics and social activists. Photographs taken by such figures as Lewis Hine, Paul Strand, Dorothea Lange, Margaret Bourke-White, Sebastião Salgado, and James Nachtwey, among many others, all exemplify a significant variation on the documentary tradition—a variation that has come to be called social documentary photography.² Such photography coheres with Kristie Fleckenstein’s activist-inflected definition of rhetorical practice, which for her is inextricable from social action, consisting of language used to bring about collaborative change in the world (Vision 7). Citing the development of rhetoric in Greece over 2500 years ago, she describes its epistemic work as mitigating conflict, underwriting communal health, and most important, creating a public sense of the common good (8). Although she often links the concept to language, and especially to speech and writing, she emphasizes in numerous books and essays the rhetorical disposition of images, arguing at one point that the prevailing means of persuasion within a period cannot be excised from the shared ways of seeing—from the visual culture—of that period (Testifying 15). Social documentary photography provides support for such claims, helping in various periods and circumstances to generate knowledge for the common good—though what it generates remains subject to debate and always in process.

Social documentary images often contribute to the ongoing construction of communal well-being not by displaying it but by demonstrating its absence or incompleteness, thereby sparking discontent and indignation in audiences for whom pursuing the common good constitutes a worthy ideal. Whether in isolation or in combination with other modes, the images clarify how far we stray from the principles that attended the early conceptions of rhetoric.³ By asserting a gap between lived experience and the common good, many social documentary photographs mark the continuing urgency of Fleckenstein’s emphasis on bring[ing] about collaborative change in the world. They establish such exigency through various and often interrelated rhetorics of exposure—a term that runs throughout the coming pages, and that signifies not just the light-sensitive material that manifests an image but the political practice of specifying an injustice, especially one that wants to remain hidden. Given recent scholarship on the confrontational appeals of public memorials (Biesecker; Gallagher), murals (LaWare), comics and cartoons (Demo; Edwards and Winkler), and iconic photographs (Harold and DeLuca; Hariman and Lucaites, Liberal, No, and Public), studying the rhetoric of exposure works to extend a burgeoning, interdisciplinary conversation about visual communication and the politics of dissent. Contributors to that conversation regularly address images as expressions of and motivations for social activism, as much visual rhetoric carries forward existing critical discourses while prompting concerted movement beyond the gaze. Many of those contributors share Robert Hariman and John Louis Lucaites’s sense that images can provide crucial social, emotional, and mnemonic materials for political identity and action (No 14). With much social documentary photography, what sticks in the memory as catalyst for organized activism is less often the picture of some achieved common good than of its violation or obstruction; the motivating image insists on what remains to be done, and thus on the urgent continuation of rhetoric as social invention.

Given that there are countless examples of social documentary photographs that advance a rhetoric of exposure, subsequent chapters center on rhetorics that comprise only a sliver of social documentary as a whole but that emerge with frequency from the late 1800s up to the present day. Those rhetorics build knowledge about the links between social class and the built environment, addressing how variously positioned subjects use engineered space, how space uses them, and how it manifests their divisions of labor and power. It is here that visual rhetoric meets and mediates geographical rhetoric, as our physical worlds, like the words we speak and write and the images we share, help to construct knowledge about personal and collective identity. In Composition and Sustainability, Derek Owens notes how that construction occurs sometimes in overt ways and other times in ways less easy to see: "Who we are and what we have to say is in so many ways interwoven, directly and indirectly, consciously and unconsciously, with our local environs (37 [my italics]). Like Owens, Nedra Reynolds sees this interwoven quality as at once generative and constraining: Identities take root from particular sociogeographical intersections, reflecting where a person comes from and, to some extent, directing where she is allowed to go. Geographical locations influence our habits, speech patterns, style, and values—all of which make [geography] a rhetorical concept or important to rhetoric (11). Both Owens and Reynolds attend to how material space builds, expresses, and sustains knowledge of social and economic difference, at times supporting cultural diversity and commitment to the local but at least as commonly reproducing hierarchy, territorialism, and fear of otherness. Many of the pictures in this book evoke the effects of such ideological reproduction, offering critical perspectives on those effects while inadvertently and paradoxically helping to maintain them. These pictures intimate that it is not just our local environs that inform who we are and what we have to say" but also the troubled relations within and among those localities.

The photographs expose varied geographical rhetorics of industrial and postindustrial capitalism in America, doing so in combination with print and oral modes that historicize, critique, and endeavor to resist spatial expressions of class division. The merging of those varied communicative modes in lectures, newspaper and magazine articles, photobooks, and websites exemplifies what W. J. T. Mitchell calls imagetext, by which he means composite, synthetic works that refuse the logic of modal purity by destabilizing presumably static boundaries between language and pictures (89). Even as he troubles such divisions, however, Mitchell celebrates the dialectical tensions that arise between the socially constructed categories of word and image, especially insofar as those tensions signal the uncertainty and the inescapably political character of historical representation. Whether representing the congested dwellings of Manhattan’s immigrant workers, contests between Berkeley activists and university administrators over what constitutes public space, or the deterioration of Detroit in the decades after industrial implosion, the forms of imagetext in this book locate class division in the uses and conditions of the manufactured environment, alerting variously implicated audiences to circumstances that many people’s routine ways of seeing and negotiating space teach them to overlook. In such semiotic contexts they enact a confrontational version of the social action Fleckenstein sees as inherent to rhetorical performance: they denaturalize the political economy at the same time that they disrupt what she calls visual habit—a system of perception that, through an array of habituated conventions, organizes reality into particular patterns, leading us to discern some images and not others, to relate those images in characteristic ways to each other and ourselves (Vision 22). Most of the photographers featured in this book set out to counter the systems of perception that sustain class relations in their particular era and chosen location, inviting audiences to study what their habituated conventions generally obscure.

Confrontation and disruption are hardly the only rhetorical effects of the imagetexts under examination, however. All too often, those imagetexts prove susceptible to the same power regimes they expose. Their susceptibility derives in part from the photographer-activist’s reformist tendencies, which involve mitigating some of capitalism’s most dire effects rather than contesting the inequitable distribution of resources on which it is founded; at other times, the susceptibility expresses itself through appropriation and commodification by the very audiences the photos (and accompanying modes of communication) seek to delegitimize.⁴ During processes of production and reception alike, the rhetoric of exposure gets tangled in contradiction. The contradictions take various forms, a select number of which comprise foci for the chapters ahead. Taken together, those chapters suggest that rhetorics of exposure, even and perhaps especially when they become subsumed by the logic they critique, help construct knowledge about the lingering distance between capitalist orthodoxy and the common good.

In marking that distance, the chapters illustrate documentary photography’s power to specify wrongs and inform contemporary movements for economic justice. The aim is never to denigrate the social documentary tradition nor to rehearse the established contention that popular visual culture inhibits rational decision-making. Like the work of Hariman and Lucaites, the case studies that follow refuse the totalizing iconoclasm that often informs studies of contemporary media (13, 20). Nevertheless, those studies do help to clarify the resiliency of what social documentary exposes. That the photographs in this book illustrate and at times embody such resiliency does not prove the futility of the genre; rather, it indicates the genre’s contribution to tracking capital across the decades—a project that, at its best, places historical awareness in the service of informed protest. An interest in motivated resistance distinguishes this book from lines of thought advanced by Susan Sontag, Allan Sekula, and John Tagg, who often either castigate the voyeurism of documentary spectators or assert photography’s general compliance with bourgeois norms. Susie Linfield takes strong issue with such scholarship in The Cruel Radiance, objecting to Sontag’s view that ‘concerned’ photography has done as much to deaden conscience as to arouse it, while rejecting John Tagg’s description of photography as ultimately a function of the state and a mode of production [. . .] consuming the world of sight as its raw material (7, 9). Although photos can in certain contexts invite voyeurism, and often reproduce dominant political-economic ideologies during their production and dissemination, neither of those possibilities fully characterizes the rhetorical capacity of social documentary. For critics to break with such limiting characterizations, however, we must take a dialectical approach to visual culture, keeping subversive aspirations in tension with