Stephen Paur
Assignments & Activities Archive
Assignment Description
This assignment invites students to critically analyze the rhetorical and emotional effects of images. The project is basically an exercise in contextualizing a news photo. It would work well as the culminating assignment for a unit on visual rhetoric, digital literacy, multimodality, mass media, or the public sphere. The type of photographic imagery this research project emphasizes is photojournalism, or documentary photography. Students analyze an emotionally charged photo that was circulated recently by a credible news organization. They conduct secondary research to determine the image’s possible meanings and messages, analyzing not only what the image shows, but also what the image says (and doesn’t say), how the image says it, and why the image’s context (real or perceived) shapes its meanings and messages. “Unless [a photograph] is supported with extraphotographic evidence, it will be mired in platitudes . . . truths for which no photographic argument is required,” writes Teju Cole (“What Does It Mean”). In the process of supplying contextual, “extraphotographic” evidence, students adapt claims and lens concepts from assigned readings by Cole, Susan Sontag, Walter Benjamin, Édouard Glissant, and others as they compose a compelling interpretation of their image. (See Appendix A and Appendix B for lists of questions meant to generate ideas and provoke discussion.) Instead of offering a laundry list of all possible details related to their image, students should focus on what they think is the most significant set of circumstances — cultural, political, economic, ecological, geographic, or historical — to which their image is somehow tied. The goal, ultimately, is to spark thought and discussion about photography’s moral, emotional, and ideological effects, including the complex ways that “photographs alter and enlarge our notions of what is worth looking at and what we have a right to observe” (Sontag 1). As Cole writes, “taking photos, looking at photos, and being the subject of photos are mutually reinforcing activities in which the participants are interdependent and complicit” (“What Does It Mean”). Students who complete this assignment will come to see photography as a powerful, even perilous rhetorical tool, practice, and medium — one that can “condense events into icons” (Linfield), reveal “unconscious optics” (Benjamin 237), and much more.