The Public Image: Photography and Civic Spectatorship by Robert Hariman, John Louis Lucaites (review)

What is photography’s role in public life? In their latest book, The Public Image: Photography and Civic Spectatorship, Robert Hariman and John Louis Lucaites tackle this question with persuasive eloquence as they work hard to debunk a number of prevailing assumptions that delegitimize photography’s significance in liberal democratic societies. Too often, as perhaps most evident in Susan Sontag’s work, photography has gotten a bad rap—whether thought to be a dominant means of mass manipulation, a suspect medium of representation, or a beguiling, subjective, and unrealistic “species of rhetoric” that is incapable of cultivating ethical relationships. Hariman and Lucaites want us to understand photography otherwise. In their eyes, photography is a “vital technology of democratic citizenship” (2). It is, in Kenneth Burke’s terms, an “equipment for living—[a] means for continually making sense of the world and for adjusting one’s place in it in relation to others” (3). As a mode of expression, a medium for social thought, and a public art, photography especially has the potential to cultivate civic spectatorship, a capability and responsibility that, if taken seriously, can help tune us into ordinary life and confront the complexities of modern existence.

For rhetoric scholars, such argument may seem like nothing new coming from Hariman and Lucaites. In No Caption Needed, after all, Hariman and Lucaites (2007) also bemoaned the all-too-common denigrations of photojournalism and urged readers to see how this visual practice is used “to communicate public culture, socialize viewers into that culture, and equip them to deal knowledgeably and reflexively with social change while maintaining characteristic habits of interaction” (18). Yet despite such similar arguments, significant differences exist in structure and content between these two books that make both essential reads for scholars interested in visual culture and public affairs. Whereas No Caption Needed focused on the aesthetic designs, rhetorical techniques, and appropriations of iconic photos, The Public Image focuses on less recognizable images taken from the daily stream of news photos and the more general characteristics of photography that make it distinctly modern—in its origination, content, and function. With chapter headings such as “Realism and Imagination,” “The Modern Art,” and “The Abundant Art,” readers are thus more educated on the civic benefits of photography as a medium and a technology rather than a specific photographic genre. This broader attention to photography helps extend their argument in No Caption Needed as to why photojournalism is so critically important to modern public life.

Scholars looking to find specific theories to advance our understanding of visual rhetoric may be a bit disappointed by The Public Image, as it seems, from the heavy use of footnotes and the lack of rhetorical jargon, to target a more general audience. But a passionate defense of interpretation’s methodological value for visual studies underlies Hariman and Lucaites’s main arguments. As evident in Bruno Latour’s (2004) “Why Has Critique Run out of Steam,” interpretation and criticism have come under scholarly fire as of late, leading many rhetoric scholars to question their value for visual studies. Of particular concern, in Baudrillard’s (2001) terms, is the “violence of interpretation” (138). Too often, Bradford Vivian (2007) argues, images are trapped within the regime of representation, a methodological practice that, Kevin DeLuca and Joe Wilferth (2009) argue, leads to an interpretive taming of a single photograph’s singularity, ecstasy, and eventfulness. Taking such concern seriously, scholars such as myself (2015) have begun to privilege tracing, following, and rich description over interpreting images within preordained contexts. What happens, in other words, if we tame our own interpretations and trace the unpredictable consequences that images catalyze across transcultural and transnational contexts to determine their rhetorical meaning?

Without launching an explicit response to such methodological concerns, Hariman and Lucaites offer a compelling argument as to why interpretation remains vital to public life, an argument that has specific relevance for visual studies...