Lesson 3 Forum
Lesson 3 Forum
Analyzing the Rhetorical Situation in Visual Arguments
For this discussion we'll analyze images that memorialize historic events. The images (which appear on pages 56 and 58) are accompanied by explanations to help you understand the rhetorical situations in which they occurred. Please review the images and information presented on pages 56-58. Select ONE of the images, and focus on one or more of the following questions in your response:
1) Image. What type of image is it? What are its qualities and features? What is it about?
2) Viewer or audience. Who do you think was targeted as the most appropriate audience at the time each photo was taken? Who might still regard each of these photos as a compelling visual argument?
3) Photographer. What do you know about the photographer, and what may have motivated that individual to take the photo? What might have been the intended result?
4) Constraints. What constraints influenced the photographer? Consider the influential events, circumstances, and traditions already in place the time each photo was taken. Consider, also, the possible beliefs, attitudes, motives, and prejudices of the photographer. Do the constraints you have identified create common ground between yourself and the photographer, or do they drive you apart?
5) Exigence. What motivated the photographer to take each of these photos? What happened? Was it perceived as a defect or problem? If yes, why? Was it new or recurring?
When you title your thread, include a reference to the image number (#1-2) or title so that forum participants may identify classmates discussing the same image.
(Page 56) For Discussion: Who are the members of the discourse community for this essay? In your view, how would different people in this community respond to the claims made by the author?
Image 1: Rosa Parks Rides in the Front of the Bus
Rosa Parks riding a Montgomery, Alabama, bus in December 1956, after the Supreme Court outlawed segregation on buses.
Look at the image and read the essay that follows. It explains the history of this photograph and will provide you with the information you need to analyze the rhetorical situation.
This photograph was taken in 1956 early in the civil rights movement in Alabama when the issue was segregation in public facilities. Until this time, African American people were required to sit only at the back of public buses. A new national ruling gave them the right to sit wherever they wanted to sit. In the photograph, Rosa Parks, an African American civil rights activist, tests this new ruling by taking a seat in the front of the bus with a white man seated behind her. This is a famous photograph. It appears on the walls of buses in New York City and has come to symbolize change brought about by the movement for civil rights that continued into the next decades.
(Page 58) For Discussion: If you had no knowledge about the larger historical struggle for civil rights, how would this affect your understanding of the rhetorical situation in which the Rosa Parks photograph is situated? And how does this historical context help you better understand the rhetorical situation here? Does this context help you analyze this photo as a visual argument?
Image 2: Auschwitz Victims of Medical Experiments
Auschwitz Exhibit at Jerusalem’s Yad Vashem Holocaust Memorial
This is a photograph of an Israeli soldier in Jerusalem, Israel, who is viewing historical photographs at the Yad Vashem Holocaust Memorial Museum of Jewish victims from Auschwitz. Photojournalist David Silverman, who works for Getty Images and has been based in Israel and the West Bank since 1991, took this photo the week before the sixtieth anniversary of the liberation of Auschwitz.
The photographs in this exhibit were taken in the early 1940s during World War II at the Auschwitz concentration camp. The issues related to this image are anti-Semitism, the Holocaust, genocide, and the desire on the part of the Nazis, who ran this camp, to create a so-called master race. More than a million Jews died in the gas chambers at Auschwitz, were the victims of deadly medical experiments, or died of other causes such as starvation. Analyze the rhetorical situation for this image. How does this analysis help you perceive this image as a visual argument? What conclusions can you draw about the Holocaust, the Nazi death camps, and the individuals imprisoned there?