Critical Review of a Photo Rough Draft (1500~200)

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UWP 101: Fall 2016, Prof. Liz Constable

Major Assignment #2: Critical Review of a Photo

Photographer: Carrie Mae Weems, and the photograph above is part of her series, Equivalents (2012), entitled “The Considered---See Bergman”

Length: approx. 2000 words

Oct. 26 Upload a jpeg file of the photo you’ve chosen to write about to your Dropbox, and prepare a short written rationale for your choice (250 words approx.): Why did you choose this photo? Where did you find it? What makes you want to write about it for this essay?

Nov 2 Upload the first draft of Assignment #2 to SS before class at 4:40 p.m. and print out TWO hard copies to bring to class for peer review.

Nov 9 Upload the final draft of Assignment #2 to SS by 11:55 p.m.

Topic

We’ve read several essays by Teju Cole who explores the ethical and political dimensions of photographs. As his title “Against Neutrality” indicates, he reminds us that photographs are composed, just as writing is composed. Therefore photographs are never value-free or ethically neutral, and nor is photographic technology. Photographers have a purpose in mind when they compose images, and they take into account their audience, their role as a photographer, and the context for their images.

We’ve also read Robert Coles in “Doing Documentary Work,” where he argues that people doing “documentary work”—that is, attempting to represent actual people’s lives and events in as truthful a way as possible— nevertheless also have to make choices about the subjects they represent. They too compose their photos,.

Photographers’ put together---or com-pose---their photos through the following strategies: they have to choose what to include in the shot, and what to leave out; how to frame the subject; what kind of lighting to use; camera angle, focus, and camera distance, among other decisions. Photographers also compose their image by deciding how (or whether) to crop the image and where (and how) to publish the image. When the image is published, it may appear in the context of other images, text, and commentary that may add more meaning. All those decisions tell us something about the values the photographer seeks to highlight in the subjects (people, events, places, objects) he photographs, and also about the photographer’s beliefs and values.

Prompt

Your task in this assignment is to write a review essay of a photograph that you consider significant, and a photograph that you believe is worth sharing with your peers and potentially a wider audience because of the “cultural work” it does. By “cultural work,” I refer to the effect YOU think the photo has on changing, or re-interpreting, or revising existing understandings of its subject. The cultural work of a photo means the photograph’s impact on ways people think about its subject, be it war, gender, race, tattoos, poverty, hunger, addiction, the drought in California, the current Presidential campaign . . . . .

The Rhetorical Situation

Audience: A general audience who would read a print journal of undergraduate writing for UCD students (Prized Writing) or online journal also for a college-educated audience.

Purpose: To show your reader the significance of the photograph you select in terms of the cultural work it does. To answer the question: why should your readers know about this photograph? To enable readers to understand the commentary the photograph makes on an aspect of culture. To communicate to your readers the importance of taking time to explain and interpret photographs

Role: Social commentator with a specialization in visual culture

Context: An invitation to feature the role of photography as social commentary in the student journal

Stages in the Writing: How to tackle this? How to organize your essay?

Once you decide on the photograph that you want to write about, you should prepare by keeping in mind that when writing a review of visual materials, you need to answer the following three questions about the photograph you’re writing about. These three questions provide a basic template, or structure, for your essay.

FIRST QUESTION TO ANSWER

1. What is it?

This means you need to write a detailed description of the photograph itself BEFORE you undertake any evaluation or interpretation of the photograph. We’ll practice this in class because it’s quite tricky to translate visual information into writing.

Keep the photograph in front of you as you draft, and when you’re writing your description, look at the photo from:

● top to bottom

● right to left; left to right

● corner to corner

Don’t shrug off the “edges” or “empty” parts, but take the entire photograph into account. Working out the “gaps” in a photograph---where nothing is happening---is important in interpreting the meaning you find in the photograph

SECOND QUESTION TO ANSWER

2. What might this mean?

Once you’ve fully and completely described the photograph, then you can embark on interpreting the meaning and effect of the photograph. Here, your responsibility is to work with visual evidence to make your interpretation. If you’re going to suggest that the photograph embodies a criticism of celebrity culture, you need to anchor this interpretation in visual evidence you find in the photograph itself. This means that you need to ask yourself what you see in the photograph that led you to interpret the photo as a criticism of celebrity culture. “What you see” may be the photographer’s decision about the camera angle, or the framing of the image, or the empty space in the frame.

Yes, you can and should bring in informed perspectives that you have researched on the photographer; or on the context; or on the historical context of other images of this subject; or on the subject of your photo. However, your primary source of evidence for your interpretation lies in the photograph itself.

THIRD QUESTION TO ANSWER

3. So what?

Here, you need to contextualize your photograph in terms of big ideas, yes, big ideas: poverty, gender, indigenous peoples, climate change, disability, old age . . .in other words, you need to explain to your readers why this photograph’s significance reaches into, and intervenes in, larger dialogues and debates.

Credit for earlier versions of this assignment to both Ken Andersen and Pamela Demory