I'm right now thinking through possible image selections for some visual rhetoric teaching materials. For the project we need to secure rights to twenty-five or so images that can be used to discuss visual rhetoric. You'd think with Flickr and similar image sharing social software sites that we might expect some quick shifts in the canon of visual images discussed in writing and communications courses. Clearly tectonic shifts in what it means to own, share, read, and use images play out daily as groups post and sift through quickly growing databases of personal, but also public photographs and works of art. The simple act of weaving a rotating set of images into a badge to place on a blog embodies radical conceptions of composition and of knowledge creation. Handed tools for generating image collections and snippets of code, authors integrate freely available images filtered through software and dynamically layered into their pages regularly by a machine. Foundational changes call us to rethink and retool approaches to teaching with images.

But the images making it into academic projects and published teaching materials don't yet reflect these shiftings in the soil of visual rhetoric. Perhaps the most striking example is the canonical Migrant Mother series of photographs by Dorthea Lange. Visual readers, writing guides, CD-ROMs, most any recent textbook we thumb is likely to open upon the now familiar despondent face of the displaced mother and child. Many works, have now even amplified the presence of photograph by providing others in the series of images to demonstrate contexts. The image made it into my last two projects; the photographs in the series were even developed into a screencast exploring how to read the image.

One might suggest that in some part the image gets used because it's in the public domain. This explanation, I think, is in many ways true. Rising to the top of any list of possible images for a project, are pieces one can secure permission to use. Images from 9-11 archives, government funded photographs, and archival posters can be generally acquired and reused for publications.

But I'm also not convinced that such a cynical reading of this growing canon of images tells the whole story. Many of the decisions about using these pieces, for instance, flow from worries about the logistics of securing permissions. Photo researchers gravitate toward what is freely available or toward pieces sold through licensing agencies, because it makes completing projects possible. As sites like Flickr make it easier to identify images and secure permissions paths with similar levels of resistance may broaden what makes it into published works.

Further, no doubt some of these pieces are selected based on the shared experience that has been developed around them. Here we must grant for image canonicity the benefits we might find in those texts that have been regularly circulated through the study of literature. Without suggesting concerns of canonicity are anything but conflicted, we can consider what these share points of reference have offered and might continue to offer to visual rhetoric.

We also need to weigh the messages and rhetorical techniques playing through the pieces that regularly make it into our visual learning landscape. Similarly, we must ask how pieces not readily familiar deliver ideas and display composition. Knowing when an image works (whether thinking about when a canonical image might need to go or how an unknown image might belong) requires that we ask about its techniques, its creator, its contexts, its messages.

And now for the big but: doesn't this rhetorical decision making question relying on a Flickr-generated image set as a mode of composing? Does one choose to add to the page a series of images selected by software? Or must one identify deliberately the images to be place in our compositions? Or, perhaps another question: What do we make of a writing space in which one is free to do both?