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 develop
ed
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?
A few of us spent some time last weekend testing the Sophie multimedia authoring software under development by the Institute for the Future of the Book. The software has a ways to go still, but I believe it is now a short way. 
If anyone ever needs it I made a brief screencast showing how to make links to the iTunes Music Store
