A Portrait of Exclusion: The Archetype of the Scientist at Work in Life Magazine

Abstract

This article investigates the role that scientific portraits play in shaping public perceptions of scientists and, by extension, the scientific enterprise. A new category of scientific portrait, termed the “scientist at work,” is introduced and discussed through the lens of Perelman and Olbrechts-Tyteca’s theories about creating value and presence for an audience.

Notes

¹ I am very grateful to RR reviewers Blake Scott and John Lucaites for their insightful and thorough feedback for revisions. Thanks also to Brian Gogan for reading earlier drafts of the manuscript, and thanks especially to Jeanne Fahnestock for her guidance on this project in its earliest stages. I am grateful to the English Department at Western Michigan University for purchasing the image licenses.

² Perelman and Olbrechts-Tyteca acknowledge alternative forms of persuasion, particularly in propaganda, but set them outside the bounds of their treatise: “Our analysis will also neglect [these techniques]: we shall treat the conditioning of the audience by the discourse alone” (8–9).

³ See Gross (“Presence as Argument”), in which he analyzes a Holocaust museum exhibit to illustrate the utility of the expanded concept.

⁴ See de Chadarevian; Fara; Jacobi and Schiele; Jordanova.

⁵ Studies of eighteenth-century botanist Joseph Banks’s portraits (Fara) and Watson and Crick’s iconic photograph (de Chadarevian), echo Jordanova’s argument that portraiture can construct both identities of scientists and public attitudes toward science.

⁶ I use the masculine pronoun purposefully here, as portraits of female scientists are few and far between in the sample I discuss in this paper. For a compelling discussion of the representation and portrayal of women in science—a subject that demands and deserves its own book-length project—see, for example, Jordanova.

⁷ It is worth noting that Jacobi and Schiele’s study is limited to the types of photographs appearing in popular scientific discourse, as opposed to publications with a more diverse readership like Life magazine, which is the focus of my case study. Of the two magazines that Jacobi and Schiele use for their case study, one is described as “semi-professional” and the other, “popular” (734–35).

⁸ It is curious that Jacobi and Schiele were not able to place the image of the scientist working, but that is all the more reason to create a fourth archetype.

⁹ Life was building on the tradition of documentary photography that began in the nineteenth century with notable figures like Jacob Riis and that continued into the twentieth century with the “iconic” photographs of Dorothea Lange and others. See also Barthes’s “The Photographic Message”; Mitchell’s Iconology; Olson, Finnegan, and Hope’s Visual Rhetoric.

¹⁰ See Kozol 7–11, 23–25; Cookman 5–7; Finnegan 135–36.

¹¹ Henry Luce made use of the most up-to-date technology to ensure the highest quality images, and to earn wide circulation, he successfully wooed advertisers to his project (Kozol 29–30).

¹² See Kozol; Cookman; Hariman and Lucaites.

¹³ See Broks; Bowler.

¹⁴ This corresponds to the hierarchical model exemplified by Bush’s report. Miller argues that it is problematic to conflate the rhetoric of science and the rhetoric of technology because of their fundamental differences (304), but she acknowledges that the treatment of the two entities in scholarship has made it difficult to separate them (299).

¹⁵ Whereas Jacobi and Schiele had no term for the scientist at work, LaFollette’s category of the “expert” most closely matches this category of scientific portrait.

¹⁶ Scholars agree that due to Henry Luce’s vision for the magazine and hand-picked editors, who shared his conservative political standpoint, Life tended toward presenting an idealized picture of American culture, striving to form the broadest consensus possible through photographs (Baughman; Cookman; Doss; Kozol; Littman). Cookman contends that Life’s downfall in the 1970s was in part due to Luce’s staunch conservativism and stubborn commitment to an ideology that was no longer supported on a national scale (175–76). According to former Life staff-member Loudon Wainwright in his “insider’s perspective,” by the 1950s Luce had let go of some of his editorial control to the new managing editor, Edward K. Thompson, so much so that “the people who worked under Thompson at Life thought of it as his magazine” (180). Life’s photographers pioneered candid photography, but the managing editors had complete control over which photographs were published (Wainwright). For example, Thompson, by Wainwright’s estimation, exercised control over every part of the publication process from the choice of stories, to the selection of images, to the layout, to the tone of the writing (180). Significantly, Wainwright argues that Thompson’s editorial control and his ideology permeated through the finished product: “Because he was the kind of compulsively engaged editor he was—and the kind of inexhaustible and controlling man—almost every issue reflected his convictions, his tastes, his quirks, the way he saw America and Americans in the world” (180).

¹⁷ Every issue of Life has been made available online by Google books. “Science” stories are not featured in every publication, but in several—enough to make “Science” a category in the table of contents in issues where it does appear.

¹⁸ Although this section is focused on science stories with only one image of a scientist, these stories often contain other images—not of scientists, but of a laboratory setting, for instance, or of scientific equipment.

¹⁹ My rationale for sampling issues from Life’s inception until 1960 is based on historical accounts of the relationship between public audiences and the scientific enterprise that indicate there was a distinct shift in public trust in science in the 1960s (see Broks; LaFollette). Moreover, Life’s novelty as a visual news source diminished significantly after the advent of television, and I am interested in the magazine’s portrayal of scientists and science when it was at the height of its popularity.

²⁰ The other thirty-six stories contained multiple images of scientists, and there are often different types of portraits of scientists contained in the same story. For instance, in the March 21, 1955 science story, there are three traditional portraits, two pictures of scientists at work, two pictures of scientists posed with objects of study, and one picture of a group discussion. And in many cases, there is more than one type of depiction of the same scientist, as in the April 16, 1945 story with one picture of the scientist at work and one picture of him posing with his invention.

Additional information

Notes on contributors

Maria E. Gigante

Maria E. Gigante is an assistant professor of Rhetoric & Writing Studies in the English Department at Western Michigan University.