The Uses of Visual History

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Notes

David Greenberg, “Do Historians Watch Enough TV?: Broadcast News as a Primary Source,” in Doing Recent History: On Privacy, Copyright, Video Games, Institutional Review Boards, Activist Scholarship, and History That Talks Back, ed. Claire Bond Potter and Renee Christine Romano (Athens: University of Georgia Press, 2012), 185–199. See also Thomas J. Sugrue, Sweet Land of Liberty: The Forgotten Struggle for Civil Rights in the North (New York: Random House, 2008).

On the specific relationship between history and journalism, see Barbie Zelizer, Taking Journalism Seriously: News and the Academy (Thousand Oaks, CA: Sage, 2004), 81–110.

Joseph P. McKerns, “The Limits of Progressive Journalism History,” Journalism History 4, no. 3 (1977): 89.

The central reason for journalism history's “embarrassment,” Carey claimed, was the subfield's default to so-called Whig interpretations that privilege progress and the “large impersonal forces buffeting the press.” In response, Carey argued for journalism history's “need to be ventilated” by cultural histories and greater attentiveness to the ritual dimensions of journalism. For more, see J. W. Carey, “The Problem of Journalism History,” Journalism History 1, no. 1 (1974): 3–5, 27. For more on Nerone's 2011 critique, see John Nerone, “Does Journalism History Matter?,” American Journalism 28, no. 4 (1): 7–27. The absence of theory in journalism history has been further addressed by Amber Roessner, Rick Popp, Brian Creech, and Fred Blevens, “‘A Measure of Theory?’: Considering the Role of Theory in Media History,” American Journalism 30, no. 2 (2013): 260–278. For other criticisms of journalism history's trajectory, see Michael Schudson, “Toward a Troubleshooting Manual for Journalism History,” Journalism and Mass Communication Quarterly 74, no. 3 (1997): 463–476.

Nerone, “Does Journalism History Matter?,” 8.

Ibid., 7.

Ibid.

Lester C. Olson, Cara A. Finnegan, and Diane S. Hope, Visual Rhetoric: A Reader in Communication and American Culture (London: Sage, 2008), 3.

Ibid.

Barbie Zelizer, “The Voice of the Visual in Memory,” in Framing Public Memory, ed. Kendall Phillips (Tuscaloosa: University of Alabama Press, 2004), 157.

Greenberg, “Do Historians Watch Enough TV?,” 188.

See Greenberg, “Do Historians Watch Enough TV?,” 185–199, on the challenges of television access.

James Carey, Communication as Culture: Essays on Media and Society (Winchester, MA: Unwin Hyman, 1989).

Meg Spratt, “When Police Dogs Attacked: Iconic News Photographs and Construction of History, Mythology, and Political Discourse,” American Journalism 25, no. 2 (2008): 88.

Susan Sontag, On Photography (New York: Picador, 1977).

Barbie Zelizer, “Reflections Essay: What's Untransportable about the Transport of Photographic Images?,” Popular Communication 4, no. 1 (2006): 18.

Robert Hariman and John Louis Lucaites, No Caption Needed: Iconic Photographs, Public Culture, and Liberal Democracy (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2007), 7.

Hariman and Lucaites, No Caption Needed, 13.

Hanno Hardt and Bonnie Brennen, “Introduction,” in Picturing the Past: Media, History, and Photography, ed. Bonnie Brennen and Hanno Hardt (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1999), 10.

Roland Barthes, Image-Music-Text, trans. Stephen Heath (New York: Hill and Wang, 1977), 20.

John Taylor, “Iraqi Torture Photographs and Documentary Realism in the Press,” Journalism Studies 6, no. 1 (2005): 44.

Brennen and Hardt, “Introduction,” 6–7.

See Olson, Finnegan, and Hope, Visual Rhetoric, on revealing and concealing. See also Zelizer, “The Voice of the Visual in Memory” and About to Die: How News Images Move the Public (New York: Oxford University Press, 2010).

Michelle Murray Yang, “Still Burning: Self-Immolation as Photographic Protest,” Quarterly Journal of Speech 97, no. 1 (2011): 1–25.

Mari Boor Tonn, “‘From the Eye to the Soul’: Industrial Labor's Mary Harris ‘Mother’ Jones and the Rhetorics of Display,” Rhetoric Society Quarterly 41, no. 3 (2011): 232.

On the visual and civil rights history, see Harold and DeLuca, “Behold the Corpse: Violent Images and the Case of Emmett Till,” Rhetoric & Public Affairs 8, no. 2 (2005): 263–286; Davi Johnson, “Martin Luther King Jr.'s 1963 Birmingham Campaign as Image Event,” Rhetoric & Public Affairs 10, no. 1 (2007): 1–26[25]; Meg Spratt, “When Police Dogs Attacked: Iconic News Photographs and Construction of History, Mythology, and Political Discourse,” American Journalism 25, no. 2 (2008): 85–105; Leigh Raiford, Imprisoned in a Luminous Glare: Photography and the African American Freedom Struggle (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2011); Martin A. Berger, Seeing through Race: A Reinterpretation of Civil Rights Photography (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2011); Davi Johnson Thornton, “The Rhetoric of Civil Rights Photography: James Meredith's March against Fear,” Rhetoric & Public Affairs 16, no. 3 (2013): 457–488; Nicole Maurantonio, “‘That Photo’: Journalism and Bearing Witness to History,” Western Journal of Communication 78, no. 4 (2014): 500–521.

Harold and DeLuca, “Behold the Corpse,” 274.

Thornton, “The Rhetoric of Civil Rights Photography,” 458.

Ibid., 459.

Johnson, “Martin Luther King Jr.'s 1963 Birmingham Campaign as Image Event,” 1–26.

Harold and DeLuca, “Behold the Corpse,” 273.

Jacquelyn Dowd Hall, “The Long Civil Rights Movement and the Political Uses of the Past,” Journal of American History 91, no. 4 (2005): 1233–1263.

Berger, Seeing through Race, 6.

Spratt, “When Police Dogs Attacked,” 94.

Brian Thornton, “The Murder of Emmett Till: Myth, Memory, and National Magazine Response,” Journalism History 36, no. 2 (2010): 96–104.

Thornton, “The Murder of Emmett Till,” 102.

Nicole Maurantonio, “‘That Photo’: Journalism and Bearing Witness to History,” Western Journal of Communication 78, no. 4 (2014): 500–521.

Nerone, “Does Journalism History Matter?,” 7.

Barbie Zelizer, “Finding Aids to the Past: Bearing Personal Witness to Traumatic Public Events,” Media, Culture & Society 24, no. 5 (2002): 708.

Here I draw again on Barbie Zelizer's work using the heuristic of voice in Zelizer, “The Voice of the Visual in Memory.”

Ashton Pittman, “Justice Denied: Is Trayvon Martin Post-Racial America's Emmett Till?,” Occupy.com, July 17, 2013, http://www.occupy.com/article/justice-denied-trayvon-martin-post-racial-americas-emmett-till.