Rhetorical Exposures: Confrontation and Contradiction in US Social Documentary Photography [Hardcover]

Exposing the politics of seeing: how documentary photographs confront inequality and reshape public understanding.

InRhetorical Exposures, Christopher Carter explores social documentary photography from the nineteenth century to the present in order to illuminate the political dimensions and consequences of photographs taken and selected to highlight social injustice. Documentary photography aims to capture the material reality of life. Carter demonstrates how the creation and display of documentary photographsoften now called imagetextsboth invite analysis and raise persistent questions about the political and social causes for the bleak scenes of poverty and distress captured on film.

Carters carefully reasoned monograph examines both formal qualities of composition and the historical contexts of the production and display of documentary photographs. InRhetorical Exposures, Carter explores Jacob Riiss heartrending photos of Manhattans poor in late nineteenth-century New York, Walker Evanss iconic images of tenant farmers in west Alabama, Ted Streshinskys images of 1960s social movements, Camilo Jos? Vergaras photographic landscapes of urban dereliction in the 1970s, and Chandra McCormicks portraits of New Orleanss Ninth Ward scarred by Hurricane Katrina.

While not ascribing specifically political or Marxist intentions to the photographers discussed, Carter frames his arguments in a class-based dialectic that addresses material want as an ineluctable result of social inequality. Carter argues that social documentary photography has the powerful capacity to disrupt complacent habits of viewing and to prompt viewers to confront injustice. Though photography may induce socially disruptive experiences, it remains vulnerable to the same power dynamics it subverts. Therefore, Carter offers a rhetoric of exposure that outlines how such social documentary images can be treated as highly tensioned rhetorical objlƒ&