Schedule | Syllabus | Projects | Moodle | Handouts & Assignments | Email Professor

Assignment Page

Essay:
The Cultural Work of an Image

In this last assignment, you will write an essay about the cultural work of an image.

The Choice of Image

You can choose an image from the present day or from history. It should be a public image that circulated via print or the Internet. The image may be an independent work like a painting, part of another work like a magazine or album cover or an advertisement, or a screen shot from a video or film. In the case of video or film, the shot you choose to analyze should be emblematic of the cultural work enacted by the whole piece, and lend itself to the kinds of "close reading" described below.

The Basics

Write an five-to-seven-page essay analyzing a single image. Talk about the image in terms not simply of what it shows--as if it were just a window through which we were viewing the subject--but as an example of cultural work that the creator of the image is performing, intentionally or not.

Your printed essay should include a copy of your image (black-and-white is okay).

What is Cultural Work?

 

Cultural work is the process by which images or writings enable individuals in a culture

* to rehearse new shared structures of feeling, thinking, and acting or

* to reinforce current patterns of feeling, thinking or acting

which history has made necessary.

"Culture" thus determines what practices or ideas are normal, natural, and common-sensical among members of a group, and what is idiosyncratic, private, strange, retrograde, or "other."

What the Essay Should Do

To explain the cultural work of the image as something actively constructed and viewed, your essay should discuss the image in four ways:

 

Opening

Introduce your image and its context. Work into the opening a thesis—that is, a moment in the introduction when you explicitly say what ultimately you want your reader to take from the essay about the cultural work of your chosen image.yellow book cover

Context

To discuss the cultural work of a picture from the news, from an advertisement, from an album cover, etc. you'll need to discover and discuss the image's context, which might include:

 

Informational Aspects

Once you've established the cultural context of the image, you're ready to look specifically at how the image itself performs its cultural work within that context. First, discuss the work as Edward Tufte would, using terms and critical concepts from Visual Explanations.

How do we know what we know looking at the image? How does it provide information about who, what, when, where, why, how much, etc. Using Tufte is particularly helpful in talking about the words that are included in or with the image (direct labels). How does the image convey information relevant to its cultural work by including what Tufte calls direct labels, coding (both color and cultural) and self-representing scales? Be sure to quote and cite Tufte when appropriate.

Design Aspects

Next, "read" the image with the critical tools that Scott McCloud provides in Understanding Comics, or that we've discussed in class (e.g., "camera work" or the distinction of diachronic and synchronic). While you may look at the very same details as you did in the Tufte section, here you'll use McCloud to explore how the image performs its cultural work in terms of visual design. How does the composition and viewpoint of the image speak to our emotions, represent power relationships, control our reactions? Be sure to quote and cite McCloud or the course web site when appropriate.

Larger Conclusion Concerning "Visual Rhetoric" or "Visual Culture"

You'll end the essay with a conclusion that brings your analysis to a satisfying conclusion and highlights a topic suitable for further thought and discussion.

A good technique for conclusions is to end by giving the reader something extra or new (but still relevant, of course) that hasn't already been presented in the paper.

In this essay, I would like you to end with a specific observation, insight, question, or issue concernng the larger subject of our class: "visual rhetoric" or "visual culture."

This observation, question, or insight should be something that writing your paper led you to think about, and which could lead to further thoughts and discussion about

I would like to use some of the conclusions from your papers as the basis for questions included in our final exam.

A Note on Style and Voice

As you introduce your image, your critical sources and other elements required by the assignment, try to speak of them as if they were a natural part of your argument or discussion. Try not to refer to the assignment, or imply that you're analyzing this image or using these sources because you have to (even though you do).

For example, if you say "The image I've chosen to analyze is...," you're suggestion that the choice of an image has somehow been forced upon you. Better to start by talking about why the image is interesting and significant, as if you just couldn't help but write an essay about it.

Remember to number your pages.

Citation and Documentation

Be sure to cite sources and page numbers (parenthetically in the text) and document those sources (in a "Works Cited" section at the end) using MLA format. Cite any quotations, paraphrased ideas or unique information you use from those sources. Also include a Works Cited entry for the source of your image.

Presentations

You will give a presentation to the class about your image and the argument you've made about cultural work it performs. The presentations should:

  1. run from 6 to 8 minutes total
  2. show the image that you analyzed (Post images and links needed for your presentation in the Moodle forum "Presentation Resources," which you will be able to access from the podium's computer)
  3. introduce and describe the cultural context that you used in your essay to analyze the image, the cultural theme you identified, and the particular cultural group for whom this image was or is meaningful at a certain moment
  4. analyze how the visual composition of the image enabled its cultural work from an "informational" viewpoint (Tufte)
  5. analyze how the visual composition of the image enabled its cultural work from a "design" viewpoint (McCloud or "Camera Work" from the Narrative Title Sequence)
  6. explain and elaborate a conclusion about some principle or technique of "visual rhetoric" or "visual culture" which is suggested by your image and analysis of it, and which would serve as a topic for further discussion or thought (such as in the final exam).

To get full credit for the assignment, I will ask you to attend all three days of in-class presentations, and to complete a feedback form for each presentation.

Sample Images, Contexts, and Resources