Proposal Draft for Craig, Jules, and Rebecca

Snapshot and Snap Judgment:
Pulitzer Photographs, Theorists, and Interaction ... Oh My!

Pictures and figures have increasingly become a major component of literacy studies. Every day we see hundreds of images that provide information (news) or tacitly ask us to purchase a product. Sometimes, however, images are given stronger context by the text displayed with them such as the details surrounding the events of that brief moment in time. This presentation will explore the impact of textual notation on Pulitzer winning images between 2000 and 2007. Further, it will also explore impressions of these pictures without the textual explanations and how text changes the interpretation and meaning of the photographs. By using visual examples, this presentation will allow web surfers to interact with images both with text (thus, context) and without (con)text and also provide opportunities to discover how others interpret the same visual images.

Visual texts, photographic essays, and visual portfolios now pepper several composition and writing texts because they offer another option for teachers to engage students. To better utilize these compositions, we need to understand the psychological effect of images. Some images stop viewers and they want to know more. Others “provoke,” as Roland Barthes writes, “polite interest” (27). What is the fundamental difference between pictures that grab us and those that do not? One possible answer is provided by Barthes, he suggests, “Photography evades us” (4). The meaning of the image is lost because viewers are more dismissive of images. People see so many images; they are likely to make snap judgments about them, their context, and their meaning. This indifference distorts the realism of the image. This presentation will use a user-guided interface on the Web to solicit impressions of images, then provide original context for the images, and finally offer a space for viewers to detail their thoughts about the differences.

Susan Sontag explains, “Reality has always been interpreted through the reports given by images” (349). Thus, pictures report reality to us. How images are interpreted is important because it is our construction of reality—in that one moment. That one moment may be supported by context or not, and the generation of that story—that (non)fiction of reality—needs to be explored. Sontag also writes, “Reality itself has started to be understood as a kind of writing” (354). The text, I think, she refers to is the context explored in this presentation. If Web viewers choose, this website will have a theoretical section where a discussion takes place by three theorists (portrayed by the designers/presenters) where they discuss a photograph based on their respective theoretical positions.

Therefore, this presentation will focus on some key questions. What impact does an image by itself have? Does this impact change with text? If so, in what ways? How does a viewer’s emotional response change with textual explanation or more information? How do theorists such as Sontag, Barthes, and Mitchell see the use of images? In responding to these questions, this work will provide an analysis of how visual literacy is exercised within our daily lives and through several theorists' interpretation. The goal of this presentation is to engage web viewers with how they interpret images and how a theoretical framework supports those interpretations.

A Web site will be created that will include interactive and theoretical components that demonstrate how "new" media and "old" media can combine to be productive facets of the proactive classroom.

Prospective audience: students and teachers of visual rhetoric, especially instructors who want to incorporate "new media" and visual rhetoric into the classroom but are unsure of the theories, books, images, or assignments available. This website will not only provide an interactive interpretive experience for the casual viewer, but will also provide instructors with an introduction to visual rhetoric and photography through (text)book reviews, helpful links, as well as entry-level assignments that have proven effective in the classroom.