5 pages
Writing to analyze a text, idea, experience, event, or phenomenon for an academic audience.
For this assignment, you will write about an image using the tool of close reading. Your essay should bring together your descriptive and analytical skills to examine what argument the image is making. Through this assignment you will practice selecting a rich text for interpretation, describing your subject vividly, interpreting visual evidence to draw a larger conclusion, and using sources to provide context.
Prompt
Use close analysis, research into rhetorical situation, and a quote from Sontag’s essay “In Plato’s Cave” to examine the argument a photograph of your choice is making.
Use MLA General Format.
Your essay should include:
The image you are interpreting (does not count toward your page count). Select an image that gives you a lot of material to consider and interpret.
A specific, arguable central claim focused on what close analysis reveals about the photograph.
A Sontag quote you selected—correctly cited and integrated smoothly into your essay.
Analysis of the relationship between Sontag’s claim and the image you have chosen. Sontag’s essay is about photography’s relationship to violence, power, and mortality–are these ideas present in the image you examined? How does your photograph reinforce, resist, or complicate one of Sontag’s ideas?
A vivid description of the image.
Close analysis of that image.
At least three sources that provide the rhetorical context for your image (its author, its subjects, its genre, the reason it was taken, the context into which it was published). These sources should be correctly cited, smoothly integrated into the text, and related to your claim. One of these sources must be peer reviewed.
An engaging and descriptive title.
Audience:
This paper should be written for a scholarly audience with an interest in visual culture and photography.
Tips:
For this assignment you can use photography from any genre except advertising.
If you are struggling with analysis, find another photograph of the same subject to use for comparison. This strategy can help illuminate some of the authorial choices the photographer made.
There are many image resources. You can use one of the photographers we have read about or discussed in class, do your own research, comb through Aperture, or look in the collections linked below.
https://www.icp.org/collections
https://www.loc.gov/collections/?fa=partof:prints+and+photographs+division
Some quotes from the Sontag I found compelling and might choose include
“In teaching us a new visual code, photographs alter and enlarge our notions of what is worth looking at and what we have a right to observe. They are a grammar and, even more importantly, an ethics of seeing.”
“Between photographer and subject, there has to be distance. The camera doesn’t rape, or even possess, though it may presume, intrude, trespass, distort, exploit, and, at the farthest reach of metaphor, assassinate—all activities that, unlike the sexual push and shove, can be conducted from a distance, and with some detachment.”
“To photograph people is to violate them, by seeing them as they never see themselves, by having knowledge of them they can never have; it turns people into objects that can be symbolically possessed. Just as the camera is a sublimation of the gun, to photograph someone is a sublimated murder—a soft murder appropriate to a sad, frightened time.”
“All photographs are memento mori. To take a photograph is to participate in another person’s (or thing’s) mortality, vulnerability, mutability. Precisely by slicing out this moment and freezing it, all photographs testify to time’s relentless melt.
“The quality of feeling, including moral outrage, that people can muster in response to photographs of the oppressed, the exploited, the starving, and the massacred also depends on the degree of familiarity with these images.”
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