The Iwo Jima photo’s “compositional richness” (98) helps account for its subsequent appropriations within society over time. Like an original photograph or visual artifact, reproductions and appropriations of original works rely on social knowledge and reflect shifting contexts, and so the study of appropriations or reproductions that involve “copying, imitating, [or] satirizing” can make important contributions to visual rhetoric projects. Moreover, like the Iwo Jima Memorial at Arlington National Cemetery, appropriations need not take the form of solely textual media or visual photographs—they may involve sculpture, public art installations, or other forms of memorializing. While some reproductions retain the direct meaning of the original, as does the Iwo Jima Memorial, for example, others may stray from the original relationship between image and context, arguably creating a mystification of sorts. One of the more recent indirect appropriations of the Iwo Jima photo, for example, occurred just following the events of September 11, 2001, when reporter Thomas E. Franklin shot the now-iconic photo of the three firefighters raising the flag at ground zero.4
Aptly described by Hariman and Lucaites as a “profoundly visual event,” the terrorist attacks on the World Trade Center in Manhattan and the Pentagon in Washington, D.C. were immediately followed by a huge, multimodal media response that served as a “direct and comprehensive emotional response to the event,” joining “images of the destruction with depictions of the emotional reactions of ordinary people” (128). These large scale visual representations of responses to the disaster helped portray and constitute the public “as a unified nation whose civic virtue guaranteed triumph over disaster” (Hariman and Lucaites 128). One outcome of these visual narrative representations was that, by the close of the week, as Hariman and Lucaites put it, “a nationwide flag mania was underway” (128).
The public was soon inundated with images of the American flag both in the media and in everyday life; these images came to represent “fear and anger” on the one hand, and instances of patriotism and “civic pride” on the other (128). Soon, a photographic icon emerged from these images: that of the three firefighters raising the U.S. flag at the site of what was just formerly the World Trade Center. The public immediately recognized the image as reminiscent of the Iwo Jima photo. Even Thomas Franklin, the photographer who took the photo, saw the firefighters raising the flag “and thought, ‘Iwo Jima’” (Hill and Helmers 5). As Charles Hill and Marguerite Helmers describe, this photo demonstrates an instance of intertextuality, “the recognition and referencing of images from one scene to another” (5). Appropriations, for example, rely on intertextuality for their reception and tap into social knowledge in their ability to construct connections from one context to another. While the photo of the firefighters is now officially referred to as “Ground Zero Spirit,” a version of the image was initially captioned by People magazine as “‘an echo of Iwo Jima’” (Hariman and Lucaites 131). Like the Iwo Jima photo, say Hariman and Lucaites, the firefighters in the photo are “dominated by their anonymity and working class norms of hard physical labor, self-sacrifice, and loyalty” (132). In addition, like the Iwo Jima photo, the flag pole “cuts across the frame on the same diagonal [. . .] while the flag itself is moved upward by coordinated effort” (133). The background is bleak and empty and, like the Iwo Jima photo, the image itself does not depict war in progress, though “precipitating events and surrounding discourse might suggest otherwise” (133). While the context has shifted, the result is again the reflection of the American codes of public culture: “egalitarianism, nationalism, and civic republicanism” (Hariman and Lucaites 133). On the one hand, while a pervasive symbol such as the American flag carries with it particular “ideological formations such as nationalism,” it is also open to appropriation and serves not only as a means for perpetuating a particular normative mode but also allows for “inflection and critique” (135). Finnegan describes the way in which viewers bring their own contexts to bear on the interpretation of images. Likewise, one goal of Hariman and Lucaites’s discussion of the Ground Zero photo is to show how iconic photographs, rather than adhering to a “fixed meaning,” function as malleable resources that invite the public to construct connections and “coordinate available structures of identification within a performative space open to continued and varied articulation” (135).
Moreover, these articulations and appropriations need not be purely or traditionally visual in nature, and need not take the form of solely print media or photographs. That is, just as the Iwo Jima Memorial emerged as a direct appropriation of the original photo, following the emergence of the iconic Ground Zero Spirit photo, “there was an immediate call to establish a memorial park at ground zero in Manhattan that would include a statue of the firefighters raising the flag” (Hariman and Lucaites 129). Certainly, the events of September 11 set into effect their own course of memorializing.
In the days, weeks, and months following the attacks, the public witnessed and participated in various acts of memorializing that spanned modes of visual and material representation. Such activities included the creation of makeshift memorial spaces constructed by citizens, media documentaries and reports, and other objects of print and popular media. As L.J. Nicoletti describes, we were “consuming political rhetoric and visual forms of memorialization as never before” (56). To help her first-year writing students cope with the events of September 11 and respond to the types of memorialization they were witnessing in the mass media, for example, she developed an assignment in which her students designed their own memorials, thus enabling them to take part in what she calls the “language of memorial spaces” (56). While this is not a book about the rhetorics of public memory per se, it is clear that an interest in memorializing or commemoration often serves as a catalyst for the creation of many public sculptures, exhibits, and other multimodal displays or artifacts. When planning their own memorials in response to the events of September 11, for example, Nicoletti asked her students to consider design components such as “symbolism, setting, audience, scale, permanence, and inscription,” thus reflecting the idea that appropriation, intertextuality, and social knowledge are important components of commemoration (56). Moreover, the consideration of design elements such as scale and permanence speaks to the physicality and spatiality of rhetorical artifacts that are not only visual but also material in composition. Visual artifacts that are also tangible and spatial, and invite engagement not only with the mind but with the whole body, can then be understood as objects of material rhetoric.
Like projects of visual rhetoric, material rhetoric seeks to understand physical artifacts and sites such as memorials, parks, or green spaces, and even multimodal artifacts such as the GPS in the context of the questions of rhetorical theory, while also reconsidering rhetorical theory relative to the challenges brought about by the study of materially rhetorical artifacts. Like the projects of visual rhetoric, material rhetoric too seeks to uncover the power and knowledge dynamics related to the study of rhetorical artifacts that incorporate visual, textual, physical, spatial, or other multimodal components. The relationship between these different generic modes is likewise seen as inviting new interpretive possibilities. Finally, building on those criteria of visual rhetoric projects, and fully compatible with them, material rhetoric seeks to more explicitly understand the influence of rhetoric on the body.
As chapter two describes in more depth, material rhetorical analysis has at its core a focus on the impact of rhetorical artifacts on contextualized, bodily experience. Carole Blair’s approach to understanding material rhetoric, one that underpins much of the work of this book, provides a toolkit for analyzing visual texts that also have material and spatial components. In her landmark essay and important project of material rhetoric, “U.S. Memorial Sites as Exemplars of Rhetoric’s Materiality,” she begins from the point of acknowledging that within the field of rhetoric, “we lack an idiom for referencing talk, writing, or even inscribed stone as material”—that we struggle with “the lack of a materialist language about discourse” (17). To better understand rhetoric’s materiality, she examines five memorial sites: the Vietnam Veteran’s Memorial, the AIDS Memorial Quilt, the Civil Rights Memorial, Kent State University’s