Julia Margaret Cameron challenged Victorian social hierarchy in her photographic portraits of women. Instead of portraying the rich and famous, she often chose as subjects servants or peasants from her home on the Isle of Wight, dressing them in period costumes to represent religious or classical characters. She also chose as sitters members of her own family, including Julia Stephens, the mother of Virginia Wolfe. Unlike the popular photographs of the day, which depicted women as tranquil and expressionless, Cameron’s portraits depicted her sitters as pensive, longing, or suffering (Wolf). Frances Benjamin Johnston flouted the gender norms of the same era by photographing herself with beer mug, cigarette, and petticoats hiked up to her knees, as if engaged in debate with an imaginary partner or with the portraits of men arranged on her fireplace mantel (Figure 2). Contemporary artist Cindy Sherman has photographed herself posing in a variety of settings that depict the restricted roles available to women.
Current tensions and ambiguities arising from the outworking of women’s emancipation are alluded to in J. Cherie Strachan and Kathleen E. Kendall’s study of convention films viewed during the 2000 U.S. presidential election. Strachan and Kendall note that the presentation of George W. Bush as a “kinder and gentler” Bush candidate and the choice to downplay his position as Governor of Texas and to focus on Laura and Barbara rather than on George Senior—that is, “to distance [George W.] Bush from stereotypical masculine institutions and activities”—may have been intentional strategies to gain favor with women voters, who had not yet proved a reliable base of support, and to distance him from his father, so that the son would seem “his own man” (150).
As Diane S. Hope explains, “Like verbal rhetoric, visual rhetoric depends on strategies of identification; advertising’s rhetoric is dominated by appeals to gender as the primary marker of consumer identity. Constructs of masculine and feminine contextualize fantasies of social role, power, status, and security” (155). Hope’s study of advertising images that appropriate feminine (passive, fertile, receptive) and masculine (active, dominating, aggressive) iconographies in natural settings notes that this “rhetoric of gendered environments works to obscure the connections between environmental degradation and consumption” (156). According to Hope, advertising that incorporated natural images before the mechanical revolution tended to present the earth as a powerful mother; later images, on the other hand, presented the earth as a sexualized other awaiting exploitation. Viewers in the United States respond favorably to the latter because so many of us have intent and means to use the earth’s resources as we see fit. At the same time, women viewers are disempowered by omnipresent advertising imagery that equates femininity with an idealized physical presence and an undernourished agency (173).
Science Studies
Elizabeth Tebeaux records in “From Orality to Textuality: Technical Description and the Emergence of Visual and Verbal Presentation” that before the explosion of print technology, the visual in technical contexts was much more closely aligned with orality than with discourse. That the usefulness of visual representation to instruction already was recognized helps explain its ready adoption in the earliest print manuscripts on technical subjects. According to Tebeaux, “the increasingly integrated verbal and visual presentation of objects and concepts captured and molded into text” has been a feature of English technical communication since at least the time of Chaucer, and bivocality had emerged as conventional by 1640 (176).
Goggin states that by the late 1600s, the craft of embroidered samplers “was on the cusp of a radical shift from invention to demonstration of knowledge” (101), an observation confirming that utilitarianism was gaining momentum in England with the increasing use of the printing press. At this time, a revolution fueled by the burgeoning need for informative text among newly literate and upwardly mobile readers was occurring in the use and the construction of images. Two centuries before, Leonardo had resurrected the cadaver as an object of scrutiny, and as a result anatomical representations appeared vitalized. As the technology of visual reproduction evolved—as copyists no longer were depended upon to reproduce illustrations; as copper etchings, which allowed for much greater detail work than woodcuts had, became the norm; and as three-point perspective became widely used and understood—the possibility for verisimilitude exploded. As illustrators struggled to create ever-more convincingly realistic representations, a technical culture in which a vast audience of readers relied increasingly on illustrated texts, at the expense of the oral tradition, emerged (Tebeaux, “Emergence,” passim).
Bruno Latour and Steve Woolgar argue in Laboratory Life: The Construction of Scientific Facts that the scientific method arose not from a new way of thinking, but from a new way of seeing. According to these authors and others, the scientific and technical project, out of which has arisen industrial and now postmodern culture, is profoundly indebted to the reproducibility and, most crucially, the contrastibility of visual artifacts forming what these authors consider to be the ultimate basis of scientific claims. Supporting the significance of visual contrastibility to science, Helmers notes “the developing importance of sight, seeing, and collecting visual objects” during the Enlightenment (emphasis ours; Pears and Jardine, 71–72).
Scientific representations remain, however, thoroughly constructed, thoroughly rhetorical—a fact all too easy for viewers to forget. Paul Dombrowski records in “Ernst Haeckel’s Controversial Visual Rhetoric” how the German naturalist and illustrator of the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries deliberately misrepresented the embryos of a variety of animals and humans in his line drawings, presumably to substantiate his theory of monism, which viewed science as “including areas of knowledge usually not associated with science, such as religion, ethics, and politics” (305). His broad definition of science appealed to leaders of the Nazi movement because it could be used to promote the idea of national history and identity. Ultimately, Haeckel’s work was implicated in the propaganda efforts of the Nazis, who propounded social Darwinism. His theories were debunked, but not before many textbooks in the United States and elsewhere had incorporated his illustrations; recently, they have become evidence for some creationists in their critique of evolutionary biology.
Today, scientist-photographers commonly accept as legitimate an array of rhetorical practices including but by no means limited to colorizing, selecting, and retouching. Anne R. Richards addresses scientific license in “Argument and Authority in the Visual Representations of Science” by deconstructing a series of images appearing in one figure in the American Journal of Botany: 19 photomicrographs and, curiously, one line drawing created to replace a photographic image. According to Nels Lersten, her interview subject and former editor of the journal, such a drawing might constitute an instance of “nature-faking” because the original photograph required enhancement if it was to be mustered in support of the author’s claim. Just as among the readers of advertising it is understood that photography illustrates a product in an ideal state, among expert readers of science it is understood that photographic images represent a claim in its most persuasively constructed visual form.
Technical and Professional Communication
“A Historical Look at Electronic Literacy: Implications for the Education of Technical Communicators,” Cynthia L. Selfe and Gail E. Hawisher’s article on the uses of electronic communication at the end of the twentieth century, predicts that rapid changes will continue to occur and that technical communicators will need to learn and to apply the latest advances. But in a review of books he sees as primarily lauding the electronic age, Stephen Doheny-Farina warns that many consequences of this rapid change need assessment, among them the loss of direct communication among