Length:  1000 words

Due Dates:  8.13.14 (rough draft), 8.17.14 (final draft)

 

Throughout this class, we’ve used photography as a touchpoint and a useful analogy for talking about writing and rhetoric.  We’ve discussed what writing might look like in the context of an increasingly visual culture, how we might adapt our sentences and paragraphs and arguments in response to the proliferation of visual images, what goals writing might be able to accomplish that we usually associate photography with instead.  We’ve spent somewhat less time using photography as the object of our writing, as a thing worthy of analysis or attention in and of itself; we’ve spent less time

The goal of this unit is for you to train close, critical attention on some aspect, genre, situation, technology, or phenomenon having to do with photography or the visual image.  Rather than analyzing one particular image in detail, as you did during the visual/rhetorical analysis unit, here you are analyzing something somewhat broader—a category, a trend, a quality, an experience.  Maybe you are focusing on a particular photographic technology, or a particular genre of photography, or a particular way photos circulate.  Maybe you are examining some power dynamic inherent to particular kinds of photography.  Maybe you are looking at some photographic trend or Instagram hashtag, or examining the ethics of some photographic situation, or unpacking certain uses of photography in real-world contexts.  Maybe you are thinking through some relationship between photography and other kinds of art, or between photography and its subjects, or between photography and its practitioners.  You might think about what it means to be the photographer in a particular situation, or to be the subject of photography in a particular situation, or to be a consumer of certain kinds of photography.  Or about what it means to take certain kinds of pictures, or to distribute them, or to be surrounded by them.

Generally, I would suggest that you think of this assignment (not unlike any mode or genre of analysis) as having two components:  a subject and a method.  Your subject might be any of the above:  some phenomenon having to do with photography, with the way photos are taken/distributed/consumed, with how and why and when we take photos, and of what, with how we use photos and to what ends, with how/when/why we ourselves are photographed.  Your method might be any vocabulary, or combination of vocabularies, through which you discuss your subject:  ethical, political, economic/commercial, social, cultural, psychological, technological, artistic, rhetorical.  Think about what vocabularies might bring up new questions about your subject, what vocabularies allow you to say new and interesting things that haven’t been said before about your subject.  For instance:  we usually talk about surveillance in either political or technological terms.  What happens when we talk about surveillance as art, or about the psychology of surveillance (as either the surveiller or the surveilled), or about the culture of surveillance more broadly?  We usually talk about film stock in technological or aesthetic terms; what happens when we talk about it in political and social terms?

Critical analysis does not mean analysis that criticizes or casts aspersions or judges negatively, but rather analysis that focuses closely and attentively on the non-obvious dimensions of a thing.  What are the rhetorical dimensions, or the psychological dimensions, or the political dimensions of this genre of photograph or that hashtag or that technology?  To gain critical traction on a thing is to find the vocabularies that cast that thing in a new light, so that you might notice things no one else has noticed.  From your essay, readers should gain some insight into the phenomenon you’re writing about, some deeper sense of what it is, how it functions, what its ramifications are, and so on.  To train a critical eye on something is to subject it to a kind and level of attention it’s not usually subjected to by the average viewer.  You are not the average viewer; you are trained in critical thinking, analytical writing, visual rhetoric, and photography itself.  As such, you are well positioned to notice things that are not immediately apparent about some aspect of photography.

As always, you are more than welcome—encouraged, even—to include photos in your essay.  Examples of the kind of photography you’re talking about, or of photographs taken in a certain kind of situation, might go a long way toward fleshing out your analysis.  Maybe you even include photographs you take yourself, to illustrate something you’re talking about or to provide hypothetical counterexamples.  This is not a requirement, per se, but if it makes sense for your essay to include not just textual but photographic content, you should think seriously about what images might enrich your writing.