Audience

The authors' No Caption Needed blog notwithstanding, we are talking about a printed book with a dust jacket, not an edition packaged as an e-book or software or website; thus, No Caption Needed might appear to be an unlikely choice for a review in a journal of rhetoric, technology, and pedagogy. The book ostensibly deals with only one of these three: rhetoric. However, Hariman and Lucaites examine a set of iconic photographs as well as their later manifestations in news media and popular culture. These analog images have been enhanced, manipulated, and collaged, often digitally, reinscribing their already layered meanings with new or additional meanings. For any scholar who is interested in visual rhetoric, photojournalism, popular culture, public discourse, performativity, or collective action, this text provides a wealth of insight into the ways that iconic photographs inform and are informed by the U.S. public culture. Professors of rhetoric and composition will find that the book provides a useful reading selection for a class that blends theory and application in visual rhetoric; the text employs a variety of theoretical models, yet proves to be an original synthesis of these models coupled with the authors' own insights and methods.