The Power of
VISUAL TEXT
Analyzing VISUAL TEXTS
• OPTIC
• Overview
• Parts
• Title
• Interrelationships
• Conclusions
OPTIC
• Overview: March 30,
1942, photo by Dorothea
Lange
• Parts: Signs: I am an
American; Sold; Grocery.
Car
• Title: Japanese Owned
Grocery Store, Oakland
• Interrelationships:
• Conclusions
Photography as an agent of
Social Change
• Poverty
• Child Labor abuses
• Racial injustices
• Homelessness
Jacob Riis
How the Other Half Lives
Photography as a political
statement
• The Burning Monk
• June 11, 1963
• http://www.lyfe.freeserve.co.uk/photobrow
ne.htm
Photographer Bernie Boston
• Bernie Boston is as much a legend in the
photographic world as his famous images. For
more than 40 years, he was part of the A-team
of photojournalists who grasped the essence of
“picturing history.” And although some of his
photographic assignments during his years at
the White House or for The Los Angeles Times
resembled a Who’s Who of the social and
political scene, Boston also managed to literally
seize the day—everyday—by recording the
commonplace elements of human existence.
Hands Across America
Flower Power
Tribute to comrades : Soldier places flags at gravestones in
Arlington National Cemetery for Memorial Day, 1988
Ernest Withers:
“Graphic Historian”
Tent City: 1960
In September 1960, after the crops were gathered, white landowners in
Fayette and Haywood counties forced black sharecroppers off their land
because they were trying to vote. Here a family prepares to move from
their sharecropper home to the Tent City erected for displaced farmers.
War Images
• Should gruesome images be censored?
• Should the public know the reality of war?
• Can photographs sway public opinion?
• Can photographs desensitize people to
the horrors of war?