Robert Hariman and John Louis Lucaites,
No Caption Needed: Iconic Photographs, Public Culture, and Liberal Democracy.
Chicago and London: The University of Chicago Press, 2007.
ISBN: 978 0 226 31606 2
US$30.00 (hb)
419pp
(Review copy supplied by the University of Chicago Press)

One of my first experiences of photography as something to be looked at in itself was, as a child, finding at my grandparents’ house a book of images from Life magazine. It was my first time seeing photographs that are now very familiar: an astronaut standing on the moon, a defeated Olympic athlete sitting glumly in the shade, a naked child running screaming down the road. I’m sure you know this last one: it’s the photograph by Nick Ut of some children running towards the camera, four soldiers walking along behind them. The children are crying; the soldiers seem alert but unconcerned. In the centre is the girl, her arms outstretched. We know now that her name is Kim Phuc, that her village has just been accidentally napalm-bombed by South Vietnamese forces and that she suffered terrible burns. When I first saw this photo, though, I didn’t know this larger back-story. Instead I just looked at the picture and caption and wondered: why is she naked? Why is she running? She doesn’t look hurt. What’s napalm? And I kept looking at it. Maybe it was because the photo of children exposed and alone in their terror presented such a rift in normalcy. Maybe I was trying to understand why that girl in the centre, who would have been about my age, was screaming.

It’s this “strong emotional identification or response” (27, their italics) that Robert Hariman and John Louis Lucaites identify as being one characteristic of the iconic images that they analyse in No Caption Needed: Iconic Photographs, Public Culture, and Liberal Democracy. The book is not primarily a “behind the scenes” look at the lives of the actual people depicted in the photos (although it does a bit of this), nor is it a broad history of photojournalism (though it is aware of this context, and Hariman and Lucaites describe their chapters on individual images as “a history of moments” [20]). Their concern in this book is with influence that a particular group of photographs has on public culture and political discourse. Much of this discourse is maintained and circulated by the mass media, and the predominant approach to analysing images in that context is one that privileges textual literacy and is suspicious about the value of images, positing them mainly as a means of social control and obfuscation (Susan Sontag and Neil Postman are cited as examples of this tendency). Hariman and Lucaites do acknowledge the potential for images to operate as spectacular displays of hegemonic power or elements of exclusionary ideologies, but they keep these concerns in the background while working to demonstrate that “iconic photographs can operate as a legitimate form of public address” (40).

The other characteristics of iconic images in Hariman and Lucaites’ schema is that they “are widely recognized and remembered, are understood to be representations of historically significant events [ . . . ] and are reproduced across a range of media, genres, or topics” (27, their italics). For these reasons the images they choose are probably familiar: the Accidental Napalm photo I mentioned earlier, Dorothea Lange’s depression-era Migrant Mother photo, the sailor kissing the nurse in Times Square during victory celebrations in 1945, the flag-raising on Iwo Jima, a subsequent flag-raising by firemen at Ground Zero, the distraught young woman with the dead student at the Kent State shootings, the man in front of the tanks at Tiananmen Square, and the Hindenburg and Challenger explosions.

Hariman and Lucaites’ method is thorough. They don’t settle for a content analysis of the images but do a close reading of them that considers their visual and graphic qualities and resonances. For example, they explain that the photograph of the shooting of a student by National Guardsmen at Kent State University from 1970 “focuses directly on the distraught girl in the centre of the frame, and there on the expression of anguish created by her face and outstretched arms” (140). This is not just personal pain that she is expressing, it’s an indication of the “profound social rupture that has occurred” (141); American citizens ought not to be shot by their own soldiers. The emotion is emphasised by the girl’s kneeling stance; a gesture akin to a “soldier kneeling beside a fallen comrade, a woman grieving aloud” or “a supplicant begging for mercy”. These “allusions can each bear a deep current of feeling” (141). The image does not just call up raw emotion though. The girl’s address is to a space just to the side of the camera, along a

vector reinforced by the diagonal across the picture frame and by the line formed by the massed figures to her left. These literal vectors denominate an abstract space, one in which we suppose there are the Guardsmen who represent the state. (143)

The interpellation is directed at the authorities (“how could you do this?”) but also at us, placed at a point of critical reflection. Siding with the authorities opens us to her anguish and fury, and if we empathise with her, “we are drawn into an emphatic relationship with a person in pain and also into a scene of political action and indeterminacy corresponding to the open space behind her” (143). This reading of the photograph itself, coupled with a wider analysis of the various appropriations over time of the image by artists and activists, sees the image as both an “empathy for the dead” that “is a sure metaphor for civic solidarity” (159), and a “performance of grief” which “can be model of embodied citizenship” (149).

It’s towards the realm of political participation that Hariman and Lucaites’ analysis ultimately leans: “the iconic photograph transforms a record of a specific event into a structure for political identity” (147). So the Kent State photo, for example, with its emotional core, can serve to generate public engagement with questions of dissent and justice (while also being a caution about the fragility of democracy). The photographs in No Caption Needed also serve as models of citizenship, calls to public action, catalysts to “stranger relationality that constitutes, extends, and empowers public life” (207), embodiments of global relationships, and a means of visualising “‘modernity’s gamble’” (244) with the dangers and benefits of technology. The meaning and uses of the images aren’t posited as unproblematic ideals, though. Imagine the Times Square kiss being enacted by a black sailor and white nurse, for example. Impossible, you say? Indeed, the social landscape of 1945 America would have had to have been quite different. But the analysis of the image that does exist, as well as adaptations like a New Yorker cover of two (male) sailors kissing, reveals some of the constituent elements of public discourse that can then be reframed critically.

For Hariman and Lucaites the photographs negotiate a tension in American public life between democracy and liberalism. The uses to which the Tiananmen Square image has been put, for instance, with the individual standing up to oppression, tend to displace other more democratic and participatory image possibilities from the same event. That is to say, in place of messy crowds in democratic solidarity, we have a lone figure upon whom ideals of individual consumer consumption can adhere. This is not the only possible reading of the image, but Hariman and Lucaites remain concerned about this tendency towards a dominant individualism that the more recent iconic photographs signal:

the icons of U.S. public culture increasingly underwrite liberalism more than they do democracy, and we believe this imbalance threatens progressive social and economic policies and ultimately democracy itself.(19)

This quotation should make two things clear: firstly that No Caption Needed is in part itself a political project rather than detached analysis, and secondly that it emerges out of and concerns itself with an American context. That the book evinces this particular viewpoint does not disqualify it from being exemplary scholarship (in fact, one of its strengths is the way that its detailed analyses inform its stated political engagement). This book makes a strong case for visual practices being part of the legitimate modes of public discourse and scholarly attention. Print might be the exemplary medium for “disembodied assertion, systematic organization of ideas, and dispassionate tone” but this also means that “other media become necessary, since such virtues often are insufficient to motivate collective action” (14). For Hariman and Lucaites, public life is also “a way of seeing” (302). Their detailed and nuanced approach is an object lesson in the analysis of visual culture. Their interpretive method owes a debt to a range of “sophisticated work in cultural studies, semiotics, and other disciplines”, but they deftly don’t let it dominate the study at hand: “It is tempting to buy tools you don’t need while working with materials that are largely prefabricated. No wonder the results so often look the same” (28). I found myself hopping between the main text and footnotes, eager to see both the related points they were making and the range of scholarship they were drawing on. Hariman and Lucaites have also started a blog, at http://www.nocaptionneeded.com, as a way of maintaining the book’s wide-ranging and valuable discussion about photography and politics.

In addition, the fact that it is American in its scope and address does not render No Caption Needed irrelevant to those outside the disciplines of American Studies or U.S. politics or history. Again, the quality of its analyses is one reason for this. The other is the sheer recognisability and resonance of the images that it deals with. No Caption Needed deserves to be read widely for its careful readings of images, its rich scholarship, and its intelligent engagement with visual culture and public discourse.

Mike Lim,
Flinders University.

Created on: Sunday, 9 December 2007