Assignment Page

Essay:
The Cultural Work of an Image

In this last assignment, you will write an essay about the cultural work of an image.

The Choice of Image

You can choose an image from the present day or from history. It should be a public image that circulated via print or online. The image may be an independent work like a painting, part of another work like a magazine or album cover or an advertisement, or a screen shot from a video or film. In the case of video or film, the shot you choose to analyze should be emblematic of the cultural work enacted by the whole piece, and lend itself to the kinds of "close reading" described below.

The Basics

Write an five-to-seven-page essay analyzing a single image. Talk about the image in terms not simply of what it shows--as if it were just a window through which we were viewing the subject--but as an example of cultural work that the creator of the image is performing, intentionally or not.

Your printed essay should include a copy of your image (black-and-white is okay).

What is Cultural Work?

Cultural work is the process by which images or writings enable individuals in a culture

* to rehearse new shared structures of feeling, thinking, and acting or

* to reinforce current patterns of feeling, thinking or acting

which history has made necessary.

A THUMBNAIL DEFINITION OF CULTURE:
shared ways of thinking, feeling, and acting.

Culture thus determines what practices or ideas are normal, natural, and common-sensical among members of a group, and what is idiosyncratic, private, strange, retrograde, or "other."

What the Essay Should Do

To explain the cultural work of the image as something actively constructed by a particular audience at a particular time, your essay should discuss the image in four ways:

informatively, providing an historical and social context in which the image was produced, presented, received, circulated, and consumed, which includes...

...the story of the cultural moment for a specific audience
(For instance, the image might be part of the process of an audience struggling to maintain a sense of order and stability, or chafing under the status quo which to them is the dead weight of the past, or they might be tenuously approaching new norms, new feelings, new ideas that seem simultaneously threatening and promising. Susan Sontag's book offers models of this kind of analysis of the how images achieve meaning in their interaction with historical and cultural contexts.)

critically and culturally using ideas, quotations, and examples from Sontag

aesthetically and formally using McCloud, or class discussion of camera work and composition in the "Motion Graphic Title Sequence" assignment) which control and condition point of view, judgments, impressions, etc.

informationally and analytically (to the degree this is appropriate), using principles, ideas, and examples from Tufte

Opening the Essay

Introduce your image and its context. Work into the opening a thesis—that is, a moment in the introduction when you explicitly say what ultimately you want your reader to take from the essay about the cultural work of your chosen image.

Social Context of the Image

To discuss the cultural work of a picture from the news, from an advertisement, from an album cover, etc. you'll need to discover and discuss the image's context, which might include:

who made the image and perhaps when/where,

where the image was/is originally presented,

what audience the image was intended for

the "cultural moment" of the image (what the subject matter signified when it was first presented

an historical sense of how the audience at the time would have interpreted the image.

cultural and historical readings of the image of the kind Sontag demonstrates

Analysis and Critique

Once you've established the cultural context of the image, you're ready to look specifically at how the image itself performs its cultural work within that context.

Select, explain, and apply critical ideas, principles, techniques and examples from our semester's readings. Think of this aspect of the essay as your opportunity to demonstrate what you've learned from these readings in an active and specific way with this one image.

Larger Conclusion of Big Question

You'll end the essay with a conclusion that brings your analysis to a satisfying conclusion and highlights a topic suitable for further thought and discussion.

A good technique for conclusions is to end by giving the reader something extra or new (but still relevant) that hasn't already been presented in the paper.

In this essay, I would like you to end with a specific observation, insight, question, or issue concerning the larger subject of our class: the nature, functions, and history of "visual culture" (or perhaps the visual culture of the particular genre of your image).

This observation, question, or insight should be something that writing your paper led you to think about, and which could lead to further thoughts and discussion about

how images mean
how particular visual genres operate (for example, comics, or film, or internet memes, or informational/analytical graphics)
how visual texts (as opposed to verbal ones) function in and affect society
how a particular principle or technique from our reading could be expanded, extrapolated, or generalized to apply to understanding larger topics or cultural issues.

I would like to use some of the conclusions from your papers as the basis for questions included in our final exam.

A Note on Style and Voice

As you introduce your image, your critical sources and other elements required by the assignment, try to speak of them as if they were a natural part of your argument or discussion. Try not to refer to the assignment, or imply that you're analyzing this image or using these sources because you have to (even though you do).

For example, if you say "The image I've chosen to analyze is...," you're suggestion that the choice of an image has somehow been forced upon you. Better to start by talking about why the image is interesting and significant, as if you just couldn't help but write an essay about it.

Remember to number and double space your pages.

Citation and Documentation

Be sure to cite sources and page numbers (parenthetically in the text) and document those sources (in a "Works Cited" section at the end) using MLA format. Cite any quotations, paraphrased ideas or unique information you use from those sources. Also include a Works Cited entry for the source of your image.

Presentations and Their Relationship to the Final Exam

You will give a presentation to the class about your image and the insights you've gained about the cultural work it performs (or performed) for a specified audience. You will use a Wiki on the Moodle site to sign up for a particular time slot on one of the days set aside for presentations.

To get full credit for the assignment, I will ask you to attend all days of in-class presentations.

One Key Idea or Term

In discussing your image and analysis, your presentation should also highlight a critical term/idea from the semester's readings and conversations (principally, Sontag, Tufte, or McCloud). In demonstrating how and why the idea was useful to you in analyzing your image, you can show us how and why the term/idea is critically revealing or suggestive.

For instance, if you found McCloud's discussion of the term "icon" useful in writing your paper, you might choose that term to spotlight in your presentation: what McCloud's purpose is in introducing the idea in his book, what specifically McCloud says (or visually explains) about it and its significance, how the idea is key to understanding something about how images work in relation to culture, consciousness, identity, or some other big idea that's important to you).

Alternatively, rather than spotlighting just one term or idea, you can also highlight a pairing of terms that worth together (in a dichotomy or opposition, for example).

What your and your classmates' presentations highlight from our semester will help determine the focus and content of the final exam. In that sense, your presentation should demonstrate "one really valuable critical term that I learned in this class, as demonstrated with an analysis of one image."

General Guidelines for the Presentation

run from 6 to 8 minutes total
show the image that you analyzed (Post images and links needed for your presentation in the Moodle forum "Presentation Resources," which you will be able to access from the podium's computer)
introduce and describe the cultural context that you used in your essay to analyze the image, the cultural theme you identified, and the particular cultural group for whom this image was or is meaningful at a certain moment
use critical ideas, principles, techniques, and examples from our semester's readings to demonstrate their power to define, redefine, re-envision, explain, reframe, transform, etc.
explain and elaborate the significance and critical usefulness of a principle, idea, or analytical technique from the semester which is suggested by your image and you discussion of it, and which would serve as an especially interesting topic for further discussion or thought (such as on the final exam).