No Caption Needed: Iconic Photographs, Public Culture, and Liberal Democracy »

Robert Hariman is professor of communication at Northwestern University and the author of Political Style: The Artistry of Power. John Louis Lucaites is professor of communication and culture at Indiana University. He is coauthor of Crafting Equality: America’s Anglo-African World.

A gaunt woman stares into the bleakness of the Great Depression. An exuberant sailor plants a kiss on a nurse in the heart of Times Square. A naked Vietnamese girl runs in terror from a napalm attack. An unarmed man stops a tank in Tiananmen Square. These and a handful of other photographs have become icons of public culture: widely recognized, historically significant, emotionally resonant images that are used repeatedly to negotiate civic identity. But why are these images so powerful? How do they remain meaningful across generations? What do they expose—and what goes unsaid?
            In No Caption Needed, Robert Hariman and John Louis Lucaites provide the definitive study of the iconic photograph as a dynamic form of public art. Their critical analyses of nine individual icons explore the photographs themselves and their subsequent circulation through an astonishing array of media, including stamps, posters, billboards, editorial cartoons, TV shows, Web pages, tattoos, and more. As these iconic images are reproduced and refashioned by governments, commercial advertisers, journalists, grassroots advocates, bloggers, and artists, their alterations throw key features of political experience into sharp relief. Iconic images are revealed as models of visual eloquence, signposts for collective memory, means of persuasion across the political spectrum, and a crucial resource for critical reflection.
            Arguing against the conventional belief that visual images short-circuit rational deliberation and radical critique, Hariman and Lucaites make a bold case for the value of visual imagery in a liberal-democratic society. No Caption Needed is a compelling demonstration of photojournalism’s vital contribution to public life.

Diamond Anniversary Book Award

James A. Winans-Herbert A. Wichelns Memorial Award for Distinguished Scholarship in Rhetoric and Public Address

— National Communication Association

List of Illustrations     vii
Acknowledgments     ix
Introduction     1
Public Culture, Icons, and Iconoclasts     25
The Borders of the Genre: Migrant Mother and the Times Square Kiss     49
Performing Civic Identity: Flag Raisings at Iwo Jima and Ground Zero     93
Dissent and Emotional Management: Kent State     137
Trauma and Public Memory: Accidental Napalm     171
Liberal Representation and Global Order: Tiananmen Square     208
Ritualizing Modernity's Gamble: The Hindenburg and Challenger Explosions     243
Conclusion: Visual Democracy     287
Notes     307
Index     401