The authors say, "The distinctive problem for a liberal-democratic society in such crises is that any political response has to be designed to meet needs defined in the aggregate, while still maintaining ideological commitment to the primacy of the individual" (88). They also say that "description of an individual's experience is the standard lead-in for any feature news story" (90). Here, I wondered not only about the effectiveness or the need of journalists to balance out their focus on more universal or wide-ranging issues with the focus on particular subjects, but more specifically how this tendency functions in publications as a whole. For instance, maybe several front page stories about government policy, the weather and local schools might be balanced out with a page 2 feature on specific individuals. Maybe this, in part, is the function of feature pieces (which also seem to be some of the easiest pieces to botch or make overly saccharin). There was an ongoing feature at the paper called "The Storyteller." The feature was usually devoted to an older member of the community's story (and, in a small, rural town many of the stories shared themes such as church, hard work, focusing on family)... what always struck me about these pieces, though, was the accompanying artwork, which tended toward portrait-like shots, highly detailed (realism over flattering shots) that seemed to, in some ways, echo the tone of "Migrant Mother." I had never thought about "The Storyteller" feature functioning to balance out the paper's necessary attention to stories about groups, stories about the impact on the entire city or county. Above Photo by Ken Ruinard, Independent-Mail, Anderson, S.C.
Overall, this book's case studies of iconic photographs were fascinating. One of the first questions to come to mind, however, is whether it is possible today for photographs to achieve an iconic status to the same degree that the photos discussed in the text have. Throughout, the authors refer to "print media" and the ways in which photographs function in print. Although the authors also use references to Google image searches to make some of their points about the recirculation of the photos, so far I found that the text left me wondering what the authors thought about the impact of digital forms of media. Additionally, and related to this question of how the internet might change the potential of images to achieve iconic status, is the authors' suggestion that there is still a definable difference between a public and a private culture.
They say, "Public culture includes oratory, posters, print journalism, literary and other artistic works, documentary films, and other media as they are used to define audiences as citizens, uphold norms of political representation and institutional transparency, and promote general welfare" (26).
The authors' model of the public sphere in this way ("other media") does seem to account for the influence of new forms; however, I would argue that the continual lessening of privacy and permeation of the mechanisms of surveillance have changed how the divisions that once existed between public and private once functioned.
They say, "Democratic publics need emotional resources that have to be communicated through the public media. That, and not the masses' childish yearning for enchantment, is why the public media include images" (36). To this I would add that the public media include images to turn a profit. Yes, maybe we have a collective unconscious desire for the affective nature of the photograph, but it is the attachment of a monetary value to the fulfillment of this need and not the desire to fulfill the need itself that seems to drive decisions of the "public media." In other words, "if it bleeds, it leads."
In chapter 3 "The Borders of the Genre," the authors discuss a statue at Disney World that is a play on the "Times Square Kiss" photograph. This was especially interesting to me considering Mitchell's claim in Picture Theory that we are in the "new world order of the theme park." Again, I would be interested in exploring further the connection between the mediation, through the theme park or maybe specifically through the Disney corporation, of how we view U.S. military policy.
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