Photojournalism Talk on Campus

From the In Box …

Dr. John Lucaites of Indiana University will be delivering a talk on Friday, February 6 from 4-5 pm in 214 Terrell Hall entitled “Boots and Hands: Photojournalism and Democratic Public Culture.” The talk is part of the Department of Speech Communication’s Colloquium Series.

Dr. Lucaites has made an undeniable impact in the study of how images and icons circulate through the culture. His most recent book, No Caption Needed (co-authored with Robert Hariman), has received enormous interdisciplinary acclaim in this regard. W.J.T. Mitchell called the book “the starting point for any future attempt to deal with the problem of the iconic photograph and its social uses.”

Dr. Lucaites is a professor at Indiana University with appointments in Communication and Culture, American Studies, Cultural Studies, and is a fellow at the Poynter Center for Ethics and American Institutions.

Some further detail regarding the talk itself:

Photojournalism is a vital public art for a democratic public culture, but not because it provides what we ordinarily understand to be “news.” Rather, we believe that it does its work by helping us to see and to be seen as citizens. In this essay we examine the recurring visual trope of “boots and hands” in everyday photojournalistic practices, focusing on how it provides an iconography for thinking about political character, relationships, and events. A subsidiary argument concerns how the specific practice functions as a remediation of the role of bodily gesture in classical rhetoric and the 17th and 18th century elocutionary movement.