Visual Literacy Author(s): Michael Lesy Source: The Journal of American History, Vol. 94, No. 1 (Jun.

, 2007), pp. 143-153 Published by: Organization of American Historians Stable URL: http://www.jstor.org/stable/25094783 . Accessed: 03/04/2014 12:08
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Visual

Literacy

Michael

Lesy

By now everyone knows that photographs do not tell simple truths. Especially if "truth" is defined as a state of certainty, a fixed point, euclidean, trigonometric. A point difficult
to reach, but conclusive.

are are different. polymorphously perverse entities. Protean Photographs Photographs data. Paradoxical both/and creatures. They resemble Tweedledum and Tweedledee stand Wonderland, ing at the crossroads in pointing in opposite directions, rolling their eyes earnest as a historian, asks inwhich direction the as while and grinning fiendishly Alice, as a went. white rabbit, truth, disguised The anthropologist Clifford Geertz talked about "deep structures" and "thick descrip tion," the pursuit ofmeanings beneath meanings, arrived at by an intense study of fecund particulars. "Doing anthropology," Geertz wrote, "is like trying to read a manuscript, for eign, faded, full of ellipses, incoherencies, suspicious emendations, and tendentious com
. . written . not in conventionalized graphs of sound, but in transient examples

mentaries

of shaped behavior." The founder of psychoanalysis, Sigmund Freud, in his heroic self analysis, The Interpretation ofDreams, spoke of "manifest content" and "latent content." what the dreamer saw and heard, what he witnessed; "latent" is "Manifest," said Freud, is the "dream work"
revised at the very moment,

itself, itsmultiple meanings,

in the very act, of

condensed,
being

displaced,

transformed, and

remembered.1

ifphotographs were analogous to Freud's dreams and Geertz's "manuscript, for full of ellipses"?What if Geertz's "deep structures" and Freud's "dream work" faded, eign, alluded to the bones ofmeaning thatmove beneath every photograph's rosy skin?To dis sect is every historian's temptation. But what if a con photograph iswedded, form and if the only way to understand a tent, aesthetic object and encoded information?What whole, to respond to it empathically and analytically, to ex photograph fully is to see it to in it order perience decipher it? in the history of printing, the educated elite communicated complex ideas in Early books illustratedwith woodcuts and accompanied by brief, enigmatic texts. Such images, were called emblems. Such with or without texts, images seemed to show one thing?for to instance, a queen holding a sieve full of water, from which no water leaked?when, What
Michael Lesy is professor of literary journalism at Hampshire College. The final portion of this essay and the se quence of photographs were adapted from Angel's World: The New York Photographs ofAngelo Rizzuto (New York, 2006). Readers may contact Lesy at mlesy@hampshire.edu. 1973), 181. 10; Sigmund Freud, The Inter

1 Clifford Geertz, The Interpretation ofCultures: Selected Essays (New York, Dreams, trans.A. A. Brill (1910; Whitefish, 2004), 111, 115-16, pretation of

June

2007

The Journal ofAmerican History 143

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144 The Journal ofAmerican History

June

2007

those who had eyes to see, the images revealed something more, in this example, Queen Bess, Elizabeth Regina, England's Virgin Queen, whole but not intact, officially, but not actually, virginal.
Emblems, rebuses, picture puzzles?what if those arcane things were also analogous to

photographs? Images, scatteredwith clues. Images built around symbols. Allusive images. Visual texts that have to be interrogated, unpacked, unfolded, opened up, and opened
out.

The multiple

and private fears and as truths embedded in a single photograph?public an like sumptions, aspirations and convictions that lie just beneath image's surface?are the parts of amachine, waiting to be activated by a viewer's gaze. Blink once, blink twice, look, then look again, and themachine begins to transmit messages. "his The classic way to decipher and then to use an image's quicksilver meanings?the an a to to in channel dike around method?is build art" them, them, tory using image's contexts. Knowledge of thewho, what, where, when, and why of an image, knowledge of
the circumstances of a photograph's making and maker, its users, promulgators, and audi

ence, will permit an investigator to understand and use an image in a scholarly way. Pen nies in one pile, dimes in another, nickels here, quarters there.A jar full of loose change becomes a bank deposit. Or a monograph. one scholarly problem?the need to sort out an image's multiple meanings? Solving a matter how mundane, utilitarian, or circumscribed a view of others. No clear opens a sentence. Images are forms of sensory data, an not is image photograph's origins may be, matter how judicious and objective a historian fancies processed by the right brain. No a herself, photograph will elicit projections and associations in her, stir her imagination, before she even notices what ishappening to her. A photograph "is a function, an experi ence, not a thing," saidMinor White, a mid-twentieth-century photographer whom Walt Whitman would have recognized as a fellow poet. "Cameras are farmore impartial than their owners and employers,"White went on to say. "Projection and empathy [are] natu
ral attributes part of in man. . . . the photograph invariably functions as a mirror of at least some the viewer."2

historians are likely challenging: The photographs that social and cultural to find interesting?images that reveal more about theirmakers, first users, and audi not exist inmodest numbers. The problem ences than such people ever intended?do is not that there are too few images, but too many. Historical photographs exist in huge numbers, inwell-ordered collections, presided over by knowledgeable curators. More and more of the collections are being digitized. Overload and saturation are only a mouse Even more

click away. One example: in the Prints and Photographs Division of the Library of Congress there are 164,000 black-and-white photographs made between 1935 and 1945 by photogra War Information. Farm Security Administration and theOffice of phers employed by the to World War II" is searchable The online collection "America from theGreat Depression names of the photographers who made the the and names, subject categories, using place in the California Museum of Photography, housed in the li images.3 Another example:
2 psa Journal, 29 Minor White, "Equivalence: The Perennial Trend," 3 to World War II: Photographs "America from theGreat Depression (July 1963), 17, 20. from the fsa-owi, 1935-1945," Library of

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Visual Literacy 145

______________^l^^ll__^____________H_______________i

ofAngelo Rizzuto, New York City. August 1957.Photo by Self-portrait Angelo Rizzuto.
Courtesy 57-8-12. Library of Congress, Prints and Photographs Division, Anthony Angel Collection,

are 350,000 brary of theUniversity of California at Riverside, there "Stereographs of the Americas" made between 1892 and 1963 by theKeystone View Company ofMeadville, is keyword searchable.4 And, as a Pennsylvania. The online "Keystone-Mast Collection" final example: in the New York Public Library's Digital Gallery, there are 26,000 color in photographs, made in 1999, of every block and neighborhood south of Canal Street a were artist Stone. named Dylan The online Manhattan. The images made by conceptual collection is called "Drugstore Photographs; or,A Trip along theYangtze River, 1999."5 as the size, variety, and accessibility of those collections may be, they are just Daunting three examples of themany archival photographic collections that exist in libraries,mu seums, and state historical societies throughout theUnited States. Taken together, those
image collections?online or not?constitute a sea of information.

at the ready,waiting for scholars to ask them for assistance. In professionals have stood stead, amateur genealogists ask them for pictures of ancestors or hometowns; free-lance researchers employed by publishers ask them for illustrations. Few, very few, scholars ask

than fifty years, such collections of historical photographs have been acces sioned, cataloged, conserved, and transferred from one form of information storage, re trieval, and access to another. Generations of archivists have lived out their professional livesmoving images from file drawers tomicrofilm reels, from microfilm to microfiche, frommicrofiche to laser discs, and from laser discs to hard drives. For fifty years, those For more

American Memory, http://memory.loc.gov/ammem/fsowhome.html. Congress: 4 "Permanent Collections: Keystone-Mast Collection," University of California, Riverside/ California Museum of ucr. edu/. http: //www.cmp. Photography, 5 A Lower New Manhattan the 1999: or, Block-by-Block," Trip along Yangtze River, "Drugstore Photographs; York Public Library, http://digitalgallery.nypl.org/nypldigital/explore/dgexplore.cfm?topic=all&collection=Drug 176. storePhotographs&col_id=

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146 The Journal ofAmerican History

June

2007

^^^^^^Bliii:::

*' -y ^ vrA^^P^^^SfflpBBBBHHIH

New York City rooftops, with Sofia BrothersFireproofStorage Warehouse building on with the sign "U.S. Bonded and Free." September 1959.Photo byAngelo Rizzuto. the left Prints and Division, Collection, Anthony Photographs CourtesyLibrary ofCongress, Angel
59-9-18.

curators to help them explore thewhole of any of those collections?collections that em structures and that human documents. the dense typifyepic body deep descriptions

answer may be matter how well-motivated and well Why? One self-preservation. No intentioned a scholar may be, no matter how curious or earnest that historian is, entering and immersing oneself in any large collection of images can be overwhelming. Even if a researcher were adequately trained?such training will be discussed below?prolonged hour after sustained hour, day after day, image after image, produces a photo research, to state ofwakeful that is, say the least, disorienting. Historians, trained to read dreaming an to read and write?from and write?and early age avoid photo archives theway only not know how to swim avoid thewater. who do people

learned from the practice of photography will enable historians to enter an image archive, sort through it, select an array of representative images and then edit them to form sequences that resemble the storyboards of films. Through the use of juxtaposition, can be built to reflect and com counterpoint, and thematic variation, visual narratives ment on the sum of images in even the largest archival collections. Such visual narratives Lessons use as scholarly essays use to as quoted excerpts plead primary quotes much single images their case. The interstitial comments, explanations, and arguments that frame quoted excerpts in an essay are not missing from a photo sequence. Instead, if the image progres sions of a sequence are well planned and well constructed, the arguments and explana tions that usually appear in print will play out in themind of the sequence's "reader." The question is: articulate, erudite scholars?especial Why should scholars?literate, one has to to take in learn need scholars interested ly photo research, photographs? No

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Visual Literacy 147

suggested that art historians interested in particular painters, printmakers, or sculp tors practice their subjects' media before writing about them and their art. Archives are archives. Research is research. The world is awash with images. Cameras are easy to use. Cameras are everywhere. Everyone has taken snapshots.Why waste time in an elementary course devoted to a popular medium? so The answer is: Most scholars?textually proficient?are visually illiterate. Basic vi sual literacy can be acquired by reading and looking, but the visual language of photogra like is best it. other learned any phy, by "speaking" language, Speaking it in the presence of someone who is fluent?an instructor. Speaking it in the presence of other begin ners?the photo class itself. To be specific, the skills and habits ofmind acquired by tak ing photographs on assignment in the realworld are applicable to the "taking" of photo to take a picture in the realworld? Press graphs while doing research in an archive. Decide to take a picture from a file in an archive? Pluck it out if it is a the shutter.Decide print; point and click if it is a digital replica. The same "eye" informs both "takings." Aesthetic judgment, visual acuity, visual memory and recall, the ability to look actively and intently at one skills are practiced by every photographer and every image after another?those There ismore: A digital camera can "make" a picture at almost the instant it takes it.A computer can command a printer tomake a hard copy of a digital image themo ment a mouse. researcher and clicks his and points photo Taking making have become almost one and the same. The result: Photographers and photo researchers can harvest
photo researcher.

ever

huge numbers of images. Those images must be edited. Such editing requires similar vi sual skills?acuity, memory, recall, and discrimination?no matter where the was image or researcher, know what to made or found. How does anyone, photographer keep and what to throw away? are informed by their experiences while on Photographers assignment?and by their out and conversation before into the field. Photo researchers have done they go reading their own due diligence before entering an archive. The choices theymake during their research are informed by their knowledge of thewho, what, where, when, and why of a of work. informs Contextual both and researchers body knowledge photographers photo before and after they go looking. The worst fear of any historian who has never practiced an im photography is that so is so to of full and can never it that age many meanings many interpretations subject be called upon to testify,can never be used to prove or disprove anything. Depending on who is an looking and when, image changes its meaning: Look now, see a rose. Look again, see a butterfly.How can a scholar use the equivalent of a Rorschach blot to reveal state ofmind of some viewer? Such fearswill be anything except the allayed by the "work a course. a of are classes set Built into course's curriculum shop/critique" portions photo aside for students to show theirwork and for others to to it. Because all work respond must be edited before being shown, students are obliged to look at their images from a critical distance before presenting them to others. Some are as quiet workshop/critiques asQuaker are as Some "I liked that." as, responses (Instructors always opaque meetings. some are diatribes. The best ask, "Why?") Some critiques are self-referential monologues, critiques are spirited conversations that engage thewhole class. The worst are charades of
mutual nonaggression.

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148 The Journal ofAmerican History

June

2007

Man

on a New York a with a small dog in a shop City subway reading magazine the sign on the door reads "Passengers Are Forbidden." October 1961. Photo Prints and Rizzuto. Division, byAngelo Courtesy Library of Congress, Photographs Anthony 61-10-26. Angel Collection, seated ping bag;

No matter how candid or evasive, how articulate or inarticulate a critique may be, to test theirwork, to discover whether their workshops provide opportunities for people consensus of An send the intended informal messages. images thought, feeling, and opin ion helps prove or disprove such intentions. During the call and response of a well-run an they do not. During a workshop, workshop, image's meanings become visible?or an or to contract, increase or decrease; theymay meanings attributed image may expand move one centimeter to the leftor two centimeters to the on a right graph of thought and tomove, theymove within a range?not But off may appear though meanings feeling. the chart. Critiques will calm a scholar's worst fears: Images do have multiple meanings, but "multiple" is not "indefinite"; "many" are not "countless." Framed by knowledge of
context, confirmed

Fieldwork and classroom experiences help develop a scholar's visual fluency. That flu ency enables a scholar to construct sequences. The latent content of a set of images?the even of the com disparate images share and provoke?consists thoughts and feelings that mon elements that permit to be to form visual narratives. Said photographs juxtaposed the photographer Minor White: A sequence of photographs is like a cinema of stills. The time and space between .. photographs is filledby the beholder, first. fromwithin himself, then fromwhat can in he read the implication of [the photograph's] design . . . and [then from] any symbolism thatmight grow within the subject [of the photograph] itself. . . . meaning appears in the space between the images, in themood they raise in the beholder.6
63. 6 Minor White, Mirrors, Messages, Manifestations: Photographs and Writings, 1939-68 (1969; Millerton, 1982),

by onlookers,

an

image's

meanings

cohere.

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Visual Literacy 149

uippHippMi^^^g^^s^

'^^9S^^?^^^^HH_______________H

A boy kneels on a New York City stoop solving a puzzle. July 1962. Photo byAngelo
Rizzuto. Collection, Courtesy Library 62-7-63. of Congress, Prints and Photographs Division, Anthony Angel

should photo researchers, historians in particular, use question remains: Why an archive? The an to communicate what sequences they have learned while exploring swer has to do with the number of images, the profusion of images that exist in archival one well-chosen an entire collection? Could photo collections. Could image represent two? Could a dozen? How then to display those dozen images? How best to convey their One meanings? A photo sequence uses visual language to argue a point. Sequences permit scholars to "show" succinctly rather than "tell" redundantly. They permit scholars to escape the trap of "a picture is worth a thousand words." Sequences do not prevent scholars frommaking written arguments. Visual narratives only appear to let pictures do their own talk explicit, a a can convey ing. By constructing well-made sequence fromwell-chosen images, scholar sentence. ideas before anyone reads her first

Visual

extent.Whatever could once be seen was photographed. Whatever depth, breadth, and now resides in those archives. Their image collections are like was once photographed ancestors. Can any vanished worlds inhabited by ghosts. Those ghosts were?are?our sentence, no matter how lucid, no matter how eloquent, enable a historian to look into the eyes of our common dead? Visual fluency, acquired through the practice of sequence building, will enable his torians to communicate whatever theymay learn in their explorations, using the very

to literacy, acquired through the practice of photography, will enable historians so state in and archival collections located historical libraries, museums, photo explore cieties throughout the United States. Those archives, hidden in plain sight, are treasure troves of experiential information?dense, sensuous, variegated, almost endless in their

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150 The Journal ofAmerican History

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2007

ofAngelo Rizzuto, New York City. December 1957.Photo by Angelo Rizzuto. Self-portrait Prints and Photographs Division, Anthony Angel Collection, 57 CourtesyLibrary ofCongress,
12-6.

shared pasts.

images they have discovered and retrieved. The world is indeed awash with images. It is time?for many more historians to use images to help us all understand our time?past

in an ossuary, to suffer the benign neglect of and humidity. optimum temperature A historian writing a new version of the American past suitable for college survey not simply illustrate his chapters courses asked me to unearth photographs that would but also promote speculation among his readers. In the course of that research I found myself sitting at a crowded table in the Prints and Photographs Division of the Library of Congress, asking a middle-aged curator, who stooped and stammered like a kid with whether he had any photographs from the fifties.He went to look, and growing pains, were stuffed with the life when he came back, he was rolling a loaded mail cart. Its trays work ofAngelo Rizzuto. of an annex, where it left them, like bones

In 1967 a recluse who called himself the Little Angel died inNew York and left60,000 to the Library of Congress, on the condition that the library photographs and $50,000 a book of his work?a book that he never completed. The library dutifully pub publish a lished book bound with staples, illustrated with perhaps 60 indifferentlyprinted repro ductions of the dead man's pictures.7 It then proceeded to spend his money, buying the work of some of themost eminent and innovative photographers of the nineteenth and it did with his prints was to store them in the subbasement twentieth centuries. What

7 Angelo

Rizzuto, Angelo Rizzutos New

York: "In Little Old New

York, byAnthony Angel" (Washington,

1972).

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Visual Literacy 151

Prints New York City. June 1959.Photo by Angelo Rizzuto. CourtesyLibrary ofCongress, and Photographs Division, Anthony Angel Collection,59-6-14. to scan the contact sheets, looking at their subjects. (Contact sheets, made it in contact with the by placing developed film onto specially coated paper?putting same roll of film.) I had no successive the from show images paper?often magnifying at a most of the frames thatwere clear glance. I started glass, but enough could be read a list. By the end of the day it had turned into a prose poem: street fights, bums, and sideshows; cityscapes seen from above; cats and sleeping children; men talking and men reading; circus acrobats, sleepers, Sunday painters, and couples arguing; skaters, lovers, cooks, vendors, parks, graveyards, little boys alone, and women walking; subway riders, and movie marquees; taxis, street preachers, speakers, and sign painters; mannequins, street and dead men; empty streets and scratched-out pic festivals, drunks, self-portraits, more fat and men, statues; tures; nuns, dogs, cityscapes and more self-portraits;Hasidim, women little of all ages; cops and grotesques. The imag and junkmen, and parades; girls so dense and pungent that I stopped thinking about the historical research I ery seemed was there to conduct and to think about theman and the pictures he had made. began It seemed that Iwas looking at thework of a man who had decided to record thewhole I began world. Just before Rizzuto died, he confessed to someone that he was working on a book thatwould be a visual record of New York City, three hundred years after ithad passed Manhattan from the Dutch to the English. Itwas to be modeled on The Iconography of was to call his book Island, 1498-1909 by Isaac Newton Phelps Stokes.8 Rizzuto going

"Little Old New York" by Anthony Angel. He died before he finished. But why had he done what he had done? Why had he persisted? To what end? For what reason? How had South he survived? The curator knew very little. Rizzuto had been born in Deadwood,
8 Isaac Newton Phelps Stokes, The Iconography of Manhattan Island, 1498-1909: Compiled from Original Sources in Public and Private and Illustrated byPhoto-Intaglio Reproductions of Important Maps, Plans, Views, and Documents Collections (6 vols., New York, 1915-1928).

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152 The Journal ofAmerican History

June

2007

____K
Self-portrait Courtesy 58-8-6. of Angelo Library

,_5_8_^

_i

.J^__l

New York City. 1958. P/wto byAngelo Rizzuto. Rizzuto, August Prints and Division, of Congress, Photographs Anthony Angel Collection,

Dakota,

Street between First and Second avenues, and began to take photographs, going out every day at 2 p.m. with his cameras. His next-door neighbor, Peter Sutherland, appeared to be his only friend. In 1959, when Rizzuto's older brother Frank died without a will, he began writing letters to the attorney administering Frank's estate and tomany others, including state legislators and judges, arguing that Frank's estate was dominated by insane judges of courts and Communists. The estate was settled out of court, but theDenver, Colorado, he remained firm in his belief that Jewish Communists his death. were conspiring against him until

he was discharged from a mental hospital sixmonths later,he enlisted in the army. Seven months after that, he was given an honorable medical discharge. Rizzuto moved toNew York City sometime in themid-1940s, bought a brownstone on Fifty-first himself.When

in 1906. He had been reared inOmaha, Nebraska, and a little graduated from in in over Ohio estate his After he father with his 1931. brothers the died, college fought to went to in was to Denver and resolve the conflict.While he kill 1941 there, he tried

For months, I had been accounts and chronicles, rumors and suppositions, collecting inventories and lists of documents related to Rizzuto. No matter how well I authenticated the facts, no matter how well-articulated the parts were, all I had was a body that could neither move nor speak. Perhaps I could summon his ghost. I began by looking, once more, at Rizzuto's contact sheets, slowly at firstand then, as my eyes and mind grew ac customed to their cluttered and recurrent detail, more and more quickly. I noted, again, his repetitions and his methods: 40 pictures of the urn in front of theNew York Public inColumbus Circle, 250 pic Library, 30 pictures of the statue of Christopher Columbus tures of the Statue of Women Liberty. photographed constantly, either with telephotos or with cameras mounted on on street corners, their shutters and tripods positioned trig gered by hand-held cable releases. He also photographed himself. From one self-portrait

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Visual Literacy 153

New

Congress,

York City Prints

intersection. 1964. Photo by Angelo Rizzuto. January and Photographs Division, Anthony Angel Collection,

Courtesy 64-1-6.

Library

of

Somehow, without knowing it, I began to memorize his contact sheets and, in my mind, to splice together their rows of images as if theywere segments of videotape. In stead of reading their frames, one at a time, I began to run whole lengths of them, and as I ran them, I to hear Rizzuto reciting began garbled bits of his life's poetry. Viewed one at a time, his were neither nor images complex ambiguous: bums looked like bums, sailors looked like sailors, buildings like buildings, and sorrow like sorrow. But viewed in over a period of years, his juxtaposed im lengths, strung together in sequences composed those formed and formed ages patterns with permutations as various as rhymes, rhymes those of a kaleidoscope. is so striking about Rizzuto (and his contact sheets) is theway his self-portraits What intermingle and play in counterpoint with his cityscapes and street-level photos. The pictures he made were acts of homage and appropriation, elements in an iconography of a city a self.He believed he was an outer permeated by recording the physical shape of world when, in fact, he was gathering evidence to serve as a talisman against his own de spair. That evidence of a shared moral predicament he found in the faces of the countless women he photographed. Occasionally he found evidence of hope in the gestures of lov ers, the grace of animals, and the games of children. By photographing himself, Rizzuto affirmed his own presence; by photographing the suffering of others as well as by record a awesome camera to lessen the pain shape of man-made world, Rizzuto used his ing the of loneliness and to transcend his fear and anger. He used his camera to confirm himself,

to the next, his pain to anger, and his anger to a rage somonstrous that theman changes himself seems to change into a demon who stares into a pit where, far below, foolish men in costumes march in a military parade while innocent boys play stickball in the street.

to enter and discover theworld, and then to rise above it.His loneliness, his persistent vision, and his transcendence are what he shares with all other photographers who have embarked on solitary quests that have transformed and restored them to themselves.

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