Locating Visual-Material Rhetorics. Amy Propen
it is important to recognize that it is just one of many rhetorical artifacts and objects of discourse associated with the emergence of environmentalism during that period. A general understanding of the social and political contexts surrounding the emergence of the photo helps to situate its rhetorical power and the associations it both reflected and perpetuated.
Just two years prior to circulation of photo 22727 on April 22, 1970, for example, the United States held its first Earth Day celebration, an event spearheaded by Democratic Senator Gaylord Nelson of Wisconsin. In 1971, just one year later, polls showed that “25 percent of the U.S. public declared protecting the environment to be an important goal, a 2,500 percent increase over 1969” (“Earth Day History”). Thus, according to Senator Nelson, “Earth Day launched the Environmental decade with a bang” (“Earth Day ’70”). Soon after, photo 22727 became appropriated as the logo for subsequent Earth Day celebrations in the United States. Other appropriations of the photo include its use by the environmental group Friends of the Earth “to convey a message of global dwelling, care, and fragility,” as well as its continual use in “antinuclear, environmental, and animal-rights campaigns” (Cosgrove, Apollo’s Eye 263). In many ways, the photo has become a metonym for environmentalism. As Hariman and Lucaites describe, to view the image of the earth as a metonym for environmentalism would involve a “reduction of a more general construct,” such as environmentalism, “to a specific embodiment,” such as the photo of the earth, or the “Blue Marble” (89). As they describe, “[s]uch compositions have to be simultaneously personal and impersonal. [. . .] They depend on a thorough-going realism, but they motivate action in response to the general condition being represented rather than to the specific event of the picture” (89). Photo 22727 fits the bill well in this regard; the image of the earth portrays a convincing realism through its sharpness, its color, and the familiarity of the landforms; its small scale and circular shape also make it easily recognizable as an image of the earth. But it is not necessarily this realism that stirs the emotions; in fact, the photo’s realism helps convey a distancing effect, or a sort of disembodiment that speaks more so to the one-world discourse. Rather, it is the condition being represented more generally, the implicit beauty and fragility of the planet, conveyed also by the informal naming “Blue Marble,” that sparks feelings of personal responsibility and allows viewers to integrate their individual perspectives with their interpretation of the image. Viewers then employ their own experiences and understandings in their interpretation of the image, though these understandings are inextricably linked to the social and political contexts in which the image was presented. That is, photo 22727 first circulated in 1972, at a point when unprecedented acts of environmental legislation contributed to the growing discourses of environmentalism. In 1970, for example, the National Environmental Policy Act and the Clean Air Act were passed, Congress authorized creation of the Environmental Protection Agency, and the National Resources Defense Council was created. In 1971, the Animal Welfare Act was passed. In 1972, Congress passed the Federal Water Pollution Control Act, the Coastal Zone Management Act, the Ocean Dumping Act, and the Marine Mammal Protection Act. In 1973, Congress passed the Endangered Species Act (Kovarik). Outfitted with knowledge of new environmental legislation and organizations, the public’s understanding of these discursive contexts likely helped shape their interpretation of the photo at that point in time. Conversely, the photo helped “communicate social knowledge [. . .] by tap[ping] into the tacit knowledge held by the audience as they are members of society” (Hariman and Lucaites 10).
In addition to understanding the image largely in terms of the “whole-earth” discourse around which it has been interpreted by its viewing publics, Cosgrove also acknowledges the vantage point of the Apollo 17 crew, who first witnessed the view that eventually became photo 22727: “Those few humans who actually witnessed the revolving terracqueous globe and who produced photo 22727 describe their experience in terms of awe, mystery and humility. The axis of world order, if it existed for them, stretched infinitely above and below the global surface” (“New World Orders” 130). This description of the astronauts’ experiences in first viewing the earth from space not only reinforces understandings of mapping as a relational process but also helps to bring before our eyes a version of the image that is surreal and almost spiritual in nature. Cosgrove wants us to imagine the image of earth through the astronauts’ eyes, invoking a sort of ekphrasis that transports us to that moment of witnessing prior to the photo’s having been captured with the camera. Understanding the photo not only through the public lens of the whole-earth discourse but also from the vantage point of its producers affords yet an additional way of seeing that takes into account the astronauts’ embodied experiences at a specific cultural moment, one that precedes even the production of the artifact itself.
As Hayles has described, experiences of embodiment are always enmeshed within a culture; they are contextual and linked to experiences of the world around us. To understand artifacts of cartographic practice and visual rhetoric as embodied knowledge allows us to consider the ways in which visual artifacts help provide more intimate understandings of or connections to a place, and in doing so, perhaps a closer relationship and feeling of responsibility toward it. An analysis of photo 22727 begins to show that to better understand the consequences of the rhetorical work of visual and material artifacts in the world, we must understand visual rhetorics as also attentive to studies of space, place, and the body.
Visual Culture, Space, and the Body: A Move Toward Materiality
Understanding photo 22727 as an artifact of visual rhetoric clearly helps demonstrates Cosgrove’s view that “geography’s words and images have always had a certain power to construct as much as to reflect the orders which it represents” (“New World Orders” 130). That is, as Pickles and others have pointed out, artifacts like the map participate in situated practices of visuality and are part of a broader visual culture. Understanding the significance of the artifact beyond its immediate function in the rhetorical situation is integral to framing visual rhetoric as a project of inquiry engaged in the practices of visuality. In this way, Olson et al. define visuality as referring not only to “images or visual media but [to] the totality of practices, performances, and configurations of the visual” (xvi-xvii). Compatible with the discussion earlier in the introduction, Carolyn Handa describes visual culture “as a subfield of cultural studies [that] focuses on vision as a starting point for tracing the ways cultural meanings form” (377). Visual culture is again implicated in the study of visual rhetoric, which she defines more broadly “as a discipline that focuses on the visual elements that persuade, taking culture as just one element among many: culture, along with images, sounds, and space, work together rhetorically to convince an audience” (377). A holistic approach to the study of visual rhetorics must then attend not only to these visual elements of persuasion but also to the situated and often multimodal practices in which they are immersed.
Also acknowledging the connections between visual culture and spatiality, Irit Rogoff writes that to open up “the field of vision as an arena in which cultural meanings get constituted, also simultaneously anchors it to an entire range of analyses and interpretations of the audio, the spatial, and of the psychic dynamics of spectatorship” (381). This understanding of spatiality as implicated in visual culture is likewise of interest to Handa, who writes: “If space, as Rogoff argues, is part of the intertextual mix that needs to be studied, we can learn much from those who critique, imagine, dictate, and analyze how space is inhabited” (378). Prelli too notes that built structures and places are “disposed rhetorically in their physical design so that their arrangement works to dispose the attitudes, feelings, and conduct of those who visit, dwell within, or otherwise encounter them” (13). Spatially-based, rhetorical artifacts such as maps, places, and built structures then tap into and rely on visual culture, which Kathryn Henderson further defines as “a way of seeing that reflects and contributes to the specific manner in which one renders the world,” or “a particular way of seeing the world that is linked to explicit material experience” (197–198, emphasis added).
In understanding ways of seeing as tied to explicit material or corporeal experience in the world, Henderson broaches the idea of how visual culture affects contextualized, bodily experience. Gregory Clark describes a similar idea when he explores Kenneth Burke’s theory of identification through the lens of American tourism. Here, Clark examines the ways in which national identity is shaped by public experiences of symbolic landscapes.