Next week I'll be teaching a lesson on visual rhetoric. Below is an in class exercise included in the lesson. Expect the lesson in full soon.

Visual and verbal texts are not composed and published in vacuum. As you practice reading and writing about visual texts, I encourage you to to consider the various contexts within which they function. Gather information about the the circumstances behind the original composition: Who created the text? Who was the intended audience? Where was it originally published? For what purpose? To what extent does the contextual information deepen your reading of the text?

To widen your perspective on a text, consider the larger cultural and historical context in which it was created. What cultural assumptions do you think the artist or author relies on? Asking questions about the larger cultural context of a particular text or image means recognizing the assumptions that are made about a shared body on knowledge on the part of the audience.

Exercise: Dorothea Lange's Migrant Mother is one of the most recognizable images in American history. What observations and inferences can you make about the context of this image?