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Morgan Andrews Dr. E. Dietel-McLaughlin Multimedia Writing and Rhetoric Section 13 Rhetorical Analysis of the Snite Viewing There are three black teenagers, two young men and one young woman, being force against a brick wall of a building by a line of water. The line leads into the spine of one of the men and the beginning of the line is nowhere to be found. Their faces are marked by terror as the other man tries to protect the woman from the beating of the water. This is simply a photo on the wall of a museum but what some people cannot comprehend is that this photograph had captured a piece of reality, a true story. The photo that Charles Moore took during the Civil Rights Movement of the three teenagers being forced against a brick wall was a very powerful image that drew rhetorical questioning from the mind of its viewers. The photograph drew the attention of its viewers away from the media used as it was low and close to the actual scene taking place. The media made the viewers step into the reality of the scene and observe the emotional and physical beatings being received. By removing the idea of media in the image, you remove the false thoughts that this was not a reality. It happened and when the media of the camera has been taken away, the image is taken more to heart and is taken more seriously.

In An Overview of Rhetoric, James A. Herrick mentions writers such as Wayne Booth and McKeon. He summarizes their views of rhetoric as it being universal and present everywhere we turn (2 Herrick). Herrick also describes rhetoric as the study of how we organize and employ language effectively, and thus it becomes the study of how we organize our thinking on a wide range of subjects (2). The media in the media in the case that I chose to discuss would be the camera used to take the photographs. Photography is a form of communication. Instead of words, the language of art is shown to help its viewers understand the point in a different way. It is possible to bring away different meanings from the photograph than every other person analyzing the same photo. Since the observers are not verbally or literally being told what is happening in the scene, they are able to evaluate it on their own terms. In the article Visualizing Rhetoric by John Jones, he says like any piece of spoken or written communication, visual texts exist at the center of a nexus of communication: they are presented by some author, be it a person, persons, or organization; they have some effect on their audience, and they consist of some basic text which can be analyzed (1). Basically what Jones is saying is that the author or artist in the case does have an opinion that shows through in his or her work. That opinion is that of how terrible racial discrimination is. Charles Moore wanted to convince his audience of his opinion and he had the power to disguise his view in the actual placement of his media. This includes the camera angle. The camera is placed at an eye level height to show that the subjects in the image are of equal value as the viewer. Next is the distance. The lens is zoomed in to the cropped view of just the victims being conquered by the water. Not only is the placement of the image important but the quality of the image draws attention to its importance.

The clarity of the photograph shows the faces of the victims wrinkled by pain and worried fear. Visualizing Rhetoric described Aristotles views of ethos, pathos, and logos. Pathos was Aristotles term for describing the effect of the speech on the audience. Did it drive them to anger? (1 Jones) Moore wanted his audience to get as close to experiencing the pain of these victims as possible and he did that by making the photograph as clear as possible. Not only could we see the pained expressions but we saw the droplets of water that had bounced off of the body of the young man from the channel of hosed water. I can only imagine the amount of force it must have taken for everything in the photograph to be soaked by the one line. As an observer myself I believe that those droplets resemble bullets ricocheting off of a titanium wall. You can try to kill the movement, but it will not break. Finally, the artist had chosen to leave the attacker out of the image. This was done to help focus the point of the image on the victims and what they are going through. By showing the power of the water that it is forced into a straight line, we as viewers judge that it has come from a firemans hose; and knowing that this photograph is of the Civil Rights Movement, we can assume that it is a white fireman. Therefore, the overall focal point is not pulled back and forth between the structures of multiple groups in the photograph but is rather a singular point centered in one group of people suffering through physical and emotional turmoil. Of course there are always other opinions when it comes to analyzing art. That is the beauty of this technique of communication. The artist could have simply been taking this photo to document this point in time, to make it a part of history. He could have only focused on these teenagers making it visible that there is the media of a camera being used because in reality our

peripheral vision would have picked up the surrounding elements. In reality we might have been drawn to the attacker questioning why he was pushed to such brutal measures of punishment and cruelty for a so called crime that should not had existed. There is a counterargument to every opinion but what I described above is not what I believe. I believe that Charles Moore removed the idea of media from the image and put his audience in the photograph itself to experience the cruelty that had occurred during the Civil Rights Movement.