No Caption Needed: Iconic Photographs, Public Culture, and Liberal Democracy

No Caption Needed: Iconic Photographs, Public Culture, and Liberal Democracy. By Robert Hariman and John Louis Lucaites. Chicago: The University of Chicago Press, 2007; pp. xi + 419. $30.00 cloth. If you find iconic photography, visual culture, and liberal-democratic citizenship interesting enough to read this review beyond its first sentence, I have little doubt that you should read Robert Hariman and John Louis Lucaites' brilliant contribution to the growing body of literature engaging these topics. The book is unquestionably valuable to academicians investigating rhetoric, media, criticism, visual and popular culture, and twentieth century U.S. history. The work also contributes substantially to the discussions of political and social theorists interested in citizenship, liberal-democratic culture, and/or the unstable line between public and private. Given its significance to academics, the book is surprisingly accessible to laypersons. Anyone working with a modest academic vocabulary should understand Hariman and Lucaites' primary arguments and will certainly be provoked by their narratives and analyses of the photographs. In short, No Caption Needed appeals to a broad and interdisciplinary audience. The work performs a close reading of nine iconic photographs and various artifacts that appropriate elements of them to show how they address the question "what is citizenship in a democracy?" Hariman and Lucaites position their critique at the contradictory intersection inherent in liberal-democratic polity, namely the simultaneous emphasis on individual identity and collective action which compete when liberty and obligations conflict. In various ways, Hariman and Lucaites show how each of these iconic photographs engage the relationship of liberal and democratic ideals, arguing that these icons are powerful because they embody the conception of a human being as an "individuated aggregate" (88). Thus, the photographs all teach, perpetuate, and-through appropriation-negotiate what it means to be a citizen in a democratic state. By tracing these lessons across time, Hariman and Lucaites argue that the dialectic between individual and collective in our contemporary democratic society has become imbalanced: "the icons of U.S. public culture increasingly underwrite liberalism more than they do democracy" which threatens "democracy itself' (19). Hariman and Lucaites make a very strong case for these arguments, in part because their descriptions of the iconic photographs are extremely compelling. Reading their descriptions I feel that I see the icon as they do--which is no small feat. In general it is relatively easy to feel that we share with others a perspective on something written or spoken, because the cultural codes used to interpret such texts are so conventional and widespread that they obscure slight differences in comprehension. But it is widely believed that a photograph can elicit so many responses that it becomes impossible to contain them all; that a picture is "worth a thousand words" expresses this sentiment perfectly. To overcome this Hariman and Lucaites write eloquence bordering on poetry that provides readers a highly developed sense of their perspective. Their ways of seeing in these icons an interaction of image, aesthetics, and emotion force us to look at the photographs again and again. Even if we end up seeing these images differently, we cannot help but comprehend their view, and we cannot simply look away. Importantly, Hariman and Lucaites' stance from the beginning of the book is that theirs is not the only valid or useful perspective. This allows readers to retain or craft their own way of seeing while developing an understanding of how the authors vision the image. Interpretation of the iconic photograph thus becomes a source of dialogue, a locus of interaction where different views can be brought together to develop a better sense of who we--that is, those for whom the image resonates as an icon of our liberal-democratic culture--are. …