10 Studying Visual Modes of Public Address Lewis Hine s Progressive Era Child Labor Rhetoric Cara A Finnegan The movement to regulate child labor in the United States was one of the most successful social movements of the early twentieth century 1 From 1870 when the census first recorded the number of child workers in the United States to 1941 when the Supreme Court upheld the legality of the Fair Labor Standards Act and its child labor provisions the issue of child labor was a staple of the national politi cal agenda 2 During the Progressive era child labor reform drew the attention involvement and activism of a range of well known and powerful figures includ ing Theodore Roosevelt Jane Addams Albert Beveridge and Woodrow Wilson Yet few studies in public address have examined the rhetoric of child labor reform 3 Furthermore child labor texts are rarely anthologized for easy access and study 4 One possible explanation for these absences is that some of the most eloquent and enduring child labor rhetoric was visual rather than oratorical While public address studies have tended to favor the oratorical the child labor debate is best remembered today for the eloquent visual rhetoric of Lewis Wickes Hine In 1908 Lewis Hine was hired as a photographic investigator for the National Child Labor Committee NCLC a privately funded group of activists and social work profes sionals who had been working to change child labor laws and practices in the United States 5 Between 1908 and 1918 Hine made thousands of photographs under the auspices of the NCLC The images were displayed as slide shows shown at exhibits on child labor and appeared in NCLC reports and journals Hine fre quently wrote articles to accompany them 6 Thanks to Hine reformers recognized the power of documenting social conditions via photography The man who hired Hine at the NCLC Owen Lovejoy remarked years later in a letter to the photog rapher In my judgment the work you did under my direction for the National Child Labor Committee was more responsible than any or all other efforts to bring the facts and conditions of child employment to public attention Scholars in other fields frequently describe Hine s work in terms of communica tion and persuasion while those of us who regularly employ tools for analyzing communication and persuasion have largely ignored him 7 Why the paradox The Handbook of Rhetoric and Public Address Edited by Shawn J Parry Giles and J Michael Hogan 2010 Blackwell Publishing Ltd ISBN 978 1 405 17813 6 9781405178136 4 010 indd 250 9781405178136 4 010 indd 250 2 10 2010 10 21 50 AM 2 10 2010 10 21 50 AM Studying Visual Modes of Public Address 251 Perhaps part of the answer is that our changing understandings of public address have not kept up with our methods for studying it More than 20 years ago Stephen Lucas asked of the field What if we move beyond the traditional paradigm What if we think of public address not just as the study of historical speakers and speeches but as the study of the full range of public discursive rhetorical acts historical and contemporary oral and writ ten considered individually or as part of a broader campaign or movement 8 Lucas contended that public address scholarship in the 1960s and 1970s did not die but underwent a dramatic metamorphosis fueled by what appeared to be an increasingly complex rhetorical political world 9 Similarly in a 1989 essay David Zarefsky observed that one sign of vitality in public address was a shift in the field s understanding of what constitutes the address of public address Zarefsky declared that public address scholarship was undergoing a shift from attention to the modes of public address e g oratory to its functions By embracing a broader conception of public address and not reducing the term to formal oratory our studies have enhanced the potential for understanding historical or rhetorical situ ations and for formulating theoretical generalizations 10 Zarefsky s point that we should be more focused on what public address does than on any particular mode of that doing was liberating especially for scholars interested in nonoratorical modes of public address Yet that liberation arguably came at the cost of methodological clarity When public address was opened up to a range of previously unexplored discourses new questions arose about methodology How should one proceed when examining nonoratorical modes To be more specific what precisely would we do if we wanted to study Lewis Hine s photographic rhetoric In this chapter I present a critical perspective on the study of visual modes of public address Although the case study I develop focuses on the photography of Lewis Hine the perspective presented here fits a range of other visual images and artifacts as well This chapter is not a complete guide to visual methodologies but it does offer starting points for those who wish their explorations of public address to include visual discourses 11 In what follows I present five approaches to analyzing visual images in terms of their production composition reproduction circulation and reception Taken together these constitute a critical perspective on the study of visual modes of public address By perspective I mean something quite literal a way of seeing the role of visual images in public culture This perspective assumes that visual modes of public address shape and frame our experience of public life In embracing the constitutive role of images it sets aside the erroneous presumption that the best deliberation takes place solely in the modes of talk and text 12 Furthermore this perspective recognizes not only that public address is fre quently visual but that it always has been Despite claims that visual modes of rhetoric are more dominant now than they were in the past the history of American public address is very much a visual as well as a textual oratorical history 13 Finally the perspective I develop here assumes that to study visual modes of public address 9781405178136 4 010 indd 251 9781405178136 4 010 indd 251 2 10 2010 10 21 50 AM 2 10 2010 10 21 50 AM 252 Cara A Finnegan is to do interdisciplinary work this chapter taps into more than three decades of scholarship in the field of communication and is informed by work in related fields such as art history American studies and literary cultural studies 14 Overall I treat the visual as a potent mode of public address which should be studied in ways that recognize images political cultural