Recently we at The Atlantic Community have been honored by a bit of attention from the excellent photo journalism and public culture blog No Caption Needed. NCN is run by Robert Hariman and John Louis Lucaites who authored one of the only sustained books charting the emergent field of cultural iconology, No Caption Needed: Iconic Photographs, Public Culture and Liberal Democracy. Hariman is a professor in the Dept. of Communication Studies at Northwestern U.; Lucaites is a professor of rhetoric and public culture at Indiana U. Together they have created an indispensable volume for anyone interested in the functions and construction of iconic images in the public sphere. Here is a reproduction of the table of contents:
TABLE OF CONTENTS
1 INTRODUCTION
2 PUBLIC CULTURE, ICONS, AND ICONOCLASTS
3 THE BORDERS OF THE GENRE Migrant Mother and the Times Square Kiss
4 PERFORMING CIVIC IDENTITY Flag Raisings at Iwo Jima and Ground Zero
5 DISSENT AND EMOTIONAL MANAGEMENT Kent State
6 TRAUMA AND PUBLIC MEMORY Accidental Napalm
7 LIBERAL REPRESENTATION AND GLOBAL ORDER Tiananmen Square
8 RITUALIZING MODERNITY’S GAMBLE The Hindenburg and Challenger Explosions
9 CONCLUSION Visual Democracy
The blog version of NCN constantly challenges us with new images from a wide range of fields (political culture, for instance the uses and abuses of the US flag; pop culture; sports; cultural geography etc.) The two authors post regularly Monday to Thursday most weeks, and on many weekends the put other, often humorous stuff up, such as their on-going collection of 'sight gags'.
I guess The Atlantic Community is stepping into similar territory with our many recent posts on political iconography in connection with the Presidential election campaign, and also with our research into the function of historically specific icons, such as my work on icons of transgression. Indeed, we are happy to link to NCN in our blog roll, and honored that they have included us in theirs.
