PEACE CORPS IN THE 21 ST CENTURY: A RHETORICAL ANALYSIS

74the whole enterprise. This very passivity – and ubiquity – of the photographicrecord is photography’s “message,” its aggression. 137Pictures have a subject behind them and contain power.Hariman and Lucaites point out that “once thought to be windows to the real,photographic images become the ideal medium for naturalizing a repressive structure ofsigns. And there is no doubt that they can function that way, as both prized shots andmillions of banal, anonymous images reproduce normative conceptions of gender, race,class, and other forms of social identity.” 138The images used by Peace Corps illustratethe everyday life of the volunteer, of the underdeveloped world, and of its people. Aninvestigation of visual rhetoric is crucial to understanding how Peace Corps photographsact as signs of larger cultural beliefs. 139Stephen Browne, in a 1995 book review discussing the procedures ofmemorializing, claims that “[h]owever varied those procedures, they collectively stress asense of the text as a site of symbolic action, a place of cultural performance, the meaningof which is defined by its public and persuasive functions.” 140Though Browne is talkingabout the practice of memorializing, I would argue that visual rhetoric acts similarly.They have political agency. Agreeing with Browne’s assertion that the work of publicmemory has to do with social construction and political resonance, I suggest that visualimages use the grammar of the political to do rhetorical work. To this end, I believevisual rhetoric is concerned with three particular functions. Images are rhetoricalprecisely because they are: 1) constructed under the pressure of society, 2) ideologicallybound, 3) narrative producing.