PEACE CORPS IN THE 21 ST CENTURY: A RHETORICAL ANALYSIS

82volunteer as a “real” person, which is ideal for recruitment. Portraits humanize theexperience of volunteering.Figure 3.5 Figure 3.6 Figure 3.7The portrait, whether of a host country national or an American volunteer,identifies service for the viewer. At the same time, Peter Galassi believes that portraits“enable us to trace the sameness of man.” 159They do this by stripping away culture andleaving a universal person. The American public receives a version of the lessWesternized world as a place where people are just like them, human. Outside of thiscontext, these volunteer portraits could be pictures of people from any part of the world.Portraits do not reveal any “ethnic” or traditional clothing; they display the face only,reminding us that context is significant when reading photographs. Clothing is always akey component in these photographs and a way to read the organizations’ visual rhetoric.DressIndigenous dress is one of the most common features of these photographs.Images of ritual costumes or tribal dress are often equated with a pre-modern mentality.Most recruitment images show native peoples in their native dress. Rarely do we seeWestern dress, even though it is prevalent in most societies today. We enjoy seeingtraditional clothing because it reminds us of the exotic. The exotic, to Westerners, showscultural differences and/ or frames the “other” as spectacle. The photographer is