HCRT-251: The Persuasive Image

This class provides everyone with the basic methods and techniques of successfully engaging, and even more importantly, memorably enduring, representational imagery. Imagery that lasts and leaves tracks. Drawing on a variety of examples from the conventions of the stand-alone single-image narrative, the practice of visual metaphor and close reading of content organization and characterization, we will examine how effective imagery actually works. We will examine examples of imagery as signage and as "extended" metaphor, and we will look at allegory and visual rhetoric, irony and satire in examples of editorial imagery and commentary; we will explore use of stylistics, appropriation and reconfiguration in contemporary Asian and Latin American painting. And because we're looking at what works and what moves people to feel and think and reflect, we will also look at the New European explorations of visual journalism and reportage, Middle Eastern and African Graphic Novels of resistance, some challenging Children's Books, some masterpieces of American Illustration, the power of the "feature" illustration, the now legendary comics of the early 20th century and a film or two that you will never forget; and, in the process, we will learn about pace, pitch, cadence and tone, the Photo Essay of Open Association, and even something of your own unexamined reservoirs of unacknowledged possibility.