Ask the Internets Part 1,037

[icepixie]

I'm on a hunt for interesting photographs, paintings, drawings, PSAs, images in general, and, perhaps, even short YouTube videos that I can collect together and give to my 101 students as choices to write a rhetorical analysis on. (If you're not up on your Aristotle, this is essentially a 1,000-word explication of what argument you think the image is making and how it's making it via subject matter, composition, color, pathos/ethos/logos, etc. etc. etc.)

Anyone got some favorites I can add to the list?

Current ones I'm considering are:
- this photo of New York, New York in Las Vegas
- Lange's "Dust Storm at the War Relocation Authority Center..."
- at least one William Wegman photograph
- Tim Davis's "Searchlights"
- one of Layla Essaydi's Converging Territories series
- Roe Ethridge's "Great Neck Mall Sign"
- #2 (both images) in Yeondoo Jung's "Bewitched" series
- Florien Maier-Aichen's "Untitled (2005)"
- others I can't find online, but which are in a book called New Perspectives in Photography (I particularly like an Anna Gaskell photograph that's sort of a modern take on The Wizard of Oz)

Comments

[nickless.livejournal.com]

There's a blog called The Big Picture (http://www.boston.com/bigpicture/index.xml) that might have something - most of them might just be current events or topical stuff, but there are some that might work. The main one for June 12 was kinda cool. There were some nifty ones in this bunch (http://www.boston.com/bigpicture/2009/04/human_landscapes_from_above.html), but I don't know if they'll work quite right.

Ooh! Here's the link I was looking for: Running the Numbers: An American Self Portrait (http://www.chrisjordan.com/current_set2.php). The artist says he "looks at contemporary American culture through the austere lens of statistics. Each image portrays a specific quantity of something...This project visually examines these vast and bizarre measures of our society, in large intricately detailed prints assembled from thousands of smaller photographs." The one with Prison Uniforms gives an awesome idea of the scale of the completed works.

A lot of them are just nifty designs made from all the small pics, but with some, the final "big picture" is part of the argument. You'd obviously have to give them the full set of pics for each one (ie, the zooms) and the stats. Really good ones for this specific exercise might be Energizer, Building Blocks, Constitution, Pain Killers, Denali Denial, Skull with Cigarette, Barbie Dolls, and maybe Toothpicks and Ben Franklin. At least, those are the ones that I think I could write about, given the basics of the assignment.

[icepixie]

Oh, these are GREAT! I especially love the statistics one--they're exactly the kind of thing I'm looking for. I saw the human landscapes from above collection when it first went online, but had forgotten about it; a couple of them would work nicely, I think. (Maybe the houses in Las Vegas or the electricity tower in the field.)

I'll be keeping an eye on that Big Picture blog, too. Thanks!

[nickless.livejournal.com]

Yay! As soon as I read the description of your assignment, I thought of the stats pics. Then I just had to find it! Thank goodness my mom keeps all the "interesting stuff" she posts at school!