Rhetorical Exposures

In Rhetorical Exposures, Christopher Carter explores social documentary photography from the nineteenth century to the present to illuminate the political dimensions of photographs that highlight social injustice. Documentary photography aims to capture the material reality of life. In Rhetorical Exposures, Christopher Carter demonstrates how the creation and display of documentary photographs-often now called imagetexts -both invite analysis and raise persistent questions about the political and social causes for the bleak scenes of poverty and distress captured on film. Carter's carefully reasoned monograph examines both formal quali-ties of composition and the historical contexts of the production and display of documentary photographs. In Rhetorical Exposures, Carter explores Jacob Riis's heart-rending photos of Manhattan's poor in late nineteenth-century New York, the iconic images of tenant farmers in west Alabama from James Agee and Walker Evans's Let Us Now Praise Famous Men, Ted Streshinsky's images of 1960s social movements, Camilo Jose Vergara's photographic landscapes of urban dereliction in the 1970s, and Chandra McCormick's portraits of New Orleans's Ninth Ward scarred by Hurricane Katrina