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The Rhetorical Force of Landscape Art Essay

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The Rhetorical Force of Landscape Art

Why talk about a rhetoric of images? The most obvious answer is that we live in an image-saturated society and a relevant rhetoric must pay attention to images, that W. J. T. Mitchell is right when he suggests that the rhetorical turn is being displaced by the pictorial turn. Beyond the obvious, the answers are multiple and layered. I want to suggest some answers by looking at some old pictures: Carleton Watkins' landscape photographs of Yosemite and William Henry Jackson's landscape photographs and Thomas Moran's water colors and paintings of Yellowstone. At a basic level, if rhetoric is, at the very least, about persuasion in conventional politics, images merit a look and have …show more content…

Moran and Jackson accompanied the U.S. Geological Survey of the
Territories to Yellowstone in 1871. Their presence was not accidental.
Jackson had recently become a permanent member of the expedition. Moran was sent with the backing of the Northern Pacific Railroad and Scribner's to join the expedition. Ferdinand Hayden, the expedition's leader, was aware of the value of public relations and was also under orders from the
Secretary of the Interior to "secure as full material as possible for the illustration of your final report, such as sketches, photographs, etc.,"(quoted in Kinsey, 1992, p. 49). As photographer Jackson recalled,
"No photographs had as yet been published, and Dr. Hayden was determined that the first ones should be good. A series of fine pictures would not only supplement his final report but tell the story to thousands who might never read it" (1940, p. 196). Jackson's photographs and Moran's watercolors and illustrations were instrumental in the successful lobbying effort to get Congress to designate Yellowstone the country's first national park. More significantly, I contend that the landscape art of Watkins, Jackson, and Moran are not merely evidence in a conventional political argument.
They are not simply representing reality or making an argument about

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