{"id":172,"date":"2016-02-18T03:46:20","date_gmt":"2016-02-18T03:46:20","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/sites.dwrl.utexas.edu\/visualrhetoric\/?p=172"},"modified":"2016-02-18T03:46:20","modified_gmt":"2016-02-18T03:46:20","slug":"what-happens-when-blitzers-triangle-is-incomplete","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/sites.dwrl.utexas.edu\/visualrhetoric\/2016\/02\/18\/what-happens-when-blitzers-triangle-is-incomplete\/","title":{"rendered":"What happens when Blitzer’s triangle is incomplete?"},"content":{"rendered":"

\"\"<\/a><\/p>\n

Her eyes longingly gaze toward a life she was never able to obtain. Her children, poor and afraid, huddle around her,\u00a0slumped\u00a0over strong shoulders that have\u00a0tirelessly borne\u00a0the burden of raising an impoverished family for years. \u00a0She is the Migrant Mother– the iconic face of The Great Depression, captured in a moment, remembered\u00a0for decades to come.<\/p>\n

Back in 1936, this image catapulted Dorthea Lange, a struggling photographer, into everlasting fame. “Migrant Mother”\u00a0ignited empathy across the nation for those hit hardest by the depression. However, one crucial element is glaringly absent from this\u00a0quintessential piece of visual rhetoric– its\u00a0context.<\/p>\n

In the beginning of this unit, we talked about the Rhetorical Triangle– a model developed by Blitzer that defines the key elements required\u00a0to analyze a text. He pins audience, writer, and context to each of the triangle’s vertices, indicating that they’re each equally important. We know both who both the speaker and decoder\u00a0of this message is, but when and where was this photo taken? Who is this so called “Migrant Mother” and what’s her story? Without answers, this photograph\u00a0lends itself to contextual manipulation, which it did have to endure in the form of propaganda after it was published.<\/p>\n

When pressured\u00a0for context, Lange admitted to staging the photograph without knowing anything about her subject. The image is striking, but there’s no telling whether or not it accurately depicts the reality of the Great Depression. All we know is that it portrays an accurate depiction of America’s memory\u00a0<\/em>of this time period, an analysis we can only make when we evaluate the context of this image’s distribution– the fact\u00a0that Lange\u00a0gave her audience absolutely no context to reference.<\/p>\n

There’s a reason Blitzer included context in his triangle. Without it, it’s easy to misconstrue information and impossible to gain\u00a0a holistic understanding of a circumstance. Even the deprivation of background information\u00a0is valid\u00a0context for analyzing situations, as understood in the analysis of “Migrant Mother” by Dorthea Lange.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Her eyes longingly gaze toward a life she was never able to obtain. Her children, poor and afraid, huddle around her,\u00a0slumped\u00a0over strong shoulders that have\u00a0tirelessly borne\u00a0the burden of raising an impoverished family for years. \u00a0She is the Migrant Mother– the iconic face of The Great Depression, captured in a moment, remembered\u00a0for decades to come. Back […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":159,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":"","_links_to":"","_links_to_target":""},"categories":[8],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-172","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-blog-post"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/sites.dwrl.utexas.edu\/visualrhetoric\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/172","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/sites.dwrl.utexas.edu\/visualrhetoric\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/sites.dwrl.utexas.edu\/visualrhetoric\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/sites.dwrl.utexas.edu\/visualrhetoric\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/159"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/sites.dwrl.utexas.edu\/visualrhetoric\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=172"}],"version-history":[{"count":3,"href":"https:\/\/sites.dwrl.utexas.edu\/visualrhetoric\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/172\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":190,"href":"https:\/\/sites.dwrl.utexas.edu\/visualrhetoric\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/172\/revisions\/190"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/sites.dwrl.utexas.edu\/visualrhetoric\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=172"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/sites.dwrl.utexas.edu\/visualrhetoric\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=172"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/sites.dwrl.utexas.edu\/visualrhetoric\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=172"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}