Join ICP for a special live presentation of The Reading the Pictures Salon: Looking at Key Images from Campaign 2024, hosted by the visual- and media-literacy site, Reading the Pictures. The evening brings together Dr. Karrin Anderson, Dr. Nicole Fleetwood, Photo Editor Gail Fletcher, and publisher and founder of Reading the Pictures, Michael Shaw with moderator Dr. Cara Finnegan, Editor at Large, Reading the Pictures, to analyze a select edit of photographs defining the 2024 U.S. election over a span of 90 minutes. 

The Reading The Pictures Salon is an online discussion dedicated to understanding how visual and social media frame the critical cultural and political themes of our day. The Salon combines the eyes and voices of the world's leading photojournalists, photo editors, visual scholars, and other highly informed observers to analyze select edits of still images in a unique 90-minute online discussion format.

This program is part of a two-part program series focused on photography, visual literacy, and the U.S. election. 

This program is being offered both in person at ICP, located on NYC's Lower East Side, and online. Tickets to attend the conversation in person are $5 and do not include access to ICP’s galleries.

About Reading The Pictures

Reading The Pictures is the only site dedicated 100% to the analysis of news and documentary images. In 2008, we participated as guest bloggers covering the Democratic Convention in Denver. In 2011, Reading The Pictures led LIFE.com's list of best photo blogs and also won a Picture of the Year International award for Multimedia. In 2012, The Reading The Pictures methodology was also the subject of a "super session" at the Rhetoric Society of America, the premier conference for Communications and Visual Communications professors. In 2017, Reading the Pictures and the Salon won the Eugene Smith Memorial Fund Chapnick Grant for advancing photojournalism.

About the Speakers

Karrin Vasby Anderson (she/her) is Professor of Communication Studies at Colorado State University, where she teaches courses in rhetoric, political communication, and gender and communication. Dr. Anderson studies the culture of politics and the politics of culture, examining the ways in which political identity is rhetorically constructed and contested in popular media. She is coauthor or editor of three books: Women, Feminism, and Pop Politics: From "Bitch" to "Badass" and Beyond, Woman President: Confronting Postfeminist Political Culture and Governing Codes: Gender, Metaphor, and Political Identity. She is a past editor of the Quarterly Journal of Speech (2020-2022) and has published articles in scholarly journals such as the Quarterly Journal of Speech, Communication and Critical/Cultural Studies, Rhetoric & Public Affairs, Presidential Studies Quarterly, Women’s Studies in Communication, Communication Quarterly, and White House Studies. Her commentary on politics, gender, and visual culture has been published by The Conversation and Reading the Pictures, and she is consulted as a political communication expert by local, national, and international media outlets.

Dr. Anderson is a recipient of the National Communication Association’s James A. Winans and Herbert A. Wichelns Memorial Award for Distinguished Scholarship in Rhetoric and Public Address; the Outstanding Book Award from the Organization for the Study of Communication, Language, and Gender; the Presidential Citation of Service from the National Communication Association; the Michael Pfau Outstanding Article Award in Political Communication from NCA’s Political Communication Division; the Organization for Research on Women and Communication’s Feminist Scholarship Award; the Carrie Chapman Catt Prize for Research on Women in Politics; the Outstanding Mentor in Master’s Education Award from NCA’s Master’s Education Section; the Faculty Mentorship Award from NCA's Rhetorical and Communication Theory Division; the Excellence in Graduate Mentoring from CSU's College of Liberal Arts; and the Distinction in Curricular Innovation Award from CSU's College of Liberal Arts.

Dr. Nicole R. Fleetwood is an art historian and the inaugural James Weldon Johnson Professor at NYU. A MacArthur Fellow, she is the author and curator of Marking Time: Art in the Age of Mass Incarceration, winner of the National Book Critics Award in Criticism, the John Hope Franklin Publication Prize of the American Studies Association, the Susanne M. Glasscock Humanities Book Prize for Interdisciplinary Scholarship, and both the Charles Rufus Morey Book Award in art history and the Frank Jewett Mather Award in art criticism. Fleetwood co-curated and co-edited Aperture’s Prison Nation, an exhibition and publication focusing on photography’s role in documenting mass incarceration. She is currently writing a nonfiction book titled Between the River and Railroad Tracks about growing up in the Black Midwest. She is on the board of MoMA PS1 and The Kitchen, NYC.

Dr. Cara Finnegan is a Professor in the Department of Communication at the University of Illinois. She joined the university in 1999 after completing her Ph.D. at Northwestern University. She holds affiliated appointments in the Center for Writing Studies, Gender and Women’s Studies, and Art History. She was named a University Scholar in 2017.

Finnegan’s research examines the role of photography as a tool for public life. Photographs are powerful forms of communication: they visualize social issues, make visible those who are often invisible, and foster or limit bonds of identification. Her book-length projects are best described as rhetorical histories of photography, in that she examines the production, composition, circulation, and reception of photographs at specific moments in U.S. history. Her new book, Photographic Presidents: Making History from Daguerreotype to Digital will be published by University of Illinois Press.

Michael Shaw is an analyst of news photography and visual journalism, a frequent lecturer and writer on visual politics, photojournalism, and media literacy, and the founder and publisher of Reading the Pictures. He is also a Clinical Psychologist and organizational consultant in private practice. His clinical training involves the analysis of character styles, and his research has dealt with the creative process, visual thinking, and how metaphors can create psychological insight. 

In 2001, Michael created a cartoon called “BagNews” to engage his young sons and their friends in news and civics. Each edition captured the New York Times top story in one picture sketched on a lunch bag. In 2014, coinciding with the emergence of the blogosphere, “BagNewsNotes” was born to analyze news images. The site’s motto at the time stated: “Thousands of sites read the words, only one reads the pictures.” 

Michael has presented papers or hosted panels at various conferences and photo festivals, including Photoville; Rhetoric Society of America (RSA); the Society for Photographic Education (SPE); and the Association for Education in Journalism and Mass Communication (AEJMC), and he has lectured about photography and visual culture at schools such as Texas A&M; Northwestern; The School of Visual Arts (SVA); and Savannah College of Art and Design (SCAD). His writing has been featured in publications such as The New York Times Magazine, Columbia Journalism Review, The New Republic, Salon, and American Photo.

Gail Fletcher is a photo editor and producer at The Guardian. Formerly, she worked as Associate Photo Editor and Producer at National Geographic. Gail was a portfolio reviewer for the Eddie Adams Workshop in 2020.  

She holds a Bachelor of Arts in History and Government with a concentration in Media Studies from Cornell University. Originally from South Florida, she is currently based in Washington, DC. 

 

Image by Erin Schaff for The New York Times