IU professor receives natl. book award

John Lucaites, an IU professor in rhetoric and public culture, received three national scholarly awards this winter for the book “No Caption Needed: Iconic Photographs, Public Culture, and Liberal Democracy.”

The book was co-authored by Northwestern professor Robert Hariman.

“No Caption Needed,” which took almost nine years for Lucaites and Hariman to complete, analyzes the relationships between photography, visual culture and liberal democracy.

“The main argument we try to present is to recognize photojournalism as perhaps our most important mode of public art,” Lucaites said.

The National Communication Association, the main scholarly organization to which both Hariman and Lucaites belong, gave two of the awards.

One of them is the 2008 James A. Winans-Herbert A. Wichelns Memorial Award for
Distinguished Scholarship in Rhetoric and Public Address, a yearly award which recognizes the most important contribution to the field of rhetoric and public address.

The Diamond Anniversary Book Award is given to the most influential scholarly book published within the last two years.

“Receiving these two National Communication Association awards is a great honor to me because they are my closest peers,” Lucaites said.

In the book, Lucaites and Hariman identify nine major images people remember across generations, demographics, gender and race. These icons include the “Migrant Mother” photograph from the Great Depression, the “Times Square Kiss” photograph following the end of World War II and the image of the raising of the flag on Iwo Jima.

“These images became the dominating icons of particular events, and we found that people have subsequently used these icons in a wide variety of ways, from advertising to satire,” Lucaites said.

IU professor Robert Terrill, director of undergraduate studies and assistant professor of communication and culture, teaches some of the main concepts Lucaites’ book analyzes.

“I feel the most important thing about the book is that it argues for taking images seriously,” Terrill said. “A lot of scholars are automatically suspicious of images and they feel that images confuse or bias people. The book shows how important images are to our society as a whole and the role they play in shaping our culture.”

Ed Linenthal, an IU history professor whose classes emphasize some of the concepts in “No Caption Needed,” also read the book and recognized its importance to public culture.

“I think that Lucaites’ book is exciting, compelling and intellectually great,” Linenthal said. “It forces us to pay more serious attention to the power of the visual, which is a very important study.”

In addition to these awards, the book has also generated a blog at www.nocaptionneeded.com that has been up for about a year and a half.

The blog is updated daily with posts that continue the discussion from the book about how images are important to liberal
democracy.