Picturing the environment: Documerica's visual rhetoric of interconnectedness

Documerica was a national photography project created by the Environmental Protection Agency in the early 1970s. Despite producing over 20,000 images, the project failed to garner much attention or success. As a result, the story scholars tell of Documerica tends to focus on its so-called failures. In contrast, I argue that Documerica photographs succeeded in using a variety of rhetorical strategies to visually communicate the complexity and interconnected nature of the environment. Because of Documerica’s interest in visualizing Barry Commoner’s first law of ecology, that “everything is connected to everything else,” Documerica offers researchers a chance to examine how the environment can be pictured in ways that embrace complexity and nuance. Further, Documerica operated at a pivotal moment in environmental history: between the time of the environmental revolution that led to the first Earth Day and before the discourse of climate change as we know it today existed. Environmental communicators regularly utilize images as an essential part of their messages. Yet photographing the environment is no straightforward task. Each chapter explores a different topos that makes the environment difficult to capture visually: time, place, and health. First, I investigate how Documerica photographs address time. Environments change slowly, often over decades and generations. Documerica photographs literally capture moments in the early 1970s but, through their composition and captions, encourage a viewer to imagine additional moments in time that enable reflection about pasts and futures. Second, I investigate how Documerica pictures place. I argue that Documerica positions people relative to their material surroundings to create a sense of place through visualizing relationship(s). In this way, Documerica photographs explain the ways that environments and places are co-constructed by people and their material surroundings. Finally, I investigate how health appears in Documerica photographs. Humans face health consequences as a result of environmental conditions. My analysis shows that Documerica photographs reveal shifting norms of public health in the 1970s by making visible the administrative tasks already in progress to address systemic causes of environmental ills. Overall, my dissertation investigates the rhetorical choices made by Documerica staff and contractors to reveal strategies for visualizing the environment in ways that account for interconnectedness. As a government project, Documerica was not beholden to news cycles and production deadlines. This resulted in photographs that are less sensational, revealing a more ordinary, everyday picture (and understanding) of the environment that emphasized people. In looking for the environment in these mundane moments, one finds hope as the photographs make visible extended pasts and futures, construct a multitude of relationships with Earth, and reveal solutions and interventions already in progress.

Name thesis:degree_name

Ph.D.

Level thesis:degree_level

Dissertation

Discipline thesis:degree_discipline

Communication

Grantor

University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign

Year dc:date

2023

Author dc:creator

• Axtman-Barker, Pamela Ann

Contributors dc:contributor

• Finnegan, Cara A
• Murphy, John
• O'Gorman, Ned
• Weissman, Terri

• Visual Rhetoric
• Rhetoric
• Environmental Rhetoric
• Documerica
• Documentary Photography
• Time
• Health
• Place
• Interconnectedness

Statement dc:rights

• Copyright 2023 Pamela Axtman-Barker

Language dc:language

en, eng

Handle dc:identifier

https://hdl.handle.net/2142/121976

OAI record oai:identifier

https://www.ideals.illinois.edu/oai-pmh?verb=GetRecord&metadataPrefix=etdms&identifier=oai%3Awww.ideals.illinois.edu%3A2142%2F121976