Books with Pictures

In my last blog post, I talked about using a semi-fictional narrative to enhance an otherwise wholly non-fiction text. A creative narrative can take something that can run dry as easily as academic writing and transform into something genuinely interesting that keeps the reader invested, the same way putting a pinch of salt on ice cream makes it taste better (seriously, try it if you haven't already).

Today, however, I want to discuss another rather unique choice that Aronson makes to further deepen the reader's understanding of race as he presents it in his book of the same title - pictures. It's a rather common cliché that someone might only read a book for the pictures, but they truly are an effective tool when writing. Pictures in books, essays, or scholarly journals may often be considered rather juvenile or unprofessional, but I believe that they have a genuine purpose in the world of academic literature.

(Via Patrick Q.)

Clearly, the pictures that Aronson used were not just randomly plopped in as an afterthought on behalf of his publisher's suggestion - there are points in the book where he directly references the photos, which simultaneously ties the image to the text itself and encourages the reader to pause and consider it for a few moments, especially if the image is on a different page. The pictures, at least at the surface level, do help break up the visual noise of the text, making it more approachable to its target audience of high school and college students. 

These images can also be used as evidence of primary sources. By including political cartoons, such as a cartoon warning Americans about taking in Irish immigrants on page 143, or passages of original text, such as the Declaration of Independence on page 132 or Carolus Linnaeus' classification of animals on pages 124 and 125, the reader can see for themselves important, noticeable details of the image or document that would be hard to describe with words. For example, from the slightly blurry picture of the Declaration of Independence on page 132, we can see how the words "CHRISTIAN" and "MEN" stand out from the rest of the page's scratchy text, and how much stress Thomas Jefferson put not only on the physical words but on the concepts they represented when writing such an important document. By looking at the image on page 119 from the book Types of Mankind by Nott and Glidden from 1854 (only 6 years before the start of the Civil War) outlining the perceived distinctions between races based on skull anatomy, the reader can clearly draw the same conclusion that the authors intended them to when they wrote it almost 150 years ago. By looking at this image, we can clearly tell that Nott and Glidden want us to infer that the average black person is similar to a chimpanzee when both are compared to - oddly enough - a statue of the Greek god Apollo. That's basically the 19th century equivalent of comparing a professionally edited photo of a supermodel to a picture of a person who walked into the studio off of the street and asking which one looks better. 

Pictures definitely improve writing when used effectively, but not just by being aesthetically pleasing. By adding images like these, the reader is able to gain an enhanced understanding of the subject matter that not only would be hard to include in the raw text but, frankly, would be much duller than adding pictures. Like the vignette narratives, they leave plenty of room for critical thinking, but they also change up the pace of the prose and make it more entertaining and accessible.