Roland Barthes famously pointed out that photographs seem to provide messages without needing additional codes (“The Rhetoric of the Image,” in Image, Music, Text, 1977). Heeding Barthes's insight, which is central to the analysis of the authors of No Caption Needed, we are able to appreciate their attempt to analyze the influence of photography on public culture in general and to consider their claim—which they confess to putting “baldly”—that “photojournalism is an important technology of liberal-democratic citizenship” (p. 18). How can that be? To make their case, Robert Hariman and John Louis Lucaites pursue two intertwined paths: a treatment of how certain famously iconic photographs influence the public negotiation of the meaning of events by representing “large swaths of historical experience” (p. 1), and a theorization of liberal-democratic citizenship. Clearly, the authors are onto something cogent. Certainly, for example, Robert Capa's famous photo of a “falling soldier” serves as an icon both of the Spanish Civil War and of the significance of photojournalism. In testimony to the photo's continuing influence, the two photojournalists in Oliver Stones's film Salvador (1986), John Cassady (John Savage) and Richard Boyle (James Woods), while in pursuit of iconic images of the death-squad murders, identify Capa's Spanish Civl War photo as the epitome of photojournalistic success.

However, Hariman and Lucaites's investigation has ambitions that extend well beyond demonstrating the iconic value and thus the influence on public culture of famous photographic images: Dorothea Lange's “Migrant Mother,” Alfred Eisenstadt's “Times Square Kiss,” Joe Rosenthal's “Raising of the Flag on Mount Suribachi (Iwo Jima),” John Filo's “Kent State University Massacre,” and Stuart Franklin's “Tiananmen Square,” among many others. They seek to demonstrate that photojournalism participates effectively in the constitution of liberal democracy. In pursuit of this larger ambition, their text takes the form of what film theorist David Bordwell calls a “forking-path” plot (for example, in his Planet Hong Kong, 2000). One narrative strand follows a contemporary history of photojournalism, seeking to show the ways in which journalism's photos evince rhetorical force, while the other seeks to elucidate post-Habermasian conceptualizations of public culture and the connections between public culture and citizen-enacted liberal democracy. As is the case with such narratives, the two paths are brought into convergence late in the plot as the authors address what they call “visual democracy.”

In the strongest parts of their investigation, Hariman and Lucaites provide abundant testimony to the iconic value of famous photographic images, with numerous examples of how they have been appropriated for a variety of rhetorical purposes and projects. And they do a creditable job of reviewing various reinflections and extensions of Jürgen Habermas's influential treatment of the public sphere. Moreover, they address a wide variety of the kind of politically relevant phenomena that have been subjects of photojournalism—civic identity, trauma and public memory, and government-sponsored brutality, among others.

Ultimately, however, while this book is valuable for the information it supplies on the public role of photojournalism and the persistent reappropriations of iconic images, it will disappoint those looking for critical theorizing in the domain of visual culture. With occasional exception, there are no theoretically guided analyses of photographic images. The authors' approach is not hermeneutic, semiotic, or psychoanalytic. Indeed, there is very little by way of analytics that would, for example, introduce tensions between the look and the gaze or between seeing and saying. And occasionally the authors even go so far as to say that the meaning and rhetorical force of this or that photographic image is “obvious.” Had the authors read Roland Barthes with more discernment, they would have discovered a significant challenge to their almost exclusive focus on the “obvious” referential aspect of photographic signification. While Barthes (in his Camera Lucida, 1981) recognizes the referential dimension of photographic images, to which he refers as a photo's studium, he is at pains to treat aspects within the photo that break or punctuate the photo's studium and thereby disrupt representation—what he refer to as the photo's punctum. Jacques Ranciere has succinctly identified the kind of challenge that Barthes's approach creates for those who see obvious, referential meaning in images: “Look out! What you are taking for visible self-evidence is in fact encoded message whereby a society legitimates itself by naturalizing itself, by rooting itself in the obviousness of the visible” (The Future of the Image, 2007, 10).

The other major theoretical weakness of the book's treatment of photographic images pertains to the authors' anaemic version of the viewer. They frequently refer to the emotional charge that images deliver, especially in their chapter “Trauma and Public Memory,” but they offer no elaborate version of how an image's impact on a viewing subject's sensations, which are radically entangled with experiential memory, can give rise to representational meaning. As Jill Bennett has pointed out (in referring to the “poetics of sense memory”), images “speak out of a particular memory or experience … in other words speaking from the body sustaining sensation” (Empathic Vision, 2005, 38). At a minimum, a robust model of how memory is embodied leads to a treatment not simply of what traumatic images can say but about the conditions of possibility for what they can do.

The theoretical weaknesses of the book's approach to photographic images is paralleled by its simplistic (and often tautological) approach to democratic theory. “Democracy,” for the authors, is a matter of citizens negotiating a collective self-understanding within a “democratic society.” In a “now-time” that witnesses sophisticated critiques of the way that the discourses of liberal-democratic theory fail to heed a politics of abjection and/or of subjectification—William Connolly's and Ranciere's for example—the authors' unreflective incorporation of civic-text political rhetoric is disappointing. Their impoverished notion of ideology—as simply “beliefs that present a social order as if it were a natural order”—is also disappointing for those who reside in a post-Lacan, post-Althusser, post-Zizek intellectual world.

By the time the authors' forking-paths converge in their conclusion on visual democracy, they have redeemed their analysis somewhat with a good discussion of visual culture and a recognition of the imbrication of “democracy” with “arts, artistry, and aesthetic norms” (p. 302). Ultimately, despite the investigation's theoretical failings, No Caption Needed should find a wide audience looking for a comprehensive treatment of photojournalism's contributions to visual culture and their connections with political discernment and discussion.