Term Paper II, Pictures and Audience as Constructors

The room was brightly lit and there were no lighting changes made. The audience was happy and mingling prior to and after the show. There was a feeling of community. Just like the old days with the storyteller in the village. It had a ritualistic feel in that these events occurred on a fairly regular basis. The rituals used for these tellings were especially strong because the tellers were operating from an environment of competition and strict storytelling rules. There was a sense of formality within the community and everyone knew what to do.
One performer presented a challenge to the notion of storytelling orally. He demonstrated how pictures could be used to tell stories. But really the picture does not talk. Instead the audience tells the story in their mind and fills in what is not seen to complete the picture. Particularly the performer showed how pictures could alter the story being told by focusing on one part of the picture at the expense of others, or simply by erasing certain aspects of the picture. In a picture of a lynching, a rhetorician took out the hanging body to draw focus on the mob. This erased the hanging person as a criminal, exposed the mob, and revealed the mob as criminals. If I remember correctly, the performer also said that lynching should not be repeated and racism today is invisible. This made me think. If racism is invisible today maybe lynching is too. If capital punishment is being unfairly applied to black men today, wouldn’t that be an invisible form of lynching? This narrator allowed me to continue developing the story after he stopped telling it.