Rhetorical Questions

Of Paper Towels and Photojournalism


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Fake. Real. Accurate. True. They're the keywords in any debate about representation, the sticky wicket famously represented by Belgian surrealist René Magritte in his painting The Treachery of Images (1929): a flat, cartoonish depiction of a tobacco pipe squats atop the deliciously polemical fiat "This is not a pipe." In this episode, Mark Johnson, from the University of Georgia's Grady College of Journalism, walks us through the process of representing a news story with a photograph, and Brian recalls the image of President Trump tossing rolls of paper towels to a crowd in Puerto Rico last October. This episode features the song "Oktoberfest Gaudi" by Steve Raphael. The episode illustration (Sharpie on paper towel) was drawn by Barbara Worth Ratner.

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Rhetorical QuestionsBy Brian Amsden