Sunday, January 26, 2014
Importance of Photos and imagery throughout the book - Chris
I'll just say it, I'm not a big fan of books with more than a few photos in them. My opinion however, was turned on its head by this book. When discussing such a graphic topic as this it was important for King to find another medium with which to communicate the gruesome details. In a way similar to the exposure of the Vietnam War, the grim reality only provokes feelings of injustice when it is shoved in the face of the watcher or in this case the reader. A picture tended to accompany every chapter and I didn't think much of them until I came across the graphic images on pages 232-233, one of them also appears partially on the cover. The contrast in the image reinforces the injustice of the situation perfectly. Two boys lying dead and dying on the ground after being shot by the very man sworn to protect them, while he wears an expression of tired indifference and and air of superiority. The boys, innocent of the crimes they were accused of, were gunned down after they "attacked" Sheriff McCall. This act of violence directly opposes all that McCall is supposed to represent. The law should stay the law and people should not have the right to take actions that they think are just against the law. This is the thing that he defended and the beginning of the book and now that the rulings have been overturned he has decided to redefine justice himself. I'll attach the images to show their gravity. King uses them to throw the reader into the very real world of this killing and it makes his case for injustice all the stronger.
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I agree, I feel like the book wouldn't have had the same effect without these pictures. Like I've said before, this wasn't just a stuffy old history book, this came with the jolt that these things really happened, and that this was really an issue. Obviously I wouldn't want to look at these pictures for too long, but this case just has that air of "Oh my god, these were real people, this actually happened" with them. The "sneer of cold contempt" (Ozymandias) McCall has on (or really just a terrifying air of "whatever") cements him as a representative of a twisted era: One where certain human lives carry no meaning whatsoever. To see that clearly documented brings a haunting realism to these pages.
ReplyDeleteI think you touch on a key thing here. I did not feel in the slightest like there was a brunt of pictures in the book. Generally Gilbert King did a good job at spacing the images out, inserting a picture at the beginning of each chapter. The repetition of images at the start of each chapter added structural continuity to the book, and regularly reinforced the idea that the story of Marshall and the Groveland Boys is a true story. Since “Devil in the Grove” is a historical work, this is important to emphasize, especially since King writes the book in the style of novel. It is important to note that the two images, which you primarily discuss, are embedded within the content of a chapter, and are not at the chapter’s beginning. This placement is significant because is diverges from the norm. The focus of the reader, upon reaching pages 232 and 233, is drawn to the images because of their location. As a result, the importance of both the event the pictures depict and the pictures themselves are emphasized.
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