Public writing is a constant battle to make one view seem inevitable in hopes that the audience will set aside the other possibilities. —Phyllis Mentzell Ryder, Rhetorics for Community Action: Public Writing and Writing Publics Attention is being directed toward reality-driven representations from an ever-wider array of sources: journalistic, literary, anthropological. —Michael Renov, Theorizing Documentary Watch the movie. Show it to others. Inform yourself. Get active on the issue. —from the “Dreams Deferred” DVD sleeve

Examining a range of visual images of executions, both legal (the executions of convicted murderers) and extralegal (the lynchings of innocent African Americans), in still photographs and in Hollywood films, the authors suggest that while such images may flatten and neutralize the popular debates and politics surrounding the issues, this is not inevitable, and that if we work at sustaining careful attention to its operations the image is neither self-evident nor doomed to obscure the political.