Last Meals

The authors/photographers of the two pieces presented obviously had a point to make and a story to tell about last meals for inmates and the death penalty yet they do not explicitly state their opinions on the matter.  These authors let their images and sparse words do the talking, which can often make a more poignant statement than any essay or video ever could.

The two websites exemplify strong visual rhetoric in different ways.  No Seconds uses beautifully posed, well cooked meals as the main focus of the image with a backdrop of a table that changes from image to image – possibly to give each inmate displayed a unique image and feel for the reader to better grasp.  Next to the image is a list stating the inmates name, age, state imprisoned in, charges, sentence, and description of last meal.  Through these statements we are able to get an image of the prisoner in our head of what he/she enjoyed and what they did to deserve the death penalty.  The visual of the font type also affected me as it was very plain and sterile, much like a prison. 

The Last Meal Project was also very good at manipulating an image in order to get a response from the audience.  The images in this album however are very different from those in No Seconds, they give a photo of the inmate that is dark and somewhat haunting with very plain images of the food they had requested as a last meal.  The text on the side was similar to that in No Seconds in a plain, typewriter-esque font describing the inmates name, last meal, and sentence along with when and where they were executed.  The most poignant of the images in this album for me was that of Jonathan Wayne Nobles as he requested the Eucharist and Sacrament, wanting a piece of himself that he had forgotten when he because a criminal.  I believe the photographer was trying make his/her audience more aware of the fact that these were people about to die and not just about a nice meal a prisoner had with in prison.

              Both photographers did a wonderful job in attempting to elicit a response from their audiences and I have no doubt that they received one.  No Seconds affected me the most through both its images and text, for we were given a better look at who the person was on paper and what their last meal was.  The Last Meal Project was also wonderful, the text along with the photos of the inmates made the album more personable, but there was something in the album that just did not affect me nearly as much as that of No Seconds.  Visual Rhetoric is a very important aspect in media that many of us do not consciously think about, it gives us new ways to see a situation and can sway an audience’s opinion without the audience being aware of what is occurring.