EVANSTON, Ill. --- A naked Vietnamese girl flees in terror from a napalm attack. Five Marines and a U.S. Navy corpsman plant an American flag on Iwo Jima. A solitary protester stands before oncoming army tanks in China's Tiananmen Square.

These and six other iconic photographs taken between 1936 and 2001 are the subjects of a newly published book by University of Chicago Press that explores how photojournalism can create the images that become signposts for our collective memory.

In “No Caption Needed: Iconic Photographs, Public Culture and Liberal Democracy,” scholars Robert Hariman of Northwestern University and John Louis Lucaites of Indiana University provide a detailed look at the iconic photograph as a dynamic form of public art that both reflects and shapes cultural values.

“The study of visual culture has been booming for more than a decade, with much of the focus on electronic media,” says Hariman, Northwestern professor of communication studies. “We believe that the impact of photojournalism -- which may be seen as more familiar, more old fashioned and less exciting -- has been taken for granted and overlooked as a powerful tool in forging public identity.”

While doing their research, the scholars also asked just about everyone they met -- at meetings, parties and airports -- what visual images were etched in their minds. “Certain images were named again and again, and clearly produced profound emotional reactions. They loved some, shuddered at others, and admired them all.”

The book's nine iconic images are “by no means a definitive list,” says Hariman, but rather reflect overlapping criteria and specific scholarly interests.

Rounding out the co-authors' selections are images of the explosions of the Hindenberg and of the Challenger space shuttle; the exuberant Times Square kiss of a nurse by a sailor on V-J Day; a horrified 14-year-old girl kneeling by the body of a slain Kent State student; Dorothy Lange's weary Depression-era migrant mother, and, from 9/11, three firefighters raising an American flag amid the rubble at New York's ground zero.

The authors look not only at the images' history at the time of their creation but also at the ways in which they have been circulated on postage stamps and posters, billboards and editorial cartoons, TV shows and Web pages, and advertisements and tattoos.

“These iconic images don't just linger in our memory but are used as ongoing resources for communicative action. We rely on them to make sense of our world and to connect with and persuade others,” says Hariman. “Just as pictures of our children, parents and vacations create a sense of who we are as individuals and family members, the icon presents an image of who we are as a political community.”

And, insist the book's authors, those portraits have important implications. When the image of a single Tiananmen Square protester before a row of army tanks went around the world, “we saw a picture of heroic individualism, of one individual facing down the state,” Hariman says. In fact, the vast majority of photos of democratic dissent taken that May of 1989 were of groups of Chinese protesters engaged in collective resistance.

“The iconic image, then, not only documents a moment in time but also projects a view of the future. What had been a national democratic movement in socialist China was transformed into a liberal model of civil society on Western terms,” Hariman notes.

However striking its visual effect, the iconic image does not have a single meaning. “No Caption Needed” emphasizes that, in a healthy democratic society, citizens argue about persuading and being persuaded. “By admiring, criticizing and otherwise talking about photographs and photojournalism, we create a better understanding of who we are and who we should be,” Hariman says.

For further information about the book, visit the University of Chicago Press site at http://www.press.uchicago.edu/cgi-bin/hfs.cgi/00/217024.ctl.

From day one, students learn that truth is our ultimate goal -- not exoneration.

- Professor David Protess on the Medill Innocence Project