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During the fall of 2005, typing into the Google search engine the keywords Katrina, woman, and flag called up a singular image: that of an elderly African American woman, wrapped in a blanket patterned after the American flag, huddling in the rain outside of the New Orleans Convention Center (see Figure 1 on the following page). This photo (the original in color) was taken on August 31 by Eric Gay for the Associated Press, two days after the neglected levees of New Orleans gave way. It was widely reprinted in both the domestic and international press. The woman in the picture is 87-year-old Milvertha Hendricks. A second photo (Figure 2 on the following page), taken by photojournalist Alan Chin two days later on September 2 and published in Newsweek, finds Milvertha Hendricks still wrapped in the American flag blanket, still sitting outside the convention center, but now slumped in her chair, staring down into her lap, her face away from the camera. This photo appeared in black and white.
In an influential book on picture theory and visual culture, Mitchell (2005) argues that “a picture” is commonly understood to be “the entire situation in which an image has made its appearance, as when we ask someone if they ‘get the picture’” (p. xiv). He notes that the essence of our contemporary media culture (in which, for instance, Googling is recognized as an intelligible verb) is, to a critical degree, visual. Quoting Heidegger (1977), Mitchell proposes that the present moment is distinguished by the way in which the world is conceived and grasped as picture. Images, he