Death Penalty and Visual Rhetoric

Both series of images are intriguing in the way that they are both unique in their objectives yet essentially portray the same things. I personally like Hargreaves series better than the last meal project because he is able to channel personality through the photos while the last meal project is making more of an attempt to persuade and disgust the audience. Both use an overwhelming amount of visual to get their point across however I feel like Hargreaves reeks of visual rhetoric because he portrays the meal as light and adds personality behind it while he is essentially describing to the audience what a death row prisoner consumed for his last meal. The last meal project portrays the prisoner as scary and uses very basic images to represent their meal, and while I was looking at the photos of the food I felt as if it was being used in a comical sense, almost cartoon like. I think there are not very many other presentations that could present such ironic things food and death unless you did something with like old people on hospice and how they decide to carry on with their lives. I think that they layout of each of the series is very important in the overall theme of the pictures each uses red ink to symbolize death I would imagine and the last meal project uses black and white mug shot pictures as the background to food creating an overall eerie mood. The red text on the crumbled notebook paper is an attempt to add to the eerie mood and almost gives it an official sense. The authors possibly were cuing at an official thing with the ruled notebook paper however depict it being crumbled to show that it is in the past or not as important. Both series of images use an array of characteristics to portray visual rhetoric in regards to the death penalty and the last supper each prisoner is given.