Visuals should facilitate, not disrupt, the reading of the body text. To achieve this goal, you need to first introduce and discuss the visual in your text and then insert the visual in an appropriate location.
Introducing the Visual Ideally, you should introduce each visual by referring to it in your text immediately before the visual appears. An effective textual reference answers the following questions:
Here is an example of a paragraph that effectively refers to a visual; it is taken from the student paper by Paul Taylor that appears in Chapter 20 (pp. 634–37):
Gordon Parks’s 1952 photograph Emerging Man (Fig. 1) is as historically significant a reflection of the civil rights movement as are the speeches of Martin Luther King and Malcolm X, the music of Mahalia Jackson, and the books of Ralph Ellison and James Baldwin. Through striking use of black and white--a reflection of the racial divisions plaguing American cities and towns throughout much of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries--and a symbolically potent central subject--an African American man we see literally “emerging” from a city manhole--Parks’s photo evokes the centuries of racial and economic marginalization of African Americans, at the same time as it projects a spirit of determination and optimism regarding the civil rights movement’s eventual success.
Placing the Visual in an Appropriate Location MLA style requires that you place a visual in the body of your text as soon after the discussion as possible, particularly when the reader will need to consult the visual. See, for example, Paul Taylor’s paper in the previous chapter (pp. 634–37). (Note that he discusses the figures in the text and places them as close after he first mentions them as he can. He also includes them in his list of works cited (p. 637), with a descriptive title and source information.)