Katy Parry, A Visual Framing Analysis of British Press Photography During the 2006 Israel
–Lebanon conflict 2010 3: 67 Media, War & Conflict
Branston G and Stafford R — The Media Students’ Book, 3rd Edition (Routledge 2006)
Read pages 134-146 from Chapter 5 titled ‘Ideologies and Power’
Read case study: Selecting and Constructing News
ANSWER THE FOLLOWING QUESTIONS
1, Do you think a news report can ever be balanced? Why or why not? How can a
journalist make sure to tell a story fairly? (300 words)
1. Should journalists show emotion in their news reports? Why or why not? (300 words)
2. Find an example of a TV journalist or print journalist discussing a story in an emotional
way. Be prepared to share the example in class.
Images, Compassion and
Reporting Trauma
Adapted from Two Lectures Given by
Dr. Gareth Bentley in November
2011.
Introduction
• ‘….pictures…… are more imperative than
writing, they impose meaning at one stroke,
without analysing or diluting it.’ (Barthes,
1972)
• Scopophilia or scoptophilia, from Greek "love
of looking", is deriving pleasure from looking.
From Bentley, November
2011
• ‘By ideological elaboration we mean the
insertion of the photo into a set of thematic
interpretations which permits the sign
(photo), via its connoted meanings, to serve
as the index of an ideological theme.
• Ideological news values provide a second level
of signification of an ideological type to an
image which already (at the denotative level)
signifies.
From Bentley, November
2011
Barthes – Two Aspects of an Image
Denotation
• The object itself photographed. Most readers or
viewers will agree on the denoted object (e.g.
here is a little boy who is a soldier).
Connotation
• Linking the object with other signs and meanings.
Connotation may vary depending on who is doing
the looking (or reading).
Susan Sontag – Photography and
Ethics
• In her Essay On Photography Sontag says that the evolution of
modern technology has changed the viewer in three key ways.
She calls this the emergence of a new visual code.
• . “In teaching us a new visual code, photographs alter and
enlarge our notion of what is worth looking at and what we have
the right to observe” . This is what Sontag calls a change in
“viewing ethics” .
• To Sontag, photographs “now provide most of the knowledge
people have about the look of the past and the reach of the
present”(4). Without photography only those few people who
had been there would know what the Egyptian pyramids or the
Parthenon look like, yet most of us have a good idea of the
appearance of these places. Photography teaches us about
those parts of the world that are beyond our touch in ways that
literature can not.
From Bentley, November
2011
Sontag (2)
•
•
•
Sontag also talked about the way in which photography desensitizes its audience.
She describes viewing images of the Holocaust“When I looked at those
photographs something broke... something went dead, something is still crying”
Sontag examines the relationship between photography and reality. Photographs
are depicted as a representation of realism. Sontag claimed that “such images are
indeed able to usurp reality because first of all a photograph is not only an image,
an interpretation of the real; it is also a trace, something directly stencliled off the
real (Sontag, Susan (1982), The Image World )
Sontag observed some uses of photography, “Photography has become one of the
principal devices for experiencing something, for giving an appearance of
participation” (Sontag,1977), such as memorizing and providing evidence. She also
states that “to collect photography is to collect the world.” (Sontag,1997)
From Bentley, November
2011
Memento Mori
• Sontag believes that photography implies that we
know about the world if we accept it as the
camera records it. She states that photography
has ‘become one of the principal devices for
experiencing something, for giving an appearance
of participation’.]
• She refers to photographs as memento mori,
where to take a photograph is to participate in
another person’s mortality, vulnerability and
mutability.
The rise of the ‘iconic’ image
‘Moments of visual eloquence’ that ‘acquire exceptional importance in public life and are
believed to ‘motivate public action on behalf of democratic values’. (Hariman and Lucaites,
2003:38)
•Recognised by everyone within a public culture
•Representations of historically significant events
•Images acquire iconic status, reducing complex and controversial news items into a memorable
visual statement.
•The iconic image may be reused/abused in new contexts, across media
No caption needed?
“All photographs wait to be explained or falsified by their captions.”
(Sontag, 2003)
Soldiers smuggle grenades in a basket covered
with water hyacinth, Bangladesh, 1971
(Mohammed Shafi)
Paris streetdancer, 2007 (Denis Darzacq)
Images and War Reporting
Media images of war
• Photographic images of war have been used to accentuate and lend
authority to war reporting since the early 20th century, with depictions in
1930s picture magazines of the Spanish Civil War
• The period between the world wars was a time when modernist notions of
news surveillance and photographic objectivity were becoming
institutionalized in the norms and conventions of professional media
practice, first in the European picture magazines of the 1920s and 30s
(and later Life and Look in the US), and then in the daily press throughout
most of the industrialized world between 1930 and 1950.
• By the 1960s Vietnam War coverage came to be associated with personal,
independent and uncensored reporting and image making
• This new style of journalism arguably shattered the propagandist
idealized mythical narrative of the Vietnam War
• From the 1930s to the rise of television infotainment and the 24/7 news
cycle, war photography trafficked in emotional content through ‘dramatic
visual impact’
From Bentley, November
2011
Objectivity
•
•
•
•
•
•
•
The emphasis on war photography’s emotional impact is closely tied to a presumption of
photography’s verisimilitude and objectivity
It conveys an immediate, direct authentic sense of real events to the viewer, more emotional and
less intellectual
We therefore tend to treat images as primarily the products of individual photographers
We want to be the recipients of an emotional and experiential transfer that goes beyond a simple
‘recording’ of the event to provide us with a human connection to the courage, determination,
pain, or suffering of the picture’s actors
Since the Spanish Civil War, theatres of conflict have been seen as a proving ground for
photojournalists, and war photographers have been celebrated as the daring and heroic figures of a
particular scopic regime; a regime which utilized the technology of modern media to bring
apparently authentic views of distant events.
News photos have a specific way of passing themselves off a aspects of ‘nature’
The ‘ideology of objectivity’ (Hall, 1973) derives from one of the most profound myths in the liberal
ideology: the absolute distinction between fact and value, the distinction that appears as a
common-sense ‘rule’ in newspaper practice as ‘the distinction between facts and interpretation’:
the empiricist illusion, the utopia of naturalism
From Bentley, November
2011
Brothers (1997)
‘In war photography…. Responses are magnified. Danger
hovers at the edged of all such images; the passions
they record are always the most extreme. The
possibility of dying that is their subtext, for their
subjects as much as the photographer, means they
make urgent claims on our attention, allowing us both
to feel a sense of our own mortality and to hold that
sense at bay. The forcefulness of their messages makes
them unlike any other genre of image, the power of
desire to communicate impelling them towards
representations that touch us more deeply and more
directly.’ (xi)
Distance
•
Images offer viscerally exciting and voyeuristic glimpses into theaters of violence that, for most
viewers are alien to everyday experience (Taylor, 1998)
•
‘….war and photography now seem inseparable, and plane crashes and other horrific accidents
always attract people with cameras. A society which makes it normative to aspire to never
experience privation, failure, misery, pain, dread disease, and in which death itself is regarded not
as natural and inevitable but as a cruel, unmerited disaster, creates a tremendous curiosity about
these events- a curiosity that is partly satisfied through picture taking.’ (Sontag, 1997: 167)
Images of war seduce us into thinking that we can experience human events vicariously, at home in
our living rooms, through cable, satellite or internet
We should not confuse news and documentary images with those of entertainment fiction, no
matter how much commercial media encourages us to do so
This requires that we study the production and use of these images at multiple levels, and stand
back from our tendency to ‘witness’ them as the shared experiences of our photographer proxies
We must remain conscious of the fact that contemporary news operations, driven as they are by
marketing concerns, routinely exploit fear, voyeurism and emotional fascination to boost ratings
and circulation.
•
•
•
•
Bentley, November 2011
Pulitzer prize-winning David Turnley,
World Press Photo of the Year, 1991
• The photo is comparable to Vietnam photos in
its human expression of trauma
• It stands in stark contrast to the great body of
techno-war Gulf War images
Bentley, November 2011
Conclusion
• It was not surprising , in the early days of the 2003 invasion of Iraq,
to hear a CBS news reader on 48 Hours claim: ‘the search is on for
the one great image that will define the battle of Iraq’ (‘Defining the
War’, 48 Hours, CBS, 1 april 2003; quoted in Hariman and Lucaites,
2007: 291
• Back to the toppling statue thing – they tried to make that the
iconic image!
• To understand why we get a steady diet of war images, why many
other types of revealing and informative images remain unseen, we
need to view war photographs not as reflections of the events and
experiences photographers encounter in war zones, but as the
results of a continuing practice of cultural production that is also a
tool of government management, media business and political
persuasion
From Bentley, November
2011
Reporting Trauma
Ethiopia 1984
• Going back to our discussion on
objectivity,BBC has run stories where the
journalist’s emotional reaction was part of the
story.
• Images play a central role Michael Burke’s
report in Ethiopia, 1984 (very graphic images)
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=XYOj_6OY
uJc&feature=related
• This reporting led to Live Aid.
Trauma
• Why show these images? Is it about empathy?
• Live Aid happening was a real thing, a good thing – but is Sontag
right that its not ethical to watch this level of suffering?
• According to Meek (2010), trauma also sheds light on ethical issues.
He stresses the analysis of unconscious structures of political
identities rather than identification with, or empathy for, the
victim/survivor of trauma. The latter discourse of
identification/empathy is argued by him to be problematic because
it “may participate in structures of power and exclusion”, while
regarding itself as progressive and liberal. Meek favours the former
discourse because it reveals repressed violence to be the basis of
both individual and group identity. (Terada, 2003: Benjamin, 1988).
From Bentley, November
2011
Witnessing (1)
• Another “practice of objectivity” from our last lecture.
• Frosh and Pinchevski’s definition of media witnessing is
as follows:
‘It refers simultaneously to the appearance of witnesses
in media reports, the possibility of media themselves
bearing witness, and the positioning of media
audiences as witnesses to depicted events,
configurations that are amenable to handy summary
through a tripartite distinction …between witnesses in
the media, witnessing by the media, and witnessing
through the media’ (Frosh and Pinchevski (Eds., 2009),
pp.1).
From Bentley, November
2011
Witnessing (2)
• Photography and video images of trauma make
us “witnesses” as well.
• Frosh (Frosh and Pinchevski, Eds.,2009, pp.69)
takes the view that:
‘Media witnessing thus helps to maintain that
unexciting but essential sphere of indifferent
relations to strangers in which potential feelings
of hostility are neutralized without requiring that
individuals become personally acquainted or
committed.’
From Bentley, November
2011
Civil inattention or objectivity?
• Civil Innattention– psychology: in the same phyiscal space,
you are aware of others but not acting in any particular way
towards them.
• For example, in an elevator.
• Do images of trauma and war promote the same thing?
– We (the news viewer) are a ware of what is happening –
but a THIN awareness.
– In contrast to the THICK awareness of our own lives and
problems.