I've been exploring the implications of how distinct meanings are constructed through the treatment, placement, and positioning of front-page news images.
The placement and positioning of front-page news images constitute part of a larger system of human visual activity that operates as an extension of humanity’s instinctual need for surveillance and expression.
Here are two front-pages that create two very different sets of meanings about an event using the same photograph.
Central to the concerns examined here are how news photographs communicate the cultural, political, and ideological frames of socially constructed realities at various levels of the news making process, from photojournalists to publishers.
According to Julianne Newton in her book The Burden of Visual Truth, a news photograph, “Enters the public consciousness under the guise of the authority of the press: This is true. This is what happened. This is what the situation looked like…. The context has been one of assumed truth” (p. 89).
By examining the treatment of various versions of identical media images on the front-pages of national newspapers it may be possible to construct a schema which illustrates the intersections among power and knowledge, which shapes public opinion, reinforces or resists dominant ideologies, and conveys societal and cultural values, tastes, attitudes, and beliefs of our times.
A critical analysis of media images and their impact of society is central to understanding the visual culture in which we live. The treatment of front-page news imagery not only shapes public perception of significant events, but also mirrors a publication’s economic interest, and at times, its political agenda.
The image was made by Reuters photojournalist Sean Bean on April 17, 2000. Shortly after, Bean's picture appeared prominently on newspaper front-pages including, The New York Times and USA Today.
In the image, a young white male wearing and American flag T-shirt is being restrained by an African-American police officer. Produced during one of several days of protest, the image constitutes a decisive moment signifying an array of tensions. Ideologically, the image symbolizes the escalation of violence encountered at similar protests in the United States and around the world by people expressing concern over what they refer to as a trend toward the corporate domination of human and natural resources around the world.
The questions raised here reflect an interest in how representations of events constitute persuasive reflections of power and knowledge in society. In this case:
How do levels of signification produced by the positioning and placement of front-page news images construct divergent perceptions of the same news event?
How does the treatment and display of front-page images reflect the dominant political and economic concerns of editors and owners?
In the New York Times, the anti-globalization protest photograph is oriented vertically above the fold of the front-page in what appears to be a full-frame version of the original. However, the USA Today image, appearing again above the fold, is cropped tightly as a square, omitting the ancillary information provided in the Times’ version.
Levels of signification change with the inclusion and exclusion of visual cues available in the frame. In this case, what is seen in the New York Times’ version, such as one gas-masked individual running in the background or the strain and arch of the protestor’s body has he is lifted off the ground by the police officer, is critical to inferring meaning.
The officer’s actions and the reactions of the protestors produce a compelling image, which appeals to the intellectual and emotional imagination of the viewer. There is a narrative in the frame which unfolds as the police officer subdues the demonstrator with his baton, the grimace of the young man, and the powerless of a young demonstrator attempting to stop the violent arrest—the image contains all the elements of drama including rising, climax, and falling action.
At the same time, the image’s cropping in USA Today, reduces the viewer’s ability to see beyond the most dramatic aspects of the conflict. Close-up and intense, the drama of the confrontation between the police officer and the protestor is brought to center stage. The image signifies a tension of the first order. The composition frames a dance of bodies in a moment of intense struggle is cropped to suggest the power of authority over the transgressions of youthful protest.
As the gateway to understanding the events of the day a front-page news image carries with it a verisimilitude of authority and factuality. The value of the image is concomitant with what the gatekeepers (photographers, reporters, editors, and publishers) of a given publication perceive to be consistent with the conventions news value and use.
Front-page news images provide visual cues that constitute our loci of common knowledge—one that shapes our consciousness and conscience in resisting or legitimizing the status quo. Embedded within front-page news images reside levels of signification which carry the underlying cultural and political codes of meaning for a society.
Front-page images signify an informational/representational system that is based on a complex and sometimes arbitrary arrangement of moral concerns, economic interests, political predispositions, cultural relevancies, and social issues. The propriety and hierarchy of the front-page, taken in sum, contributes to a reader’s common stock of knowledge—aesthetically, intellectually, and emotionally. The moral agency of a newspaper’s use of images on the front-page transmits and reinforces the symbolic environment of prescriptive values and norms within society.
However, when analyzed holistically, the front-page image is a structurally homogenizing and persuasive force—which cannot only normalize public discourse, but also affect social change.
Visual reportage, then, is positioned within the cultural and social practices of our times. From an ideological perspective, however, the hegemonic role of the positioning and placement of front-page news images presumes the authority of a social institution that reflects and reinforces the interests and ideas of a society’s dominant group. Front-page news photographs provide a complex matrix of ideologically encoded meaning in which the viewer’s social reality is constructed for them. New images, especially those selected as significant enough for the front-page, provide a central core of visually experiencing the world in which we live.
The power of the image resides in movement, in this case, with the center of action focused on a confrontation between a police officer and a protestor. The officer’s actions and subsequent reactions produce a compelling image, which appeals to the intellectual and emotional imagination of the viewer. There is a narrative in the frame which unfolds as the police officer subdues the demonstrator with his baton, the grimace of the young man, and the powerless of a young demonstrator attempting to stop the violent arrest—the image contains all the elements of drama including rising, climax, and falling action.
There are many ways of evaluating how placement, positioning, and cropping of news images contribute to how they are consumed by readers. One context may attempt to prove the “transcendent relationship” among signifiers and what is eventually signified. Another approach may examine the role of media as establishing notions of deviance and conformity within society, or what I suggest maybe the normalizing of an “ideological other.”
The signifiers of protest, i.e., the physical appearance of the protestors and the police offer, the confrontation, the crowd (as seen in The New York Times’ version), or the caption used to explain the event, present a complex matrix of meaning. Complicating the interpretative process is the fact that the image may be understood as indexical, iconic, and symbolic at the same time. In other words, the image cannot be read linearly as in the syntax of a text. Instead, the viewer moves back and forth constructing an individualized grammar of meaning from both text and image. In the process of viewing, the manifestation of power and knowledge becomes consecrated through the media as history.
The relationship news images occupy with other informational elements on the front-page, such as captions, masthead, teasers, texts, headlines, or graphics, as well as how an audience scans and then mediates the meaning of all this content, presents interpretative challenges for practitioners and theorists alike.
For example, one concern may be how to account for the edifying function of an image, while embracing a strategy that recognizes how it also serves the primal needs of human activity. In this configuration, imagery is grounded not only in representation, but as Newton suggests, as “An integrated cultural/physiological system…that is more primal in the sense of being core than it is symbolic, and that is evolutionary in nature” (p. 118).
The placement and positioning of front-page news images constitute part of a larger system of human visual activity that operates as an extension of humanity’s instinctual need for surveillance and expression.
Peter Berger and Thomas Luckmann in The Social Construction of Reality suggest, “knowledge of everyday life is structured in terms of relevances.” In this case, the notion of relevances may help to illuminate how media often frame events for the public. Questions appropriate to this issue include how does the media construct relevances for readers? And how the events deemed relevant to my everyday life, intersect with the people I meet in the grocery store, at school, or on the street?
Although the design of newspaper page may be considered too functionalist and pedestrian to discuss it does provide an entry point for discussing emotional, cultural, political, social, and intellectual issues attached to how they construct a common stock of knowledge, reinforce a dominant ideology, or foment change.
In writing about art history, David Freedberg articulates concerns that may not be limited to the fine arts. In his analysis, Freedberg suggests that one obstacle standing in the way of understanding how people respond to imagery and learning from history is “our reluctance to reinstate emotion as a part of cognition. In other words, Freedberg argues that critics and historians often omit feelings and emotions from the cognition aspects of learning from what they see.
As Freedberg claims, “We have seen and learned too much; we cannot see with old eyes. History does not give us that possibility—and so the question still remains whether we have any other resource for grasping the power that is constrained by context, event, and idiosyncrasy” (431).
From a semiotic perspective, how an image is cropped, positioned, and juxtaposed by a caption, text, or headline determines the inferential properties of signification. Despite the temptation to account for differences in positioning and placement by assuming that the treatment of the image simply reflects the desired tone and appearance of newspaper management based on marketing decisions and audience appeal limits the scope of how imagery influences the public’s perception of the meaning of news.
Newton suggests that “The reality of mass communication is that content is influenced by personal, political, social, economic, and ownership forces, even though we would like to believe in journalism for journalism’s sake” (p. 79).
The management of content, in this case the positioning and placement of the anti-globalization protest image, is illustrative of some of these forces. For example, in the New York Times the viewer is provided a greater number of signifiers in which to abduce and infer meaning—a treatment that is consistent with the newspaper’s philosophical approach to edifying presentation of news. For Philip Gefter, front-page editor for The New York Times, image selection is “driven by the mix of stories, and the mix of stories is a result of—well, an impenetrable calculus” (Vienne, 2001, p. 22). This mathematics, however, produces a fairly predictable or formulaic relationship between a dominant image and other front-page design elements.
According to Gefter, “The top picture is often given over to the most important news of the day. Short of that, it refers to a story inside the paper. Occasionally, it’s a stand-alone picture depicting something of public interest or it’s good enough to deserve top billing on its own visual merits…”
For Caroline Brothers (1977), “Meaning inheres not in the photograph itself, but in the relationship between the photograph and the matrix of culturally specific beliefs and assumptions to which it refers to” (p.23).
Evaluating and comparing USA Today’s treatment of the protest image against the positioning and placement in the New York Times support this perspective. The tight cropping in USA Today demonstrates how signification can shift given the elimination of background elements as provided in the New York Times.
What, then, are the political, cultural, and economic forces influencing the decisions behind the selecting, positioning, and placing of this powerful image?
The meaning of a news photograph is contingent upon its relationship with the social and cultural practices of journalism and aestheticism. Furthermore, according to Batchen (1997), meaning is “dependent on the context in which that photograph finds itself at any given moment” (p. 6). This moment, however, is embedded within an ideological matrix that must be dealt with before any true meaning can be inferred.