‘Seeing is believing’: The semiotics of online news photographs
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| Year of publication | 2023 |
| MU Faculty or unit | |
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| Description | This talk shows how the accompanying visual material in news stories can be analysed in order to reveal underlying perspectives and ideologies. In this way, it challenges the traditional lay belief that press photographs provide a more ‘objective’ account of reality in news accounts than the verbal description of the events covered. Adopting a social semiotic and critical perspective, the presentation discusses the meaning potential of single photographs and image sequences, showing how they can be used not only as units of representation but also as distinct storytelling devices. Additionally, the talk addresses the issues of authenticity and visual verisimilitude, which are based on the ideal of documentary realism, and notes some of the opposing trends in journalistic visual representation, namely towards semantic genericity, staging and fakeness. |
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