War photojournalism and audiences: Making meaning from tragic moments.

摘要

Although armed conflict has endured throughout the twentieth century, few of us experience bombings and atrocities of war firsthand. To a large extent we must rely on the storytelling capabilities of journalists to convey the implications of these confrontations to the world; our knowledge and attitudes to war "mediated" by the pictures and words of journalists.;With the increasing power of the mass media over the past century, debate has arisen about the ability of commercial journalism to provide balanced and impartial chronicles of war, focussed in large part on the "bias" and "inadequacy" of journalistic coverage by commercial television. Far less scholarly attention, however, has been given to war photojournalism and its impact on public attitudes, impressions and memories of armed conflict. Given anecdotal evidence that people pay attention to and remember vivid images from war news, this thesis sets out to analyze the power of war photojournalism, recognizing this power as being comprised of two moments. There is an affective power "of" photojournalism, focussed on the visual mediation of human experience, and there is a power exercised "through" photojournalism, with power viewed from the context of institutional control over the flow of images and ideas in our society.;Comprised of three sections, the thesis first provides a historical context to photojournalism's development as an industry and cultural practice involved in the visual chronicling of war. The second section utilizes a political economic perspective to make sense of the negotiations that occur around contemporary photojournalism's institutional power, with attention to ethical and representational problems of newswork. An audience reception study comprises the third section, probing into the meaning making processes audiences undergo when presented with traumatic media material.;Debates about the impact of war images go back to the American Civil War. However, the Vietnam War marks a critical defining moment for photojournalism, with conflicting views circulating about its critical potential to influence public opinion and citizen morale through presenting the "truths" and "horrors" of war. While the American Pentagon successfully orchestrated a "clean" vision of war during the 1991 Persian Gulf War, vowing not to have "another Vietnam," an alternative position arose, questioning whether the public even wanted to be confronted with images of war's horrors.;While scholars, journalists and aid organizations express growing concerns about the problem of "compassion fatigue" in a mass mediated world, the audience study in this dissertation sees evidence of audiences being willing to bear witness to troubled world affairs, balanced by a propensity to avoid experiences that are disturbing. While a certain degree of "compassion fatigue" may contribute to a belief in the waning of war photojournalism's critical powers, at the same time no definitive confirmation of a "death of photojournalism" was evidenced. There does exist a very real tension between war being "remembered" and "forgotten," and further, the form that remembrance shall take.