This World Press Photo of the Year 2011 was taken by Samuel Aranda. There are many categories and as many winners, but there is only one big winner, and Aranda’s photo it was. A post on the New York Times’ Lens blog noted that the image “has the mood of a Renaissance painting” - which, of course, is true. And that’s exactly one of the problems here. Jim Johnson already noted that the image in fact does not just reference Renaissance paintings in general. It assimilates Christian iconography (which was produced before and after the Renaissance as well): The Pietà, “depicting the Virgin Mary cradling the dead body of Jesus” (I’m including just a few examples in this post). If you have followed the news over the past decade even just tangentially, you might realize that using a visual language that could not be more Christian to depict an event in a Muslim country might pose a problem. (more)

These kinds of debates always center on photographs, though, and I think that that’s a problem. As a photograph, Aranda’s image is rather successful. As I said, it mixes Christian iconography with an event in a Muslim country, thus hinting at what should be obvious: Human suffering is independent of religion. But that doesn’t mean that this photograph should be used to illustrate the news, unless efforts are made to educate viewers what they’re actually looking at (there’s much more than “the mood of a Renaissance painting”!).

A viewer has to not only be aware of the iconography behind the image, s/he also has to understand how it was possibly used here to send a message. These kinds of nuances, however, are alien to the world of the news in the 21st Century. Instead, what we typically see in the news are world events seen from our - usually limited - perspective.

Take, for example, Tim Hetherington’s photo of a tired soldier: This is not a photograph about Afghanistan. It’s not a photo about the situation there, it doesn’t say anything about the suffering of people there. Instead, it focuses on a soldier from the West, and the photograph expresses what we all feel: We’re tired of that war (without really understanding what’s going on there).

If you look through the series of winning photographs of World Press Photo (I’m talking about the main winning image here, not the many others in the various categories), pretty much every photograph expresses something very specifically seen through our, Western, eyes. Photographers, of course, do their best to take good photographs. But what we see in the news, in newspapers, magazines, and on websites, is a carefully selected number of photographs conforming to usually very specific messages.

This is not to say that all media are biased (even though in reality many are), but that they are produced from a very specific background, usually our Western one. And it is that background we see reflected in World Press Photo. If we called it Western Press Photo the name would be a bit more accurate.

The World Press Photo 11 gallery says that 5,691 photographers of 125 nationalities submitted work. Doesn’t that show that I’m wrong, that it is in fact a World Press Photo? No, it doesn’t. As I said above, photographs in the news were first taken - by an obviously international group of people. But then they were selected/edited, and that typically involves a small number of people from an even smaller number of countries. You just have to go to, say, Al Jazeera’s website to often see very different images (of course, the narrative here is that they are biased).

So we have a problem, a problem that has actually increased over the past few years. We have seen a great many photographers going to remote places, taking photographs. We have seen the news media, especially online, using more and more images to present events. But we have not seen any efforts to use these images to educate viewers what they are actually looking at. For this flood of images in the news to really make sense - to tell us more about the world - we need more context, we need better explanations, and we also need an increased visual literacy. We need to learn how to question images, to ask what we are actually looking at.

If we don’t get that then we’ll helplessly stare at all these images, to project what we already know onto them. Samuel Aranda’s photograph provides a good opportunity: It’s easy to see the veil, it’s easy to see the pose (the expression of human suffering and of compassion), it’s easy to see (or at least somewhat realize) the very specifically Western visual imagery. But it’s quite a bit harder to put all that together and to then find out what we are really looking at.

And you cannot focus just on one aspect. It’s just not that simple. You have to weigh all the different aspect and find out what your reading says: What does the image depict? What does it say about our own cultural and political background? To what extent do we something because we want to see it that way? In other words, to what extent are we using a photograph to illustrate your own belief system?

Unless we learn how to get beyond our simplistic readings of photography, we’ll simply be stuck with what we might as well call Western Press Photo. We won’t get closer to understanding all those events that we currently grasp only as one-dimensional labels, lacking all context (“The Arab Spring”). We will continue sending soldiers to foreign countries, not really understanding what’s going on there (despite all those photographers going there trying to tell us!), not really asking whether that makes sense, and then pushing those same soldiers to the margins once they come back home.

Copyright © 2002-2012 Jörg M. Colberg

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Dosc idealistyczne podejscie do misji mediow dzisiaj, ale zgadzam sie z autorem.
Pytanie retoryczne: czy mozliwy jest obiektywny przekaz medialny wogole?

Idealistic post by Joerg Colberg but I agree with him. And rhetoric question is
if fully objective approach is possible at all in media message no matter on which side you are?