Violence and the Rhetoric of Images

UNCC Author/Contributor (non-UNCC co-authors, if there are any, appear on document)
Gregory Starrett, Professor (Creator)
Institution
The University of North Carolina at Charlotte (UNCC )
Web Site: http://library.uncc.edu/

Abstract: This article is about the politics of visual representation, specifically about how the documentary photograph can be used to mobilize collectivities. Images become the medium for transnational political contests in which opposing groups mobilized by projecting onto those images fundamental values: purity versus idolatry, heritage versus fanaticism, injustice versus innocence, cynicism versus responsibility. . . . Documentary newspaper photographs act as a discourse of emotional engagement through which the Egyptian state seeks to assimilate itself with the newspaper reading audience into a single rhetorical subject. By representing emotions visually, photojournalism engages the passions of a diffuse audience and expresses that engagement as a spontaneous unified outpouring of feeling. It becomes in effect the expressive art of the modern political order.

Additional Information

Publication
Language: English
Date: 2003
Keywords
Egypt, terrorism, media, photography, semiotics

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