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News Images as Lived Images: Media Ritual, Cultural Performance, and Public Trauma

2009; Taylor & Francis; Volume: 26; Issue: 5 Linguagem: Inglês

10.1080/15295030903325354

1529-5036

Gordon Coonfield, John Huxford,

Visual Culture and Art Theory

Abstract This article considers the relation between news images—images captured, selected, written about, printed, and distributed in the course of the news process—and cultural performances—those everyday embodied modes of expressive enactment by which individuals meaningfully and collectively create their worlds. While scholarship on media from a ritual perspective has contributed a great deal to understandings of the cultural dimensions of the production of news images, it remains focused on the sites and practices of encoding. This article calls upon the concept of performance to explore those sites, relations, and practices in which the decoding of news images obtain. After a review and critique of the literature on news as ritual and a definitional overview of the performance concept, it considers two cases which explore the ways news images of September 11, 2001 became lived images through specific cultural performances. Keywords: RitualPerformancePhotojournalismNewsVisual Culture Acknowledgements The authors wish to thank the editor and reviewers for their generosity and patience, and Patty Sotirin for permission to reproduce her photograph of the Cub Scout float. Notes 1. We mean here to resonate with Stuart Hall's (1987) argument against the notion that different kinds of cultural phenomena appearing at different "levels" of a social totality are mere reflections of economic reality. That is, the belief that culture simply can be "read off'" the relations and mode of production (the economy "in the last instance"). While we do not intend to conjure the specter of "ideology" as such, we find a similar logic at work in writing about news images: the notion that the moment of their "production" determines in the last instance their appearance and meaning at any given level of social practice. Contesting this logic and elaborating one alternative is the goal of this essay. 2. As Turner (1981 Turner, V. 1981. "Social dramas and stories about them". In On narrative, Edited by: Mitchel, W. 137–164. Chicago: University of Chicago Press. [Google Scholar]) defines them, social dramas involves four stages: breech (violation of a norm or rule), crisis (a "momentous juncture" between social actors precipitated by that breech), redress (formal or informal ritual mechanisms for resolving the crisis), and recognition (either of social reintegration of irreparable schism) (pp.145–147). 3. Because we broach similar subject matter (photojournalism, the Franklin photograph) and use similar language (appropriation, performance), the work of Hariman and Lucaites (2001 Hariman, R. and Lucaites, J. 2001. Visual rhetoric, photojournalism and democratic public culture. Rhetoric Review, 20(1): 37–42. [Google Scholar], 2002 Hariman, R. and Lucaites, J. 2002. Performing civic identity: The iconic photograph of the flag raising on Iwo Jima. Quarterly Journal of Speech, 88(4): 363–392. [Taylor & Francis Online], [Web of Science ®] , [Google Scholar], 2003 Hariman, R. and Lucaites, J. 2003. Public identity and collective memory in U.S. iconic photography: The image of "accidental" napalm. Critical Studies in Media Communication, 20(1): 35–66. [Taylor & Francis Online], [Web of Science ®] , [Google Scholar], 2007 Hariman, R. and Lucaites, J. 2007. No caption needed: Iconic photographs, public culture, and liberal democracy, Chicago: University of Chicago Press. [Google Scholar]) on iconic rhetoric deserves some comment. While their interests are not unrelated to our own, there are at least two important points of distinction we wish to make here. First, they focus on public culture and the role of iconic images in providing a "civic education" for "liberal democratic citizenship" in "large, heterogeneous states" held together "by mass communication" (2007, p. 17). Their analysis of particular iconic images and their catalog and critique of heterogeneous appropriations of these images focuses largely on various actors on the mass-media stage. We view their analysis as consistent with the ritual approaches discussed above. In contrast to their "global" interest in a dispersed and diffuse "imagined community," we are interested in the ways images are incorporated into performances as local acts of individual and collective sense-making. Lived images may or may not ever involve or become iconic images, but they are, for a moment, profoundly important in a particular (rather than dispersed and abstract) time and place. Thus, as a second point of distinction, rather than place particular iconic images at the center, our theoretical framing and the consequent analysis place particular performances at the center of attention. We connect these to the peripheral mass mediated images which we argue these performances appropriate. We discuss below differences in our understanding and use of the term performance. 4. Such mechanical repetition characterizes what Baudrillard (1994 Baudrillard , J. 1994 . Simulacra and simulation . S. Glaser (Trans.) . Ann Arbor : University of Michigan Press [Google Scholar]) terms the age of simulation, a hyperreality involving "the generation by models of a real without origin or reality" (p. 1). In a different but related sense, McLuhan & Fiore (1967 McLuhan , M. , & Fiore , Q. 1967/1996 . The medium is the massage: An inventory of effects . Produced by Jerome Agel . Corte Modera, CA : Gingko Press . [Google Scholar]) described such repetition as the basis of modem, mass production: "Printing, a ditto device confirmed and extended the new visual stress. It provided the first uniformly repeatable 'commodity,' the first assembly line" (p. 50). 5. On the afternoon of 9/11, the front page of the DMG was dominated by a triptych depicting: (1) the explosion immediately following the second plane's impact; (2) the second plane approaching its target; and below these (3) a landscape view of Manhattan as the first tower collapses into a billowing fog of dust, smoke, and debris. A smaller, fourth image separated from these at the very bottom of the page, depicted New Yorkers fleeing in the wake of the collapse. 6. Edensor's turn to performance is welcome, and, while he insists his use of performance is metaphorical (see Edensor, 2002 Edensor, T. 2002. National identity, popular culture and everyday life, New York: Berg Publishers. [Google Scholar], p. 69; 2000 Edensor, T. 2000. Staging tourism: Tourists as performers. Annals of Tourism Research, 27(2): 322–344. [Crossref], [Web of Science ®] , [Google Scholar], p. 322), in both spirit and practice his concern over the inflexible and abstract nature of much theorizing of national identity lies close to the concerns regarding media studies addressed here. 7. The inclusion of victims of 9/11 in the pantheon of patriotic heroes was reiterated in a memorial ceremony held after the parade in a local park. Before a display of the U.S. flag accompanied by a color guard and representatives of the local Veterans of Foreign Wars post, a poem inspired by 9/11 titled "One" was read. The poem, which has been posted on some 800 web sites (see Sawyer, 2003), makes similar patriotic connections through a subjunctive celebration of National unity. 8. Hariman and Lucaites argue that the Franklin photo is particularly unusual in this respect. It is, they explain, the first (and thus far only) time that a new iconic photograph (the Franklin photo) has drawn upon the template of an earlier iconic photograph (the Rosenthal photo) (2007, p. 131). The significant elements in the performance we discuss here—the tangle of debris, the police tape and evident presence of rescue personnel on the site, as well as the temporal and affective proximity to 9/11—suggest it is more reasonable to connect the shrine to Franklin's, rather than Rosenthal's photograph. 9. See 9/11: A Nation Remembers at the National Constitution Center website. Retrieved October 10, 2009, from http://constitutioncenter.org/ncc_press_911.aspx 10. Notable precedents of news coverage of such spontaneous shrines include coverage of Princess Diana's tragic death and funeral and the bombing of the Alfred P. Murrah Federal building in Oklahoma City, OK. Additional informationNotes on contributorsGordon CoonfieldGordon Coonfield (Ph.D. Michigan Technological University) is Associate Professor of Communication at Villanova UniversityJohn HuxfordJohn Huxford (Ph.D. University of Pennsylvania) is Assistant Professor of Communication at Illinois State University