Publics, Discursive Struggles and Political Agency, Vol. 22 - 2015, No. 1

Guest Edited by Julie Uldam and Nico Carpentier

Are a Thousand Pictures Worth a Single Word? The Struggle between Condemnatory and Affirmative Discourses on Photographic Change in Slovene and UK Mainstream Media News Reports on Selfies

Ilija Tomanić Trivundža, pages: 93-109

The proliferation of visual communication in contemporary societies, fuelled by the rapid transformation of photography from a specialised activity into a ubiquitous social practice, has not gone unchallenged and the recent “picture craze” has revived many long-seated objections and fears over the power of the image. This article presents one strand of these contestations that were articulated by the mainstream news media reports on the popular informal photographic self-portrait known as the selfie. This is presented through a discourse-theoretical analysis, which shows the discursive struggle about how to give meaning to the phenomenon. In order to show the confrontation between condemnatory and affirmative discourses on photographic change, 255 news articles and commentaries published by three Slovene and three UK mainstream news media, between 30 November 2012 and 30 November 2014, are analysed. The analysis traces the development of the contesting articulations of the discourse of photographic change that are structured around three nodal points—image producer identity, photographic image value and photographic subject relevance. The article also outlines the ideological implications of psycho(patho)logisation of the selfie that is prevalent in the analysed articles—of treating selfie primarily as a psychological rather than as a sociological communicational or photographic phenomenon.

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