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Visual Motifs and Representations of Pow

This special issue of Communication & Society explores visual motifs and representations of power in public spheres. It aims to establish how images of power are self-produced through organized combinations of motifs that appeal to viewers' prior knowledge of staging models. Visual motifs like the Pietà and David vs Goliath have been used in photojournalism and memes to convey narratives about power and legitimacy. The issue calls for analyses of how power and the public arena are visually staged and reinvented across media like film, photography, television and social networks.

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Anna Giralt Gris
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61 views

Visual Motifs and Representations of Pow

This special issue of Communication & Society explores visual motifs and representations of power in public spheres. It aims to establish how images of power are self-produced through organized combinations of motifs that appeal to viewers' prior knowledge of staging models. Visual motifs like the Pietà and David vs Goliath have been used in photojournalism and memes to convey narratives about power and legitimacy. The issue calls for analyses of how power and the public arena are visually staged and reinvented across media like film, photography, television and social networks.

Uploaded by

Anna Giralt Gris
Copyright
© © All Rights Reserved
We take content rights seriously. If you suspect this is your content, claim it here.
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Download as PDF, TXT or read online on Scribd
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VISUAL MOTIFS AND REPRESENTATIONS OF POWER IN THE PUBLIC

SPHERE

Guest Editors:
Jordi Balló (Universitat Pompeu Fabra)
Monica Centanni (Università IUAV di Venezia)
Ivan Pintor (Universitat Pompeu Fabra)

This special issue of Communication & Society aims to create a space for
dialogue and interaction between experts in cinema, visual arts and researchers
on social and political communication, in order to establish the core principles
that define the system of self-production of images of power that characterizes
our times.

Images that portray the various aspects of power and the public sphere in the
media are frequently articulated through visual motifs that hail from cinema,
painting and other iconographic legacies. Far from separating the images from
their traditional sources, the expansion of social networks has endorsed the
importance of the user-viewer's background when reading the self-
representation of the various scenarios of power in the public sphere - political,
economic, judicial, from the police or even the social movements themselves.
We hypothesize that there is an organized combination of motifs to portray
commonplace situations in the everyday life of the public sphere which appeal
to the spectator’s prior knowledge of these staging models, thus configuring a
fertile space for reflecting on their ambiguity and political and communicative
effectiveness.
As Carlo Ginzburg has pointed out in Fear, reverence, terror. Five essays of
political iconography, every image contains the current political storyline along
with a historical, religious and iconographic background that conveys both the
emotional content and the codes through which power is expressed, and which
often survive through the ages. A visual motif such as the Pietà, for example, is
not only identifiable in artistic representations such as painting and cinema, it
has also been used in photojournalism to express unjust pain in wartime
conflicts and humanitarian catastrophes. The visual motif of David against
Goliath, meanwhile, has recurred when Greta Thunberg and Donald Trump
were shown in the same photo at the UN General Assembly, an image that is
also a narrative invocation of the tragic motif of Antigone, which evokes
legitimacy and the preservation of dignity in the face of insuperable power.

The latter image has been reappropriated by social networks in the form of
memes, gifs, and mashups. Together with the action of the transmission of
visual motifs, we are interested in their contemporary reinventions in the hands
of social network prosumers. There is a significant tradition of studies on
political iconography inspired by the seminal figure of Aby Warburg which is
continued on through Erwin Panofsky, Horst Bredekamp, Monica Centanni,
Georges Didi-Huberman, and Patrick Boucheron, as well as the aforementioned
Carlo Ginzburg. His emphasis on the central role played by visual motifs in the
construction of public space converges with the investigations carried out by a
large number of theorists from other fields, such as theory and art criticism
(Boris Groys, Hito Steyerl, Harun Farocki), political philosophy (Giorgio
Agamben), film studies (Nicole Brenez, Alain Bergala, Emmanuelle André),
photography theory (Ariella Azoulay), social semiotics (Theo van Leeuwen),
cognitive iconology (Ian Verstegen) and production studies (Banks, Caldwell,
Du Guy, Thompson and Burns), all of which pay attention to the levels of
awareness and control over the images produced, whether in film and
photojournalism, in the praxis of TV documentaries and reports or in online
productions.

In this sense, social networks and the transmedia integration that is present in
public and political communication, as well as the work of more traditional
media, warrant a new, urgent consideration of how visual motifs circulate, how
the production of images of power is organized, and the visual constants that
link them. Through these analytical viewpoints, we aim to address a process of
collective bargaining of the visual where cinema functions not as a destination
but as a catalyst of visual shapes that are echoed in print and online media and
new communication formats.

In this context, and given the urgency of our awareness today of the use of
images in the new public sphere, this monographic issue calls for empirical
research and theoretical approaches on the ways in which power and the public
arena are staged, how their images are reinterpreted by citizens, and which
mechanisms exist for appropriating and reinventing iconographic sources.

Among the possible topics, the following are proposed:

- Visual motifs in the representation of the different spheres of the public arena:
political, economic, judicial, police, civil organizations and forms of citizen
participation.

- Motifs and visual narratives of political campaigns based on the reinvention of


previous iconographic sources.

- The study of the representation of power and the public sphere in cinema.

- The iconographic evocation in photojournalistic practices; the civil contract of


photography.

- GIFs, memes and mashups, both in political processes and in the public
sphere.

- Case studies and production studies in photojournalism, television, online


media and social networks concerning images of power.

- Theoretical studies on the continuity and transformations of political


iconography.
Submission deadline for proposals:
Original articles must be sent in before November 30, 2020 to be submitted to
the peer review process. Authors should indicate in the "author comments"
section that this is an article for this special issue.

The articles submitted must comply with the journal's style guidelines:
https://www.unav.edu/publicaciones/revistas/index.php/communication-and-
society/about/submissions#authorGuidelines

Publication: April 2021

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