Team

Aims

The central aim of the project is to analyze the presence, production, and circulation of the visual motifs related to power through images disseminated in print and digital media and TV newsreel in Spain from 2011-2017.

In the first place, we identified the recurrent visual motifs in Spanish media that represent the most significant events of the agenda during these years. The motifs were structured around six fields: political, economic, institutional, judicial, police, and civil, determining similarities and differences between them.

In the second place, the project addresses the professional praxis and productive processes of creation and selection of images that impact the representation of power. For doing so, the team has held in-depth interviews with a significant number of media and corporate communication professionals (photojournalists, editors, campaign advisors, communication managers) and analyzed their working processes.

In the third place, we study the appropriation and dissemination of these visual motifs through social networks (memes, gifs) by citizens, as a means of fostering a participatory culture in the contemporary public sphere.

The project intends to raise citizens’ and professional’s awareness regarding the use of specific expressive patterns in the images that circulate in the public sphere. To achieve this we created a database, with more than thirty thousand documents, of visual motifs of media and TV newsreels. Furthermore, the project proposes the creation of a toolkit, the production of a number of video essays, and a series of resources that will be available for society as a fundamental outcome of the research.
In short, this project conceives the public sphere as an area of continuous negotiation of images and meanings between several agents. On the one hand, political, economic, judicial, and police institutions who resort to staging to represent themselves in front of media and citizenry. On the other hand, the media, who reinterpret the images of these institutions based on their professional praxis, and finally the citizenry, who appropriates the images with digital means and conveys their own meaning thanks to digital platforms. Visual motifs are at the center of this negotiation. Thus, our project foregrounds the specificity of the visual as a vehicle for the representation of power and its critique.