How the World Looks to Us

<em>Strike a Pose:</em> Comparing Associated Press and UNICEF Visual Representations of the Children of Darfur

“…What media and aid agencies have in common is access to children in conflict who are often in institutional care (orphanage or refugee camp), lacking the privacy provided by a functioning family and community, and therefore easily photographed. The use of children in photographs, particularly in conflict and disaster, lends to the idea that innocence is being threatened (Greenwood and Smith 2007). Our research seeks to broaden this idea to include the role photographers (news or aid agencies) and how it contributes to or exploits the vulnerability of children in conflict.…”

“…For example, African stories are dominated by famine and ethnic strife, while the Middle East is 7 fodder for war and ethnic cleansing stories (Fahmy 2004;Moeller 2002). Episodic coverage forces complicated stories and multiple perspectives through a narrow frame designed to simplify rather than represent complexities of the struggles for power as limited to unjustified chaos and violence (Greenwood and Smith 2007). Understanding that this frame exists and showing how it is applied by these two institutions is the focus of this study.…”

“…This idea is even more pronounced when adults take photographs of children. Greenwood and Smith's (2007) study of award-winning international photographs from 1943 to 2003 found that stories about developed countries dominate the news, but coverage of developing nations increases when there are massive events such as famine, natural disasters, and war and conflict. As a result, the Western audience is regularly inundated with images of strife and deprivation designed to entertain, essentially creating a stagnant environment where charity 8 and indignation are valued over deeper examinations of the need for structural redistribution (Hutnyk 1999).…”

Visualizing the experience of flight

“…As previously noted, like other professional photography contests, it sets professional standards and recognizes best-practice visualizations. Research on photojournalism contests has shown that they help define and frame definitions of quality and professional ethics and that they produce and reproduce a professional ideology (ANDEN-PAPADOPOULOS, 2000;GREENWOOD;SMITH, 2007;KEDRA;SOMMIER, 2018). As a result, a jury of peers selecting what in their view are the most significant and best images can be said to set norms for how a topic, in this case migration, should be visualized.…”

Whose Pictures, Whose Reality? Lines of Tradition in the Development of Topics, Negativity, and Power in the Photojournalistic Competition World Press Photo

“…In contemporary news, however, there is the danger that the "main use of photography is to represent news in a particular form, as a product that has little need for photographs beyond stereotypical illustrations" (Taylor 2000, p. 129). Research shows that in photojournalistic practice, stereotypes related to topics such as gender (i.e., McEntee 2018) or developing nations (i.e., Greenwood and Smith 2007) are reinforced rather than counteracted. This underlines the power of the professional actors orientating themselves within the realms of photojournalism, who frequently select photos for a bigger audience.…”