getting closer?
TRANSCRIPT
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GETTING CLOSER?Mervi PanttiPublished online: 10 Sep 2012.
To cite this article: Mervi Pantti (2013) GETTING CLOSER?, Journalism Studies, 14:2, 201-218, DOI:10.1080/1461670X.2012.718551
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GETTING CLOSER?
Encounters of the national media with global
images
Mervi Pantti
Drawing on the idea that citizen images of crisis events can function as ‘‘ruptures’’ within
mainstream journalistic narratives*instances in which distant others can speak and be heard*this article examines from a dual perspective how the global citizen images (photographs and
videos) embedded in Finnish print and broadcast coverage of the Arab uprisings and the Japan
tsunami disaster facilitate the construction of cosmopolitan imagination. Specifically it explores,
first, how emotional proximity is constructed through the conventions of citizen images that break
with the aesthetics of professional photojournalism, and, second, how professional journalists see
the role of amateur images in their work of reporting distant crises. The analysis identifies four
defining characteristics of the aesthetics of citizen images*unconstructedness, unconventional
framing, mobility and embodied collectivity*which may invite enhanced affective engagement
and reflection. Moreover, it reveals that the increasing significance of global citizen imagery
prompts renewed internal reflection on established journalistic practices and norms, but this is not
accompanied by a new consideration on the relationship between journalists and their audiences,
on journalism as a resource for cosmopolitan attitudes.
KEYWORDS aesthetics; citizen images; closeness; cosmopolitan imagination; crisis reporting;
journalistic self-reflection; national media
Introduction
A man bled to death on a street in Tehran on Monday. As one bystander tenderly held
the man’s head, five others held out their cameras. They captured photos and videos of
the man, and of the blood that stained his white shirt. On Wednesday afternoon, an
anonymous individual uploaded the disturbing video to YouTube, where it was viewed
by thousands and shared by bloggers. (B. Stelter and B. Stone, ‘‘Stark Images, Uploaded
to the World’’, New York Times, June 17, 2009)
This story of photos and videos taken by bystanders of a man dying in the post-
election protests in Iran in 2009, originated in the virtual environment but like many other
images of breaking news events taken by camera phone-equipped citizens, it quickly
moved to mainstream media outlets, at both the global and national levels, and became
woven into the journalistic regime of truth and practices of bearing witness to distant
crises. In this article, I consider citizen photography as a political space of affective human
attachments, where pain and anger are expressed, help and justice pursued, and our
‘‘emotional imagination’’ expanded (Beck 2006, 6). The working assumption here is that by
offering direct eyewitness testimonies from distant events, citizen images of crises may
facilitate a more cosmopolitan approach in the nationally-based media and contribute to
Journalism Studies, 2013Vol. 14, No. 2, 201�218, http://dx.doi.org/10.1080/1461670X.2012.718551# 2013 Taylor & Francis
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the ‘‘world openness’’ forged from encounters of the local with the global (Delanty 2006).
Accordingly, my central concern is with how far the mobilization of global citizen imagery
within national media coverage facilitates the construction of cosmopolitan imagination? I
will answer this by examining aesthetic conventions of citizen images of selected
unsettled global events in Finnish press and broadcast coverage and the value assigned to
them as ‘‘cosmopolitan tools’’ by professional journalists.
Citizen eyewitness images have become common in mainstream media outlets to
the point that today we expect to see images with distinct ‘‘amateur aesthetics’’ in media
representations of disasters, uprisings, wars and other unsettled events. However, while
they are now firmly established as important elements in global crisis reporting, amateur
images have an uneasy relationship with professional journalism, especially with the
professional understandings of objectivity and truth that still dominate journalistic
discourse. Journalists respond to this uncertainty by employing different discursive
strategies and textual conventions to incorporate citizen imagery into their existing norms
and routines (Becker 2011; Lorenzo-Dus and Bryan 2011; Pantti and Anden-Papadopoulos
2011; Sjøvaag 2011; Saugmann Andersen 2012). This process of embedding ‘‘normalizes’’
amateur images, and as Jane Singer (2005) has argued in her seminal study, has important
consequences for their symbolic status, meaning and consequences. Re-contextualizing
global citizen images in national press and broadcast outlets provides them with a new
meaning-making frame and new functions. At the same time, this process of incorporation
also works to re-construct ‘‘professional visions’’ of what journalism is and what it should
be (Anden-Papadopoulos and Pantti 2012). I suggest that it also re-constructs ‘‘audience
visions’’, altering how we imagine and morally respond to the struggles and suffering of
distant others (cf. Chouliaraki 2010, 2013).
I will focus here on the aesthetics of the citizen imagery from a dual perspective.
Firstly, I will discuss how emotional proximity is constructed through the aesthetic
conventions of citizen images. How do they ascribe meaning to*or are allowed to ascribe
meaning to*crisis events within Finnish mainstream media outlets? Secondly, I will
discuss how professional journalists see the role of amateur images in their work of
reporting distant crises, focusing in particular on their views on the capability of amateur
photographs and videos to draw viewers emotionally closer to distant others. My
discussion draws on two main sets of data. Firstly, I have examined the press coverage of
the Syrian uprisings in Helsingin Sanomat, the largest national daily in Finland, between
17 March 2011 and 31 March 2012. In addition to newspaper coverage, I have also
analysed the Finnish National Broadcasting Company’s (YLE) newscasts of the post-
election protests in Iran in 2009 between 13 and 22 June 2009, the earthquake and
tsunami in Japan during 11�12 March 2011, and the killing of Libya’s former dictator
Muammar Gaddafi during 20�21 October 2011. Secondly, 20 in-depth interviews have
been conducted, between October 2011 and January 2012, with Finnish journalists
(including foreign news reporters, foreign news editors, editors-in-chief and picture
editors) working for major national news organizations in which they talked about the
challenges and benefits of using citizen photography in their work.1
This article begins with a contextualizing discussion of the interaction between
citizen images and professional journalism in the context of journalism’s endeavour to
bear witness to distant crises. This is followed by analyses drawing on the Finnish case
study materials, firstly, of the affectivity and aesthetic specificity of amateur images in
news texts and, secondly, of the ways in which journalists consider their professional
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practices vis-a-vis citizen images (what do citizen images ‘‘do’’ to the journalism) and what
citizen images ‘‘do’’ to the audience. It concludes with a discussion of the potential of
amateur images to lead to a more cosmopolitan approach of journalism.
Journalistic Witnessing and the Global Image-world
The emergence of new visual-based communication technologies, particularly the
camera- and video-enabled mobile phone, have provided unforeseen opportunities for
recording and distributing lived experiences of disasters across the globe. They have also
become powerful tools which political activists use to make their struggles visible in the
mainstream media. As Henry Giroux (2006, 19) states, ‘‘Image-based media have become a
new and powerful pedagogical force, reconfiguring the very nature of politics, cultural
production, engagement, and resistance’’. The ‘‘transformation of disaster visibility’’
(Pantti, Wahl-Jorgensen, and Cottle 2012), the uncontrollability of images today, and the
vulnerability of power relations are palpable if we just think about the very few
photographs that depicted the aftermath of the ‘‘Hama massacre’’ in Syria in 1982,
compared to today’s constant stream of photographs and video clips from different Syrian
cities documenting the protests and state terror as they happen.
The role of ordinary people in providing first-hand testimonies of suffering and
violence has been recently discussed in terms of ‘‘media witnessing’’. As Paul Frosh and
Amit Pinchevski (2009) argue, crises today are not only something that audiences ‘‘see’’ in
the media as the ultimate witnesses of tragic events, but something ‘‘they are increasingly
socialized to create’’ as the most important producers of mediated testimonies. However,
while ordinary citizens, non-governmental organization workers and victims themselves
can distribute visual testimonies without mainstream news organizations functioning as
mediators (cf. Ashuri and Pinchevski 2009), eyewitness photography has arguably achieved
its cultural and political significance, and its unprecedented power to influence public
discussion and render power-holders vulnerable, primarily because of its remediation in
the mainstream media (Anden-Papadopoulos and Pantti 2012). As Daniel Dayan (2009, 27)
has argued, in relation to the Abu Ghraib images, these citizen images ‘‘became fully public
only when they were picked up and circulated by the major media of the center and, in
particular, when they were shown on television.’’ We have seen that amateur photographs
themselves occasionally become news events, as was the case with the videos of the killing
of Neda Agha-Soltan in the Iran post-election protest, or with the footage of Muammar
Gaddafi being manhandled before his death. It can be argued, then, that citizen images are
not only shaping news content, but also what is considered ‘‘newsworthy’’*which events
become news and which are overlooked by the news media.
In the professional world of news production, where different forms of citizen-
created content and images are sorted into a hierarchy depending on their news-
worthiness, the highest value is placed on eyewitness footage of important events (Pantti
and Bakker 2009; Williams, Wardle, and Wahl-Jorgensen 2010). Amateur photographs and
videos typically enter mainstream news in situations when a news event is unexpected (as
was the case with the 2004 tsunami which was a turning point in the use of citizen
images), or when journalists’ access to the scene has been inhibited or banned altogether.
On such occasions, professional news organizations justify the use of unverified images by
referring to their mission to reveal important information. This is how, for instance, Mary
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Hockaday, head of the BBC multimedia newsroom, justified showing the graphic footage
of the capture of Gaddafi: ‘‘[A]s a news organisation our role is to report what happened,
and that can include shocking and disturbing things’’ (quoted in Halliday 2011). When
professional visual material is missing, individuals’ exclusive on-site material*even if often
at odds with journalistic norms*works to lend journalistic story-telling authority and
credibility (Carlson 2011, 4; Zelizer 2007). As Barbie Zelizer (2007, 425) notes, it ‘‘has
allowed the news media to claim that they ‘have been there’ as witnesses of events that
they have not witnessed’’. Photographic images have traditionally held a special role in
witnessing crises because of their perceived nature as authentic, transparent captures of
reality (Sontag 1977; Zelizer 2010). Because of this inclination to understand images as
evidence of ‘‘what really happened’’, citizen-created images have come to have more
epistemic authority than their verbal counterparts (cf. Saugmann Andersen 2012).
However, it is not only their content that matters, but also their surface. Studies of
journalists’ perceptions of citizen-created imagery suggest that professional newsworkers
see their grainy, blurry and unfocused aesthetics as a valued new resource (Pantti and
Bakker 2009; Niekamp 2011; Williams, Wardle, and Wahl-Jorgensen 2011). Pixilated
aesthetics are believed to lend intimacy and give a ‘‘reality-effect’’ to journalistic
storytelling and therefore, as Williams, Wardle, and Wahl-Jorgensen (2011) note, are
employed by professional journalists as ‘‘a new instrument in the toolbox of realist news
reportage’’. This idea of the aesthetic characteristics giving impressions of reality is
dispassionately summed up by a BBC reporter: ‘‘[R]ight now it’s [citizen-created material]
fresh and it looks real, and it gives you insight and emotion’’ (quoted in Williams, Wardle,
and Wahl-Jorgensen 2011, 206, our emphasis).
Cosmopolitan Imagination and National Media
If reading newspapers helped to construct an imagined community of the nation
(Anderson 1991), is the global dissemination of images helping us to imagine a
cosmopolitan community? If we see cosmopolitanism as a potential consequence of
media technologies, discourses and practices (e.g. Beck 2006; Delanty 2006; Chouliaraki
2006; Silverstone 2006), we need to ask questions about what kind of media
representations could make possible new identifications and emotional bonds with
distant others (see Corpus Ong 2009).
From the news audience’s point of view, a key factor contributing to the added
‘‘realism’’ of amateur images is the emotional engagement generated by seeing an event
through the eyes of the ‘‘ordinary people’’ as opposed to the detached and disembodied
accounts of professional journalists (Williams, Wardle, and Wahl-Jorgensen 2011, 207). This
understanding of amateur images as less-mediated versions of reality has important
implications for the truth claims of journalism. We have seen that global citizen images
have been incorporated, as visual evidence, in the grammar of truthful and authentic
reporting of distant crises. However, their role in encouraging a cosmopolitan imagination
and ethics of care is unclear, and calls for critical analysis. Could the encounter between
global citizen images and the crisis coverage of local/national media provide such a space
in which the other is allowed to speak and her voice heard (Silverstone 2006, 139)?
Beck (2002) employs the concept of ‘‘internal globalization’’ to describe the
transformation of the public sphere at the national level, as global concerns become
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part of local experiences and moral life worlds. For Delanty (2006, 27), the transformation
of the social worlds occurs ‘‘when and wherever new relations between self, other and
world develop in moments of openness’’. From this perspective, journalistic accounts can
contribute to constructing a cosmopolitan imagination by providing precisely these
‘‘moments of openness’’. It has been suggested that transnational media, operating across
geographical borders, are more likely than national media to promote a cosmopolitan
imagination but when Alexa Robertson (2008) tested this assumption in her comparative
study of five national European broadcasters and three European channels, she concluded
that global broadcasters did not contribute more than national broadcasters (see also
Riegert et al. 2010).
While images taken by involved citizens promise to eradicate barriers of physical and
social distance between spectators and sufferers (Chouliaraki 2008), they also raise serious
ethical questions for professional journalism. Citizen images’ valued aura of authenticity
arises from the position of photographers as involved participants rather than ‘‘detached
observers’’. And as Roger Silverstone (2006) has argued, the physical presence of ‘‘being
there’’ does not in itself guarantee responsible reporting. Similarly, Ashuri and Pinchevski
(2009, 140) have pointed out in their discussion of media witnessing that proximity and
the involvement of the eyewitness may come with the annihilation of perspective, and the
absence of reflection.
The ambivalence of amateur images in professional news also has to do with their
aesthetics. Their closeness, lack of control and violent nature raise ethical issues that the
mainstream media must deal with before they can be published. It is far from novel that
news organizations need to make decisions on whether or not to show individual images
of death, violence and suffering, which ones to use and why, where to show them (on
broadcast news bulletin or online news) and how to present them (e.g. should they be
digitally edited to reduce their horror-factor; how they should be captioned and
contextualized) (see Perlmutter and Hatley Major 2004). However, the fact that graphic,
newsworthy images are today so easily available makes established news organizations’
decisions more pronounced. Journalists regularly curtail their truth-telling through the
practice of self-censorship and ‘‘good taste’’ by preventing images capable of representing
the horror of crisis situations from making it into news reports. In today’s networked media
environment, acts of publishing are not simply about telling truth and revealing new
information, but about performing a distinct speech act (Kunelius 2009). By publishing (or
not) an amateur video which is already available on the internet for anybody to see, news
organizations make a statement about their ethics and professional codes. What is at stake
then, in publishing pictures made by non-professionals, is the authority and credibility of a
news organization. Thus, we can think of amateur images as means through which
journalists reconstruct and reaffirm their ‘‘professional imagination’’ (Kunelius and
Ruusunoksa 2008) in relation to the changing role of the audience, the visual
representation of journalism, and ultimately, the idea of cosmopolitan journalism.
Aesthetics of Citizen Images: Ruptures of Lived Experiences in JournalisticNarratives
I now turn to the question of how citizen images construct the closeness and
‘‘being-thereness’’ that are deemed to be their defining feature and the element that is
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arguably most salient for the construction of a cosmopolitan imagination. To understand
the potential role of amateur images in extending cosmopolitan sensibilities requires
taking into account what and how journalism traditionally can and cannot represent. My
analysis of the defining characteristics in citizen image aesthetics is based on Pinchevski’s
(2005) idea of communicative interruptions as resources for constructing more genuine
encounters with strangers. Could citizen images of crisis, because of their aesthetic and
narrative shortcomings, be understood as ‘‘ruptures’’ (see Corpus Ong 2009, 461;
Pinchevski 2005) within journalistic modes of representation? These interruptions, as
defined by Piotr Szpunar (2012), provide ‘‘a space in which the ‘Other’ can speak; an
instance in which those with whom we have no other contact but through news media
can disrupt us.’’ In the present context I adapt this complex philosophical and ethical
framework to the analysis of amateur aesthetics by looking at citizens’ images as a form of
communication that breaks away from the dominant aesthetics of journalistic storytelling.
A good starting point for discussing the specific aesthetic quality of citizen images is
the criticism of professional photojournalism in the context of human suffering. Critics of
the aesthetization of professional images of human suffering argue that they generate
aesthetic rather than moral responses by offering a form of infotainment (e.g. Morgan
2002; Sontag 1977). Aesthetization is said to desensitize and depoliticize viewers and invite
passive consumption by directing attention away from the suffering to the beauty and
formal structure of the image (for the relationship between aesthetic and ethical response
to suffering, see Moller 2009a, 784). But what about images that lack the formal artistic
properties of journalistic photography? Frank Moller asks whether ‘‘less aestheticised
approaches to photography would automatically or necessarily avoid the viewers’
depoliticisation and increase their degree of empathy and response’’ (784), and concludes
that images lacking conventional beauty are also aesthetic because ‘‘representation
cannot not aestheticise’’ (784�5). Amateur images claim to document things as they are,
yet, as with all images, they are products of a choice of what and how to shoot (even if
unconscious and determined by the competence of the photographer). The ‘‘realness’’
and ‘‘closeness’’ in amateur images emerges through technical, symbolic and audio-
written codes and conventions that link to different modes of the ‘‘DIY genre’’ (Saugmann
Andersen 2012). We can identify four central characteristics of the aesthetics of citizen
images: (1) unconstructedness, (2) unconventional framing, (3) mobility and (4) embodied
collectivity.
Unconstructedness
Citizen eyewitness images seem to simply grasp spontaneously what is happening
without any premeditation. Taken typically by camera-phones as unedited single shots,
these images position viewers as witnesses of direct experiences. The sense of
unconstructedness is supported by the lack of narrative structure (having a beginning,
middle and end), which some scholars see as essential for understanding (e.g. Sontag
1977). At the visual level, this defining characteristic (and the aesthetics of citizen images
on the whole) is most powerfully signified in the pixilated and blurry quality of the mobile
footage that may distort the subject almost beyond recognition. It is most evident in the
graphic video of the last moments of Gaddafi filmed by someone in the angry crowd, and
aired either as full, unedited or cut versions on Finnish television channels or online news
sites. The extremely blurry and chaotic footage, the manic voices, draw attention to the
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unconstructedness as the basis of amateur imagery’s truth claim, and as untamed
affectivity. The raw emotionality of amateur footage*both its allure and condemnation*was clearly communicated in the headline of Channel 4’s online news story: ‘‘Like Beasts
upon Their Prey: Video of Gaddafi’s Capture Is Horrific to Watch’’ (October 21, 2011).
Unconstructedness conforms to the idea of unmediated, accidental ‘‘truth-telling’’,
while professional images typically seem to be an outcome of identifying the privileged
storytelling moment. Roland Barthes ([1957] 1979) writes that because of their ‘‘over-
constructedness’’ and deliberately cultivated aesthetics, journalistic ‘‘shock-images’’ of
suffering fail to hold the viewer responsible or create an emotional connection. He defines
professional photography as too coded with message to allow the viewer’s own moral
judgement and reflection. Similarly, Judith Butler (2006, 126) argues that photographic
representation succeeds only when it ‘‘fails’’, when ‘‘the ethical claim of the other is not
pinned down, exhausted and therefore silenced by the . . . image.’’ It is this sense of the
unconstructedness of citizen videos and photographs that attracts attention and invites an
emotional relationship with the image.
Unconventional Framing
Breaking with traditional representational conventions of photojournalism, and at
the same time with viewer expectations of what news images should tell us (see Moller
2009b), the sense of closeness is further constructed by ‘‘unprofessional’’ framing. A
screenshot from a protest in the city of Daraa, Syria, is a good example (Figure 1). The
photo displays three partially framed individuals: in the upper right corner we see a dead
man, caught from his waist up laying on the ground, and another man standing next to
him, only his legs below the knee showing. In the foreground, a man stands in a seemingly
helpless or confused position with open arms, his body shown from the chest down. There
seems to be a pool of blood in the centre of the image. Since we do not see the face of the
main character (the other is literally invisible), the image conceals the story the audience
typically receives from a news image: how is this particular man reacting to the death?
Press photos are more dependent than moving images on textual contextualization, and
their symbolic meaning is typically anchored by the caption. This, however, does not apply
to images coming from unknown photographers through international news agencies.
The caption, ‘‘A man is standing next to a person who died in Wednesday’s unrest in
Daraa, Syria. The picture is from an amateur video that was published in social media’’,
situates the image in terms of time and place and attributes the authorship to a recording
device and content-sharing site, but when it comes to what it depicts, it cannot offer much
more than ‘‘indexical information’’: there has been a protest, a man has died, a man is
standing next to the corpse. So, we are told ‘‘what is there’’ but not what we should think
and feel about it.
Kress and van Leeuwen (1996, 134) suggest that the proximity of the camera to its
subject reflects a particular social relation between the images and the spectator: the
closer an object is to the camera, the more intimate and engaged the social relationship
becomes. In professional photojournalism the focus on the affected or involved individuals
has traditionally been the main means of conveying emotions and creating closeness. In
citizen images of crises, closeness tends not to be constructed through individual stories
or through emotional identification with the particular subjects of the photography.
Amateur images rarely focus on one or few individuals.2 An exception lies in the images of
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visible bodily harm or death (videos/stills of the shooting of Neda Agha-Soltan during the
Iranian post-election protests being the most prominent exception). It is clear that citizen
photographers documenting the Arab uprisings find it crucial to capture the pain of the
people in the frame and zoom in on the bleeding wounds or blood on the street. As John
Peters (2001) writes, pain and death function as an ultimate criterion of authenticity and
moral righteousness in the practice of bearing witness. More usually however, citizen
images offer wide shots of destruction or masses of people; wide shots of crowds
protesting having become a trope in journalistic discourse during the Arab Spring,
signalling the justified struggle for freedom against authoritarian regimes.
Citizen images are also characterized by unconventionally high and low camera
angles, which effectively add to the sense of direct experience (Figure 2). Images are often
framed by marks of the photographer’s location such as window frames or window bars,
doorways, walls of building, roof tops and balconies. The unconventional camera angles,
which are often due to the photographer’s hiding or escaping, reinforce the significance of
the event through the bodily danger of the photographer-witness.
Mobility
‘‘Being-thereness’’ is also created through unconventional camera movements. The
wildly swinging camera and panning across the field of view are marked characteristics of
amateur videos. The unsteady camera shots do not draw the viewers’ eyes to a particular
focus but rather aim to show everything that is going on around the photographer. For
example, in an amateur video of the early moments of the Japan earthquake which shows
an office room, the photographer frantically pans from side to side to capture the shaking
and falling of different objects in the room. The mobility of citizen images is often
reinforced by the commonly used ‘‘follow shots’’ in which the camera follows at the
distance (for instance from a window or roof top) in a long take showing protesters
walking or running down the street or the water rising up in Japan. A specific version of
FIGURE 1
From Helsingin Sanomat, 25 March 2011. Caption: A man is standing next to a person who
died in Wednesday’s unrest in Daraa, Syria. The picture is from an amateur video that was
published in social media
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the ‘‘follow shot’’ is a tracking shot in which the camera follows a subject in motion. The
latter is often used in the footage of the Arab uprisings: a camera follows the protestors
along a street, usually bouncing due to walking or running. The tracking shot creates a
deeply invested point of view: it renders the viewer as one of the crowd as we see from
within the scene what the photographer is seeing. Being part of the scene, for example
following agitated and frightened protesters, creates an alarming feeling and invites the
viewer to identify with protestors.
The mobility of citizen imagery, then, is not only about the camera movements but
also about the moving photographer who physically follows people running, hiding,
getting hurt, and dying, and the viewer shares the horror (the moment of seeing someone
next to you beaten, the moment of escaping from bullets and dying because of them, the
moment of running out of a collapsing building and climbing for safety when the water is
moving fast) with the photographer. In a video of the Japan earthquake, the mobile
camera is capturing the moments of disbelief and hesitation to act*the people depicted
are not sure whether they should run or not*and a moment later the photographer is
running for his life with others, and with his mobile camera.
Embodied Collectivity
Citizen images of crisis invite the viewers to engage through their embodied points
of views. The ergonomics of the telephone allow the photographer to be included in the
picture, while the professional photojournalist’s position is defined by both physical and
ethical distance (Rubinstein and Sluis 2008, 11): the photojournalist remains behind the
camera. In a tsunami amateur video in the YLE report, the photographer points with his
finger to the onrushing water (the amateur footage of Japan is reminiscent of the amateur
images of the 2004 tsunami; see Zelizer 2010, 244�64). In a video of the Iran uprisings, the
FIGURE 2
From Helsingin Sanomat, 15 February 2011. Caption: The picture taken from activists’
YouTube video shows protesting against the Syrian government last Friday after prayers
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photographer places his bloody hand in front of the camera. We also hear citizen
photographers’ voices and even their breathing. In a tsunami video the photographer is
cursing in panic when buildings are collapsing around her in Yokohama. In the Gaddafi
death footage, we hear the sounds of rifles as the rebels are shooting into air and their
shouting ‘‘Allahu Akbar’’ (God is great).
The embodied practice of the photographer does not mean that only the individual
photographer is important. On the contrary, the photographer in citizen images emerges
as an embodied collectivity, as a figure inviting herself to be imagined as ‘‘anyone’’. This
structure of ‘‘from-anyone-to-anyone’’ (cf. Scannell 2000) constructs a collectivity between
the depicted others and ‘‘us’’. Citizen images as a collective affective space are also
sustained at the visual level by the prominent trope of the raised camera, which signifies
the importance of the event and the authenticity of the participants’ perspective on it
(Becker 2012). At the textual level, this sense of collectivity is reinforced by the captions,
which make images, on the one hand, ‘‘authorless’’ by attributing images to recording
devices (‘‘captured by a camera phone’’), content-sharing sites (e.g. ‘‘loaded from YouTube
video service’’) and distribution channels (e.g. ‘‘distributed by news agency’’) and, on the
other hand, attributing them to a collective figure (citizen, activist).
Journalists’ Views on the Citizen Images Bearing Witnessing to Crises
Photojournalism has long assumed an ethical function to bear witness to the
suffering of others and institutional politics and professional practices have informed the
ways distant crises are witnessed*and who may appear in them as eyewitness and how
the eyewitnessing material is used (see Frosh and Pinchevski 2009, 11; Ashuri and
Pinchevski 2009). But in the present context this function needs to be understood against
the background of the avalanche of amateur images and visual field I have just described
and the accompanying change in the conditions of the ‘‘looking relations’’ to images of
suffering they imply (Kennedy 2009).
Here I want to outline two layers of professional discourse on the meaning of citizen
images. The first layer consists of the discourses with which journalists evaluate the overall
meaning of citizen images vis-a-vis global crisis reporting (what citizen’s images ‘‘do’’ to
the journalism). Foreign reporters and news editors describe the benefits and challenges
of citizen images within the frames of journalistic professional values such as public
service, objectivity, autonomy, immediacy and ethics, and their conception of their
audience. It is worth noting that the participants think strictly in terms of a national
audience, as illustrated in the comment of one foreign reporter from Helsingin Sanomat:
‘‘Our audience is here [in Finland] and the topics of our stories are somewhere else.’’ One
of the three imperatives of journalism’s cosmopolitan approach as laid out by Stephen
Ward (2011, 257) is to ‘‘serve the citizens of the world’’ (rather than the public of one’s
country), but this does not have resonance for journalists operating with small national
languages.3 In such a context, adopting a cosmopolitan approach would have less to do
with the notion of whom to serve and more with the notion of what and from whom to
report in order to orient the national audience toward distant others. The second layer
consists of the discourse regarding the potential of citizen images to create closeness and
foster the moral imagination of the audience in the context of journalists’ work of bearing
witness (What are amateur images perceived to do to the audience?).
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Seeing Things We Could Not Otherwise Have Seen
Generally speaking, professional journalists embrace the increased flow of citizen
images of distant conflicts and disasters. The practitioners interviewed stress that they do
not perceive citizen material as a threat to professional journalism (as several scholars of
‘‘citizen journalism’’ have proposed), but as a welcome complement to their own reporting
that ultimately helps them to better serve the public. The global connectivity through
mobile visual technologies is presented as an invaluable new resource for journalists in
terms of immediate information, diversity of viewpoints and multi-layered story-telling.
The perceived value of citizen images lies first and foremost in their newsworthiness
which is intrinsically related to their immediacy. Amateur photographers ‘‘are there’’ to
provide evidence of what happened. The following is an example of a foreign reporter,
working for the national public broadcasting company YLE, reflecting on the biggest
benefit of citizen imagery:
It is absolutely that that we get access to events, places and situations we wouldn’t
otherwise get. Because of that, in my opinion, it [amateur imagery] is a really important
and significant journalistic development. There are situations in which [our] cameras are
not allowed and then we can’t know if it is true what people who were there tell us. An
image, and especially a moving image, has always that kind of evidential power that
what it shows has most likely happened.
In practical terms, this aspect is illustrated by many examples of events and affairs
that would have never seen the light of day without amateur cameras. The videos of the
killing of Muammar Gaddafi were used as a prime example of the exclusive information
that amateur cameras can provide:
If they hadn’t carried camera phones in their pockets, we would have never seen those
pictures and so we would be still speculating as to whether they tried to take him nicely
to the court and he just happened to die. (foreign news editor, Helsingin Sanomat)
Most commonly citizen images were seen as ‘‘raw material’’ (as opposed to
professionals’ skilful, finished products) that news organizations used for their own benefit.
As the managing editor of Ilta-Sanomat (the biggest afternoon newspaper in Finland)
stressed: ‘‘Obviously photography has played quite a significant role in many uprisings,
but . . . for us it’s just picture material we use in reporting.’’ While all journalists have
significant reservations regarding the authenticity, objectivity and aesthetic quality of
citizen images, what ultimately matters to them is the news value of the image, regardless
of who captured it and why, whether it can be verified, or its pixilated character. Here a
foreign news editor of Helsingin Sanomat reflects on the need to suspend the criterion of
objectivity in the interests of capturing diverse viewpoints and voices in the context of the
Arab uprisings: ‘‘I don’t see it [objectivity] as a problem in this kind of event, because the
alternative is that we have nothing from there. Or we would only have fine pictures from
the regime in which the president is drinking coffee in his neat palace.’’
The involved perspective of the citizen photographer stands in sharp contrast to the
professional approach, which, besides being expected to provide an objective perspective
on events, is also supposed to be impersonal and detached rather than engaged. The fact
that they are eyewitnesses to or participants in the events they depict is considered to add
to the sense of ‘‘being there’’, carrying the viewer to the scene of the event. However, the
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journalists are well aware of the fact that they are used as conduits for organized ‘‘image
wars’’:
The motives of Syrian activists are very clear. Of course they try to tell to the world about
their suffering as nobody else is doing that. And of course they have their own
propaganda motives too*perhaps they even try to make things bigger as they are.
Perhaps they hope to get a similar intervention than in Libya that happened surprisingly
fast and I think that amateur images played a role in the creation of that international
consensus. (foreign news editor II, Helsingin Sanomat)
Only a select number of journalists*those who have long working experience of
reporting from the crisis scenes*were able to reflect on the social and political
importance of citizen images outside the news value frame. For instance, an amateur
image was described as a channel for brave people to get their voices heard, or key
evidence for the mobilization of political opposition, critique of power-holders (as in the
Abu Ghraib case) and shaping the international public opinion (Syria). Moreover,
journalists predominantly think about citizen images in terms of their documentary or
denotative quality*images recording reality as it is. Only one journalist addressed the
symbolic meaning of citizen images by stating that the mere existence of them tells to the
audience that ‘‘there are repressive countries that limit people’s freedoms’’ (foreign
reporter, YLE). In the interviews, none of the journalists (unsurprisingly) ever mentioned
the word ‘‘cosmopolitan’’ and yet the concept, in a sense of constructing broader
solidarities, was implicit in some of their reasoning. This is most pronounced in their
repeated claims about how citizen images bring an event or people closer to the audience
members, which I will turn to next. Before that, however, I would like to consider the idea
of amateur images as expanding journalists’ professional visions or imaginations of what
they do.
In discussing the value of citizen images, journalists often use metaphors such as
‘‘coming down from the ivory tower’’ which suggest that dealing with the global flow of
images involves a re-negotiation of professional roles. The interviews testify to the fact
that the global flow of images is seen as supporting new forms of journalism that take
citizens and their efforts to communicate into serious account. It is also suggested in the
interviews that constant encounters with citizen imagery contribute to the constitution of
a more engaged and political public. This re-negotiation of professional attitudes is being
propelled not only by technological changes in image making but also by cultural
changes, especially the new global life-world of the audience that has gained media
literacy and familiarity with ‘‘amateur aesthetics’’ from their experience with YouTube.
Thus, it is suggested by journalists that the broad changes in visual culture and the
‘‘amateurization’’ of the media culture that the YouTube and other DIY channels have
fostered, may have an impact on the visual representations of news events, and on what
audiences expect from photojournalism and what kind of images they tolerate.
Seeing from Close, But Not Too Close
That citizen images of crises bring viewers and readers closer to the reported events
was a mantra in the discourse of journalists. Here a foreign news editor of Helsingin
Sanomat describes the most significant change brought about by citizen images:
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Ordinary person’s perspective in the news story becomes significantly stronger through
them [amateur images]. We get closer to people. That has always been very important to
us but amateur images bring a totally new channel to it*a direct channel*so that we
can show a specific event kind of like through the viewer’s own eyes.
The concept of closeness is typically used to refer to the enhanced involvement of
the audience in the story and the creation of immediacy in representations of events,
people and emotions. Closeness in journalists’ understanding is a result of ‘‘transporting’’
the viewers or readers into the crisis narrative so that they assume a point of view from
within the situation (Bilandzic 2006). This notion of closeness as seeing through the eyes of
those who experience the event is consistent with the idea of identification which refers to
an imaginative process through which audience members assume the perspective of a
media character, ‘‘as if the events were happening to them’’ (Cohen 2001, 245).
Paradoxically, however, while the interviewees unanimously subscribe to the idea that
amateur imagery provides a sense of closeness that allows audience members to view
crisis events from the involved perspective of those affected, when discussing the
aesthetic properties of citizen images they stress that emotional proximity can only
happen as a result of incorporating citizen images into a professionally crafted journalistic
narrative. Standing alone, citizen images are seen as fragmentary, chaotic pieces of
information that do not allow for personal engagement and lack the potential to
transform events into stories, and, therefore, to bear witness to traumatic events (cf. Peters
2009, 45).
Journalists’ discourse on closeness resonates with Silverstone’s (2004, 444) notion
that in order to enable responsibility and care, media reporting of suffering ‘‘needs to be
close but not too close, distant, but not too distant’’. The journalists believed that, unlike
citizen photographers, professional journalists are able to create emotional identifications
and yet maintain a ‘‘proper distance’’ to witnessed events. This view came forward
especially when journalists expressed concerns about the graphic imagery and involved
role of the photographer: ‘‘You don’t need to have a face in agony or a bleeding open
wound to show someone’s pain . . .An amateur takes the situation as it comes’’ (foreign
reporter, YLE). They see that being a neutral observer has significant implications for the
aesthetics of citizen imagery, as being neutral means also being selective and reflective:
‘‘When a person who is angry enough sees a confrontation he takes close-ups of beaten
people’’ (foreign reporter, Helsingin Sanomat). Journalists, then, are turning the long-time
criticism of professional crisis reporting towards ‘‘citizen journalists’’ by defining citizen
imagery as lacking context, reflection, and rendering suffering to a spectacle through
extremely violent content.4
When it comes to the aesthetics of citizen images of crises and their potential to
bear witness to suffering, journalists stop re-imagining their profession and start
defending their expertise. They persistently identify professional photojournalists as skilful
storytellers who know how to keep a proper distance, which allows for reflection, and
insist that it is necessary to employ well-tested narrative elements and dramaturgical
methods (telling stories through named individuals, through children if possible, not
through unknown people) to ensure that the story touches the audience. As journalists
see it, citizen images are expressive of raw emotions and the authenticity of the random
look, while professional images possess a pre-selected, narratively oriented point of view
that allows for appropriately close renderings of crisis events.
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Conclusion
Images are central to journalism’s public power today and a driving force in the
selection of news in television and newspapers. The increasing flow of citizen-created
images has taken the mainstream media reporting of distant crisis to a new stage, offering
an unforeseen sense of proximity to the coverage. Citizen images of crisis events have
been conceptualized here as a political, affective space which potentially provides
audiences with resources for fostering a cosmopolitan imagination. When embedded in
mainstream media they acquire the status of representing reality ‘‘as it is’’ and often
become focal points of public discussion on suffering and human rights violations.
Interviews with journalistic professionals suggest that they are seen within news
organisations as providing potent ‘‘raw’’ ingredients that journalists can add to their
well-prepared professional representations. They strengthen journalism’s authority by
providing a ‘‘surrogate presence’’ (Zelizer 2007) or functioning as ‘‘surrogate sense-organs’’
(Peters 2001, 709) for news organizations in national settings, and, as records of lived
experiences they may have a positive effect on the development of cosmopolitan
attitudes among their audiences.
Drawing on the idea that citizen images can function as ‘‘ruptures’’ within
journalistic narratives*instances in which distant others can speak and be heard*I
have analysed how the citizen images embedded in Finnish print and broadcast coverage
of the Arab uprisings and the Japan tsunami disaster break with the aesthetics of
professional photojournalism. I identified four defining characteristics of the aesthetics of
citizen images*unconstructedness, unconventional framing, mobility and embodied
collectivity*which may invite enhanced affective engagement and reflection. In the
interviews conducted in major Finnish news organisations, I detected a tendency for the
increasing significance of citizen imagery to prompt renewed internal reflection on
established journalistic practices and norms but this was not accompanied by a new
reflection on the relationship between journalists and their audiences, on journalism as a
resource for cosmopolitan attitudes. The journalists, however, fully embraced the
extension of sources that citizen images have produced. They were imagining a new
world for journalism rather than for humanity, where, in the words of the editor-in-chief of
Helsingin Sanomat, ‘‘there will never be a news event of which there are no pictures’’. His
vision reminds us that when thinking of citizen images as potential means for
cosmopolitan imagination, we need to keep in mind that not all disasters and crises
produce citizen testimonials.
Visibility may foster identification and make political action possible and identifica-
tion may be reinforced by the ‘‘raw’’ and immediate quality of citizen images, but it is not
enough in itself. Addressing the injustices or structural conditions that have caused the
situations also requires reflective analysis and contextualization and it is journalists’ claim
to provide this essential resource for citizen understanding and agency that continues to
constitute the basis of professional journalists’ arguments in favour of their own
indispensability.
ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS
I would like to thank Laura Ahva and Graham Murdock for insightful comments on this
study. Particular thanks to Sanna Ojajarvi and Minttu Tikka for their valuable contribution
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in collecting the data. I am grateful to the Helsingin Sanomat Foundation for providing
the funds for this study, which is a part of my research project ‘‘Amateur Images*A
Comparative Study on How User-generated Content is Shaping Journalism.’’
NOTES
1. The broadcasters are the public service broadcaster YLE and commercial broadcasters
MTV3 and Nelonen (Channel 4) and newspapers Helsingin Sanomat, Ilta-Sanomat, Iltalehti
and Aamulehti.
2. One reason for this might be that citizen photographers (in the context of political crises)
are aware of the fact that mainstream news outlets prefer images that show background
as it helps journalists to determine the veracity of the image.
3. Maria Hellman’s and Kristina Riegert’s (2009) study, which compares the role of
transnational and national media in producing cosmopolitan empathy and identities
by focusing on the coverage of the tsunami disaster by the transnational channel CNN
and the Swedish national television channel TV4, raises an interesting question about the
national language of the news. The Swedish respondents (although fluent in English) felt
that English as the news language decreased the sense of proximity and emotional
involvement with the mediated suffering.
4. Interviews with journalists point to the fact that most of the amateur imagery that
Finnish news organizations receive through international news agencies is too graphic to
show to a general public, or it can be shown only by using various distanciation
techniques or distinguishing it as disturbing content.
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