Can Visual Framing Offer Insight Into Studying Visual Culture ‘Beyond the News’?

• In Event: From a “Life Line” to a “Bridging Model” of Visual Research? Theoretical and Methodological Challenges of Visual Framing

Abstract

Moving beyond the traditional focus of political communication and journalism perspectives, this paper considers the wider practices of visual framing, including those which might take place beyond traditional journalistic cultures. Hybrid media forms have multiplied in the digital era, posing new challenges and problematizing the traditional boundaries between, for example: professional and amateur production; serious and playful genres and formats; and public and private modes of sharing and viewing.

How, then, do we reconfigure visual framing approaches to deal with multifaceted visual data and materials (camera phone images, YouTube videos, live streams, interactive web documentaries) (see Lim, 2013)? What kinds of visual objects now intrigue us; and how do we collect such data, or evaluate their symbolic currency? For example, as sponsors of frames, new social movements express their political message through visual means, taking to the streets in spectacular style and appropriating images in sometimes satirical or carnivalesque ways (e.g. Occupy, 15-M, and “Arab Spring”) (Khatib, 2013). New hybrid forms and genres encroach on journalistic borders, realized in public gatherings and via social media platforms, and with the presentation of intensely visual materials in DIY modes of expression, often travelling through global networks. Questions of affinity, solidarity, dissent and identity-formation come to the fore in analyzing such imagery.

In responding to these changes, the content and form of the message arguably takes on a supplementary appeal to the social processes of participation and mediation: the acts of linking, uploading, and sharing reveal patterns of mediation that have become part of the ‘set of communicative resources’ for researchers (Thorson et al., 2013). However, there is a danger that the current fascination with how images or videos circulate online leads to a lack of attention given to the actual images as expressive forms (Pauwels, 2008). In seeking to explore the boundaries of ‘visual framing’ this paper takes a speculative journey into framing practices beyond the journalistic concerns of news narratives.

Author

• Katy Jane Parry, U of Leeds