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- Najem, Chafic T., 1991-
(author)
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Smuggle, Frame, Shoot : Illicit Media Practices and Visual Insurgency from Lebanese Incarceration
- 2023
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Doctoral thesis (other academic/artistic)abstract
- This research explores prisoners’ illicit use of digital-media technology during their incarceration in Lebanon. Prisoners smuggle cellphones and access internet and telecommunication connection to produce and mediate videos, images, and voice recordings documenting quotidian experiences of imprisonment, violent events, and the COVID-19 Pandemic inside the notorious and overcrowded Roumieh Central Prison. Fragmentary prison amateur cellphone media messages make their way from behind bars to various media ecologies, from social media to local and international news-media platforms, where they are (re)mediated and often appropriated to feed partisan and sectarian media narratives. In this dissertation, I investigate prison cellphone recordings and their political and testimonial possibilities by tracing the prison media practices responsible for their production and circulation. Influenced by Amel’s (1976, 1988) intellectual project of theorizing from the periphery and the lo popular approach to theorizing media with and from individuals’ media practices in their territory (Martín-Barbero, 1998), I propose a framework for the conceptualization of prisoners’ illicit use of digital-media technologies and the recordings they produce as media from the prison. Based on a foundation of media-practice theory, more specifically the articulation of activist media practices and mediation theory (Martín-Barbero, 1993; Mattoni, 2012; Mattoni & Treré, 2014), I introduce three overarching and overlapping conceptual themes: media witnessing, media mobilization, and vulnerability in resistance. Using this theoretical framework, I examine the categories, characteristics, and modes of framing reflected in prison cellphone recordings, explore their alignment with mechanisms of mobilization and organized protest, and consider them as visual and sonic recorded testimonies that document and communicate personal impressions and the conditions of quotidian life in confinement. The analysis draws on a qualitative, multi-method approach combining visual analysis and contextual interviews. Location- and event-based searches were used to systematically collect a corpus of prison cellphone recordings remediated between 2011 and 2022 on Facebook, YouTube, and local and international news-media platforms. I propose the notion of visual insurgency as a step towards understanding the role and function of recordings that are produced and mediated through inherently prohibited media practices. Through the examination of composition, POV, frame, sound, (re)mediation, and the partisan context of Lebanon and the colonial history of its prisons, I trace the illicit media practices responsible for these prison representations. I claim that, through their media practices, prisoners mediate from the prison testimonies of their lived experiences, expose their vulnerabilities to the precarious conditions they exist in, re-claim a sense of mundanity, and incite feelings of affinity to mobilize support. I conclude that prison cellphone recordings are the result of meticulous prison media practices that are intended to actively mobilize support and sympathy, as well as to establish communication networks with affiliates and media personnel. Prison media practices continue to grow as prisoners smuggle digital-media technologies, develop new approaches to framing their testimonies and shooting the precarious environment, stories, performative assemblies, and lived experiences behind bars.
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- Andén-Papadopoulos, Kari, 1963-
(author)
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Kameran i krig : den fotografiska iscensättningen av Vietnamkriget i svensk press
- 2000
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Doctoral thesis (other academic/artistic)abstract
- The doctoral thesis deals with the problems of (news) photographic representation in general, and is based on an empirical study ofVietnam War photography in four major Swedish daily newspapers. A more specific aim of the thesis is to investigate and ideologically evaluate the representational strategies of the press photographs. A central argument is that news pictures must be understood in terms of the specific cultural context constituted by the Western pictorial tradition, both classical and popular. The news media operate within the culture and make use of common motifs, symbols and rhetorical devices to convey their messages. Studies have shown that journalistic texts often hark back to literary traditions, oral storytelling, sagas and myths. Likewise, press photography is permeated by iconographie conventions from the Western arthistorical and pictorial tradition. In order to understand how and what the pictures signify, you must read them in light of this tradition.The thesis takes its starting points in various theories of representation; in photo theory, art theory, visual rhetoric and in mass communication theory, particularly the part that deals with news production. Following a poststructuralistic line of argument, 1 take it that photographs convey information not about any objective reality, but about the beliefe and ideas particular to the culture in which they operate. News photographs can be conceptualized as projections, as ”involuntary confessions” of their culture’s deeper preoccupations. This study shows that both the form and content of the news photographs from the Vietnam War reflect historical and contemporary, fictitious and documentary depictions of war. They trigger the same cultural myths found in popular movies, novels and picture genres, including classical Western painting - which confirms the present assumption that news photography must be understood as a cultural product. An ethnocentric as well as patriarchal perspective is prominent in the Swedish new- - spapers’ Vietnam photographs. They position the capitalist West as the masculine, modern and civilized ’ ”Absolute”, against which the Vietnamese are contrasted as a feminized, primitive, communist ”Other”. The press photographs are permeated by a Judeo-Christian iconography. They convey a modern version of the Passion, with the Pietà and the mourning Madonna as recurrent themes. The American soldiers are transformed into Christian martyrs, and the fleeing South Vietnamese population is staged as a timeless vision of the Old Testament Exodus. By referring to the Christian tradition, the photographs give the suffering and killing a higher purpose. Belief in the resurrection - the ultimate triumph owing to the sacrifice — acts as a comforting filter over the scenes of wounded American soldiers and crying South Vietnamese women.My study does not support the popular assumption that the photographic staging of the Vietnam War turned public opinion against the war in any direct way. The negative picture of the war conveyed in press photographs from 1968, which became increasingly negative beginning in 1972, can largely be seen as a result of the mounting Swedish and international resistance to the war. Even though the Swedish press (and other mass media) mirrored changes in the actual course of the war to a certain extent - and through its brutal descriptions of violence certainly contributed to strengthening anti-war opinion — it still appears as if its picture policy responded to, as opposed to preceded, public opinion. Whereas it is difficult to find evidence that news pictures have any direct and decisive effects on the formation of political opinion, it can be argued that they have long-term repercussions for more general cultural conceptions - that they are both symptoms and agents of a process of cultural reproduction. What my study has shown in particular is that even liberal democratic Western media seem to function as propaganda machines of some sort, in the sense that press photographs confirm and reproduce deeply rooted cultural myths and values. It seems appropriate to say that the media — rather than revealing the world — project onto it ideologically colored pictures.
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