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Abstract
Photography contests have assumed an increasingly significant public role in the context of the global surge of war reporting, drawing large audiences and abundant media attention. This article focuses on the image awarded the Photo of the Year 2011 in the World Press Photo contest. The photograph conforms to an easily recognizable visual trope of a mourning mother: an acknowledged convention that remains unchanged despite its frequent recurrence in the visual sphere. The article traces the kinds of collective emotional reactions this trope triggers among the judges and wider audiences of the WPP and considers the political and cultural challenges of such reactions. Using this example, the workings of tropes in the visual broadcasting of warfare are considered.
Notes
1 Caption as found at http://www.worldpressphoto.org. The original caption submitted by the photographer did not name the woman or her connection to the injured man; these were added after the image had been awarded first prize and the people in the photo identified. Captions in the World Press Photo contest often shift from a micro- to a macro scale; private tragedies, broken bonds of love, loss of property and heritage set against wider cultural and geopolitical contexts are common narrative tropes developed to match the visual ones.
2 The jury's choices have been heatedly debated on blogs and online platforms, among others on duckrabbit.info/blog, bagnews.com, lens.blogs.nytimes.com, copywriterjournalist.com, lensculture.com, jeremynicholl.com, politicstheoryphotography.blogspot.com, nocaptionneeded.com, lightbox.time.com, david-campbell.org, and bjp-online.com, https://bitly.com/bundles/martijnkleppe
3 This research is a part of a larger project based on quantitative research, examining the recurrence of various tropes in the WPP (Zarzycka and Kleppe forthcoming).
5 Due to a decreasing number of printed titles, today's photographers, rather than working with newspapers and magazines to create coherently interrelated visual and written narratives, increasingly collaborate with agencies and databases such as Corbis, Getty, Reuters, and AFP. Consequently, images produced by them function less as a testimony to a particular event and more as a general representation of some aspect of war.
6 The jury that gathered in 2012 consisted of 18 judges, 6 of whom were from the US, 2 from the UK and 6 from Western Europe (see http://www.worldpressphoto.org/2012-photo-contest-jury).
7 Nevertheless, some online reactions pointed out the woman's active, strong way of holding her son, suggesting strength and agency. Moreover, Fatima Al-Qaws herself claimed that the WPP award makes her proud of “being a woman, being a mother, and being a Yemeni” (see http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/17111673).
8 Numerous scholars (i.e. Boltanski; Campbell) point to the massive donations to NGOs and disaster funds stimulated by globally disseminated images that evoke indignation towards the perpetrators, compassion towards the victims, or fear and shock at the sight of carnage.
9 See interview with jury chair Aidan Sullivan available online, http://www.worldpressphoto.org/photo/world-press-photo-year-2011-0
11 This claim seems debatable when one examines the totality of the Photos of the Year since 1955; many of these have been known to evoke a strong reaction of shock or horror (examples include the Photo of the Year 1985, showing a dead girl trapped in the debris caused by the eruption of Nevado del Ruíz volcano). Nevertheless, the last three winners indeed rely strongly on the ethos of compassion, courage and resistance to oppressive conditions/systems.
12 Massumi (“The Half-life of Disaster”) claims that horror “decays” in the media within a period of approximately two weeks, transmuting into low-key intensity.