Marco Solaroli

Toward A New Visual Culture Of The News

This paper argues that the rise of new digital technologies and new amateur/citizen practices of photographic production have constituted a “short-circuit” that has critically destabilized but also productively challenged professional photojournalism. In this context, the paper focuses on the practice of digital post-production (i.e. digitally “retouching” and “enhancing” photographs), as an empirical prism through which to theoretically discuss wider technological, professional, and cultural shifts that have been affecting news photography over the last decade. In particular, drawing on in-depth interviews with international photojournalists, jury members of press photo contests, and directors of digital post-production labs, the paper analyzes a few paradigmatic case studies of post-produced news photographs that have recently won prestigious professional awards, yet have generated considerable controversies. Through the analysis of the case studies, the paper aims to shed light on the contested construction of aesthetic conventions and professional-ethical standards within digital photojournalism, in relation to (1) the shifting professional ideal of visual news “objectivity,” and (2) the shifting symbolic boundaries between professional and non-professional news photo producers. Finally, introducing the notion of “digital cultural capital,” the paper suggests the theoretical relevance of a (post-)Bourdieusian approach to photojournalism, which frames the conflictual implementation of new digital technologies and the diffusion of new social and material practices as a symbolic struggle for professional distinction within the wider visual culture.

Authors and Rappers: Italian Hip Hop and the Shifting Boundaries of Canzone d’Autore

By offering a historical reconstruction of the process of contextualisation of hip hop culture in Italy over the last fifteen years, the article assesses the current status of canzone d’autore and its changing configuration under the impact of rap music. From a theoretical point of view, the conceptual framework combines the sociological definition of ‘field of cultural production’ elaborated by Pierre Bourdieu with the related literature on social and symbolic boundaries. From a methodological point of view, the analysis is based on the data collected by Club Tenco (a cultural organisation which plays an institutional role within the field of canzone d’autore) as well as on a series of qualitative interviews carried out with a number of Italian rappers and cantautori. Special attention is paid to a very few crucial figures that can be considered paradigmatic examples in the dynamic process of boundary-making of the two cultural (sub-)fields of Italian rap and canzone d’autore.

Mediatized conflicts, performative photographs and contested memory: The Abu Ghraib scandal and the iconic struggle over the meanings of the ‘war on terror’

On 28 April 2004, CBS 60 Minutes II broadcast a few shocking photographs taken over the previous months by US soldiers within the prison of Abu Ghraib, near Baghdad. The pictures showed Iraqi prisoners naked, tied, hooded, wounded and bleeding, constrained in unnatural positions, piled up or dragged along the floor and forced to suffer sexual violence, as well as soldiers posing with amused looks and thumbs up, even while closing a black sack containing a dead and tortured body. In the following days, the diffusion of the images generated tragic effects, most cruelly the beheading of US worker Nicholas Berg, abducted in Baghdad by Iraqi militants as an explicit reaction to the acts represented in the pictures. In the following weeks, The New Yorker published a series of articles written by Pulitzer prize-winning investigative journalist Seymour Hersh, while newsrooms throughout the world were flooded by dozens of bitterly auto-commemorative amateur snapshots. Between May and June 2004, the Abu Ghraib torture photographs occupied the frontline of the international political debate. Many influential voices within US civil society asked President George Bush and Secretary of Defence Donald Rumsfeld to resign. In a very short time, the Abu Ghraib photographs became a public scandal threatening the White House’s political-military hierarchy. However, at the moment of the initial publication, their reasons, meanings and consequences were not easily definable or predictable. Temporarily hidden from the political debate until Bush’s re-election in November 2004 thanks to an aggressive strategy of news management, the Abu Ghraib photographs have persistently re-appeared throughout a strikingly wide variety of processes of creative appropriation, re-articulation and re-contextualization within different spheres of action over the following years, triggering an interpretative struggle over the responsibilities for

Iconicity: A Category for Social and Cultural Theory

Over the last two decades, various intellectual waves of theoretical repositioning and advancement within and beyond the “cultural turn” in the social sciences and humanities have revealed a widespread, increasing (and increasingly institutionalized) attention to the “visual” and “material” – plus, more recently and secondarily, the “sensory” and “affective” – dimensions of social and cultural life. In this context, this symposium aims at posing the concept of “icon” and the category of “iconicity” at the centre of contemporary cultural research in the social sciences. In order to open the discussion, this paper offers a comprehensive and critical assessment of the state of the art, highlighting the underlying tensions and the fundamental issues at stake, focusing on the most recent theoretical debates (e.g. the “iconic turn” in cultural sociology), and suggesting grey areas in need of further research and refinement. It aims to show that the category of iconicity can provide fertile ground for exploring connections and constructing dialogues among different strands in the social sciences and humanities that have so far developed almost independently of each other. Finally, it offers a number of insights toward the construction of an organic and truly multi-dimensional analytical-conceptual framework, which might throw into further relief the dynamics of iconic power in the increasingly global and digital age, and the relevance of iconicity as a category for social and cultural theory.

News Photography and the Digital (R)evolution: Continuity and Change in the Practices, Styles, Norms and Values of Photojournalism

This chapter deals with the impact of new digital technologies and new social practices of photographic production and circulation in the field of professional photojournalism since the early 2000s. Focusing on shifting practices, styles, norms and values, it highlights elements of both continuity and change with the previous analogical age. In particular, it offers an analysis of three major changes: (i) the rise of so-called citizen photojournalism (i.e. the possibility for ordinary people to produce photographs that come to be valued and circulated by news organizations); (ii) the increasing implementation of digital post-production (i.e. the possibility to digitally retouch or enhance a photo before circulating it) that can consecrate specific aesthetic conventions yet generating considerable controversy in terms of standards and norms; (iii) the symbolic struggle for distinction and authorship among top international photojournalists as an effect of the emergence of nonprofessional producers and new digital technologies of production and postproduction. In the end, this chapter outlines a problematization of the increasingly diffused discoursive transition from the value of “objectivity” to the value of “trustworthiness” within professional photojournalism. As a whole, it urges for more empirical investigations on socially situated practices of digital production as well as on existing institutional frameworks.

Cornici di tortura Lo scandalo di Abu Ghraib come rituale mediatizzato tra fotogiornalismo e arte contemporanea

This paper deals with the scandal of Abu Ghraib. The diffusion of the torture photographs is analyzed as a peculiar form of mediatized ritual, which has cristallized them in the public memory and performatively activated a number of practices of creative re-contextualization and symbolic re-articulation. In particular, the paper problematizes a wide range of forms of artistic representations of the torture photographs, according to three main analytical dimensions: inter-iconic translation, authorial intentions, degree of institutionalization.