How are corpses represented on the front pages of major Spanish newspapers? Why are most corpses that appear in the foreground of photographs of immigrants or Middle-Eastern people? Why do Western people’s corpses appear in a wider frame/shot where it is more difficult to distinguish details of dead bodies?
In this paper we will look at a part of a research project that we are developing at Pompeu Fabra University, where we show that a series of visual motifs exists in the images that represent the different areas of power in the public sphere (political, economic, judicial, law enforcement, institutional and civil) (Balló and Pintor, 2017).
We analyze if there is an iconographical pattern in images through the concept of “visual motif” (a significant image by its formal composition that acquires its expressiveness in its repetition or in its dynamic persistence) coined by Balló (2000) and Bergala (2016). The research is based on the review of a sample of 18,146 archives, including front-page newspaper images and news video clips, taken from major Spanish newspapers and television news programming between 2011 and 2017.
Specifically, in this paper we will focus on the visual motifs in the public sphere related to death. We will establish a classification of motifs depending on whether 1) the representation of death is literal (through the figure of the corpse) or 2) the representation of death is figurative (through symbolic visualization or public manifestation of changes in regimes at moments of political transition or revolution, particularly through images of statues being torn down or of the attack on representations of political leaders at the moment).
We will identify distinct variants of the death motif and demonstrate that literal death motifs appear with more intensity in civil, law-enforcement and political areas; and that metaphorical images of death appear especially in institutional, monarchical and political milieus.
Thus, we will demonstrate that visual motifs are not only found in artistic representations, but also in the images in the mass media that constitute the public sphere. For instance, when Moammar al-Gaddafi died, the photographs used on front pages by the media implied a pictorial tradition of the representation of the corpse observed by a series of witnesses, that Rembrandt emblematizes in The Anatomy Lesson of Dr. Nicolaes Tulp (1632). We will examine why some specific images repeat depending on the type of death represented.
We will see that there are several compositional constants in these images that make reference to visual motifs from pictorial or cinematographic tradition. To that aim, we will follow the framework of iconographical studies (Panosfsky, 1982, 1995; Warburg, 2005), cultural studies (Hall, 1980; Fiske, 1992, 1986, 1989) and comparative studies. We will be able to affirm that images that represent power in mass media are articulated through visual motifs and we will analyze why and how sociologically, culturally and aesthetically.