How news images work: When engagement comes at the expense of understanding

Barbie Zelizer discusses the 1968 photo by AP photographer Eddie Adams on the screen behind her in Old Main. Photo by Kristi Miller.

By Sarah MacDonnell

There are certain images that can really make readers stop and gaze at a page, such as photos of people facing death, and they often get more attention than the story they were meant to illustrate.

Images are direct pieces of evidence of news events, but Barbie Zelizer, who this spring delivered the School’s 47th annual Ralph L. Crosman lecture, said, “Images need to be recognized as real, accurate and factual ... not only for the sake of the image but for journalism as a whole.” She said that’s not always what happens.

Zelizer is a professor of communication at the University of Pennsylvania’s Annenberg School for Communication and the author of “About to Die: How News Images Move the Public.” She is known for her research work in the cultural dimensions of journalism, with specific interests in journalistic authority, collective memory and journalistic images in times of crisis and war.

Zelizer focused on “about-to-die” images from three events: the attack on the World Trade Center towers, the invasion of Afghanistan and the Iraq War. She presented a slide show of images portraying presumed death, possible death or certain death, she said.

“The moment at which an individual faces death is both troubling and uncomfortable,” she noted, referring to the controversy that often comes with the publication of such images.

Zelizer said that while impending-death images serve an important function during crises, those images require viewers to imagine what they do not see. However, that imagination creates a certain kind of engagement with the image that comes at the expense of understanding, she said.

“What happens when the act of imagining works contrary to the context in which it occurs?” Zelizer asked. She also noted how images portrayed in the news are often chosen by people who did not take them and who were in fact far from the place the image was taken.

She said that as we accept what’s visible and what’s hidden, the acceptance is not universal and is particularly problematic in journalism.

Zelizer said that while images are evidence, it is important for viewers and readers to get the whole picture because without that, she said they lack the ability to have a factual account of the event shown.

“It is up to us – the viewing public – to transform this into certainty or not,” she said.