The Power of Images in Global Politics

Summary

Images shape international events and our understandings of them. Photographs, cinema and television influence how we view and approach phenomena as diverse as war, humanitarian disasters, protest movements, financial crises and election campaigns. The dynamics of visual politics go well beyond traditional media outlets. Digital media, from Twitter to Instagram, play an increasingly important role across the political spectrum, from terrorist recruitment drives to social justice campaigns.

It has become common to speak of a visual turn in the study of global politics: the recognition that images and visual artefacts play an increasingly crucial role in depicting and shaping the world we live in. Our understanding of terrorism, for instance, is inevitably intertwined with how images dramatically represent the events in question, how these images circulate world-wide, and how politicians and the public respond to these visual impressions. Take the terrorist attacks of 11 September 2001. There is no way to understand the origin, nature and impact of the event without understanding the role of images. The attack was designed for visual impact. Images circulated instantly around the globe, giving audiences a sense of how shocking and terrible the event was. Many of these emotional images not only shaped subsequent public debates and policy responses, including the war on terror, but also remain engrained in our collective consciousness.

There are two ways in which the politics of images has changed fundamentally. First is the speed at which images circulate and the reach they have. Not that long ago, during the time of the Vietnam War, it would have taken days if not weeks for a photograph taken in the war zone to reach the front-page of, say, the New York Times. In today’s digital world, a photograph or a video can reach audiences world-wide immediately after it has been taken. Media networks can now make a local event almost instantaneously global, whether it is a terrorist attack, a protest march, an election campaign rally or any other political phenomena. Second is what one could call the democratisation of visual politics. It used to be that very few actors – states or global media networks – had access to images and the power to distribute them to a global audience. Today, everyone can take a photograph with a smartphone, upload it on social media and circulate it immediately with a potential world-wide reach. The result is an unprecedented visualisation of both our private lives and our political landscape: a visual communication revolution that has shaken the foundations and hierarchies of established media networks. We see a dismantling of the division between broadcaster and viewer, producer and consumer.

Photographs offer a good illustration of the issues at stake. They appear to communicate clearly and truth-fully, yet they deceive us. They provide us with the seductive belief that what we see in a photograph is an authentic representation of the world: a slice of life that reveals exactly what was happening at a particular moment. The illusion of authenticity also masks the political values that such photographic representations embody. The assumption that photographs are neutral, value free and evidential, is reinforced because photography captures faces and events in memorable ways. It is precisely the illusion of authenticity that makes photographs such powerful tools to convey the meaning of political events to distant audiences. Spectators view and re-view crises through various media sources until the enormity of the event seems graspable. In doing so, photographs not only shape an individual’s perception but also larger, collective forms of consciousness. Photographs are thus politically partial and not just because they can be manipulated and faked. All images – still and moving ones – always express a particular perspective. They inevitably exclude as much as they include. A photograph cannot be neutral because it always is an image chosen and composed by a particular person. It is taken from a particular angle, and then produced and reproduced in a certain manner, thereby excluding a range of alternative ways of capturing the object in question. Similar political processes are at play when it comes to our individual and collective efforts of understanding images.

Photographs do not make sense by themselves. They need to be seen and interpreted. They gain meaning in relation to other images and the personal and societal assumptions and norms that surround us. Our viewing experience is thus intertwined not only with previous experiences, such as our memory of other photographs we have seen in the past, but also with the values and visual traditions that are accepted as common sense by established societal norms. There are inevitably power relationships involved in this nexus between visuality, society, and politics.

Look at one of the most iconic images of the past few decades, the ‘Tiananmen Man’ image, depicting a lone protester in front of a series of tanks. This image immediately makes sense for many people around the world, as long as they know about the historic event in Beijing in 1989: the occurrence of the protest movement and its suppression by the police. But many people inside China, for whom depictions and reportage of Tiananmen massacre remain censored, do not have the background knowledge necessary to interpret this photograph let alone recognise it as an icon.

Consider how the global North, influenced by liberal-western values, visually depicts the rest of the world. Television and photographic portrayals of celebrity engagement with famine, for instance, tend to revolve around a patronising view of Africa, depicted as a generic place of destitution, where innocent and powerless victims are in need of western help. But just as images and visual artefacts entrench power relations they can also uproot them. Michael Cook challenges stereotypes and the colonial understanding of history associated with them. He visually reverses how colonial Australia has rendered the Indigenous population invisible. Indigenous art has, indeed, a long history of exposing the undersides of Australia’s past and of advancing protest forms that eventually contribute to political and social change.

Although we live in a visual age, knowledge conventions – both in academia and in the wider realm – are by and large still revolving around texts and textual analysis. The challenge ahead lies in gaining a fuller and more sophisticated understanding of the links between visuality and the political. How do we assess the political implications of the visual phenomena that surround us? What would it mean to communicate and think and act in visual ways? Numerous scholars have started to address these and other issues, but we have a long way to go until we understand and appreciate the power of images in global politics.

This commentary was originally published by E-International Relations. An edited version is reproduced here with the author’s permission.

Disclaimer: Views expressed are of the author(s) and do not necessarily reflect the views of The Statecraft Institute.