Seeing Katrina: Perspectives of Judgement in a Cultural/Natural Disaster

Building boundaries: A case study of the use of news photographs and cultural narratives in the coverage of local crime and in the creation of urban space

“…Newswork culture, the newsgathering process, and the creation of photographs-from the preparation of the photo shoot through the editing and to the publicationmaintain or alter the images' meanings (Bock, 2008;Silcock, 2007). What appears is the ultimate product, the image, that tells stories through "modes of seeing" (Jenkins, 2007) and the documentary nature of the image, and constructs a "visual agenda" (Miller & Roberts, 2010) through storytelling surrounding a news event or issue.…”

Picturing the future‐conditional: montage and the global geographies of climate change

“…As a practice, photography has been an important instrument of constructing knowledge and understanding of the world, of identity and difference, and of the politics of collective world‐making (Kress and Leeuwen ; cf. Foucault , 61; Jenkins ). For Booth and Davisson (), images of disaster – such as extreme weather events – should not be considered to be simply rhetorical – a call to arms, the identification of a problem and an argument for its melioration.…”

“…Climate change communicator George Marshall railed against the Postcards , particularly their handling of migration, as ‘dangerous’ fantasy which would only fuel existing prejudices ( The Guardian 27 October 2010). Echoing Jenkins' () concerns about photojournalistic portrayals of the aftermath of extreme climatic events reinforcing existing interpretive schemas rather than challenging them, Marshall asks ‘why did the cover story of “climate change” permit the enthusiastic promotion of images and language that would be normally considered unacceptable in a public exhibition?… [Climate change] requires the same intelligence and sensitivity as any exhibition on gender, race or class’. The policy director of the UK Refugee Council called the images ‘lazy and unhelpful’, and they were similarly condemned as ‘cheap stereotypes’, ‘inaccurate’ and ‘insulting’ by other refugee and climate change campaigners.…”

International journalists’ expectations from the US media coverage of Hurricane Katrina

“…In an investigation of the visual portrayal of Hurricane Katrina by the Washington Post, Jenkins (2007) found that photographs gave the viewer distance, power, detachment, and externality and led him/her to a judgmental disposition. This coverage, according to the author, also interpreted the disaster in a nature vs. culture dominant frame, when other more complex and critical explanations should have been presented.…”