Analysis of visual images

The main objectives of analysis of visual images were to identify what was pictured in visual images selected for publication with HT ‘highly relevant’ and ‘relevant’ articles, to complement quantitative and qualitative findings and to track the differences of representation of HT in the three countries.

II.6.1 Sample

The German sample consisted of 25 visual images from nine articles that were ‘highly relevant’ and 12 articles that were ‘relevant’ to HT. The visual images in FR, SZ, FAZ and DW were extracted from the on-line archives, which provided complete pages in PDF format.

The visual images from the TAZ newspaper were provided by the research services of the newspaper in PDF format.

The British sample consisted of 18 visual images in five articles that were ‘highly relevant’ and 11 articles that were ‘relevant’ to HT. The visual images in The Times, The Guardian and The Daily Telegraph were extracted from the on-line archives in HTML format, which might mean that visual images published on paper were not necessarily reproduced on-line. The images from The Independent were provided by the research services of the newspaper. The images from The Financial Times were not identified due to a number of limitations and, therefore, were not included in the analysis.

The Kyrgyz sample consisted of 44 visual images in 30 articles that were ‘highly relevant’ to HT and 14 articles that were ‘relevant’ to HT. The visual images were extracted from the on-line archive of VB.

If an article contained several images, each image was analysed as a separate unit of analysis.

II.6.2 Methodology

The analysis of visual images was a mixture of Philip Bell’s (2001) quantitative methodology for content analysis and Roland Barthes’ (1977) qualitative visual semiotic and logico-semantic approaches to analysing visual images and text-image relationships.

For Bell (2001, 15), to conduct a content analysis is to “…try to describe salient aspects of how a group of texts (in our case, images or visual texts) represents some kinds of people, processes, events, and/or interrelationships between or amongst these.” Similar to classical quantitative media content analysis (Riffe et.al 2005, Stempel 1981, Neuendorf 2002), Bell’s

(2001, 15) approach includes classification of visual images on specified dimensions or variables and “is not concerned with ‘reading’ or interpreting each text individually.” Bell (2001) specifies, however, that in the content analysis of visual images, a variable refers to aspects of how something is represented, not to ‘reality’ (manifest content); the content of the visual image cannot be easily compared with some assumed ‘reality’ by which to make claims of ‘bias’ or ‘negative’, let along ‘true’ or ‘false’, representation in visual images.

For Barthes (1977, 15), “the press photograph is a message”. A key idea of his visual semiotic approach to analysis of visual images is the layering of meaning. “The first layer is the layer of denotation, of ‘what, or who, is being depicted here?’. The second is the layer of connotation, of ‘what ideas and values are expressed through what is represented, and through the way in which it is represented?’” (Barthes cited in van Leeuwen 2001, 94). While denotation should pose no problems as long as the viewer can recognize what is known, connotation includes understanding ‘myths’ and ‘ideological meanings’ of what is depicted (van Leeuwen 2001). According to van Leeuwen (2001) while exercising ‘denotation’ of the image, one can pay attention to whether a person is represented as a personality or a desirable social type, whether people are represented as individuals or a group, whether people are portrayed at a distance or closer to the photographer, etc. The frequent carriers of connotation as a second layer of meaning are poses and objects. According to Barthes, there is “an unwritten ‘dictionary’ of poses which is known to everyone who is at all exposed to the mass media, and whose ‘entries’ again have the kind of broad and ideologically coloured meanings that at typical of connotation” (Barthes cited in van Leeuwen 2001, 97). Similarly, objects may represent something, constitute elements of signification or be “accepted inducers of ideas (book case = intellectual) (Goffman quoted in van Leeuwen 2001, 98).

Barthes (1977) also considers the effect of connotation of visual images in the context of the text of an article, its headline and a caption attached to it. To avoid “multiplicity of readings” of visual texts, the authors of visual images – especially in print media – include captions. They not only explicitly describe who and what is pictured but also “get a particular message across to a particular audience” (van Leeuwen 2001, 95). Barthes (1977, 26) explains, “The caption probably has a less obvious effect of connotation than the headline or accompanying article: headline and article are palpably separate from the image, the former by its emphasis, the latter by its distances; the first because it breaks, the other because it distances the content of the image. The caption, on the contrary, by its very disposition, by its average measure of reading, appears to duplicate the image, that is, to be included in its denotation.” According to Barthes (Barthes cited in Martinec and Salway 2005, 341), there

are three possibilities of how images and text relate to one another: “text supporting image (‘anchorage’), image supporting text (‘illustration’), and the two being equal (‘relay’).” With anchorage, the language has a function of ‘elucidation’; with illustration, the image ‘realises’

the text; and, with relay, which is rare in fixed images and more common in film, the text becomes important not only to elucidate but also to advance the action by setting out meanings that are absent in image itself (Martinec and Salway 2005, 341).

The coding book consisted of 15 variables divided in three parts. Based on Bell’s (2001) approach, the first part was designed to code general characteristics of a visual image categorizing country, newspaper, placement, attribution, its type and colour. Based on Barthes’ (1977) approach, the second part consisted of variables that coded clarity and tone of a caption in relation to what is depicted in a visual image, text-visual relation, and strength and tone of a headline-image relation. The third part dealt with deconstructing the meaning of a visual image. It included variables coding the relevance to HT of what is depicted in a visual image, denotation and connotation of a visual image. For operationalization of variables and their categories, see the coding protocol for analysis of visual images in Appendix VI.