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ANADOLU ÜNİVERSİTESİ
The
types of image, image patterns, have established the cultural memory by continual re-
petition and ultimately prove as part of the circular: Because they seem familiar, they must
apparently correspond with reality and are accordingly believed. Certain contexts require time
and again certain pictorial implementation patterns in this phase. Self- reference of press pho-
tography and visual language is being established in this context. The World Press Photo Award
Competitions have a strong formative influence in this regard . Because of this,
they set some
image standards and role models. This process consciously or unconsciously affects the process
images are involved in. Visualizations of suffering as in the example of the featured photographs
are particularly common in iconographic image traditions and obviously show an emotional
symbolism. In this context, I would like to briefly elaborate on Aby Warburg who created an
Atlas of the collective image memory of a Mnemosyne project. In his Mnemosyne Atlas, War-
burg gathered art and religion-historical imagery of two and a half millennia a compiled it on
large panels. In his image Atlas, Warburg tried to group the images to image constellations and
iconography series. He sorted the images according
to various visual criteria; thereby he sought
to disclose the connections between the different images. (Sladen, 1996) Like religion and art
themselves, the Atlas is a collecting mirror of connective and mnemic energy. The Atlas is more
than documentation, interpretation, and knowledge. In the collection of designs, in which affect
energy and formal control are equally satisfied as constraint and order, Warburg used certain
motifs and forms of representation of the cultural memory and
called them pathos formulas,
which symbolize emotional expressions with recourse to the ancient repertoire of forms in this
cabinet of wonder. Warburg describes the rhetoric and semantic of body-related expressions
as “historical psychology of human expression” and refers to the “interference between affect
energy and cultural patterns of processing” coagulated to images and figures with the concept
of pathos formula. Renewing pathos formulas, in the sense of aesthetic image quotations, which
visualize an emotional expression, seems as a characteristic of press photography. Particularly
emotions and emotional issues such as suffering and pain appear extremely
ritualized in photo-
journalistic imagery. (Benjamin, 1973) The recourse to an iconographically familiar repertoire
of forms and the return of emotional symbolism visualized this topics as easy-to-read symbols.
This immediately recognizes the viewer as part of the cultural memory of the image. An examp-
le of this, the World Press Photo of 1997 (Visual 8) .
The so-called Madonna of Bentalha, a photograph of Hocine Zaourar from the Algerian civil
war, shows a female figure sitting on the ground and compassionately held by another female
figure. The expression of emotional mourning of the first female figure is evident. she has tilted
her head to the side, her look is absent and the mouth open complaining. The headscarf wea-
ring, weeping woman in the picture reminds of a form of presentation of Christian iconography,
namely the Maria and the lamentation of Christ. Hocine‘s photograph taken after the massacre
in Bentalha in Algeria on September 23, 1997, quotes the occidental Christian pictorial traditi-
on
and renews a pathos formula, which makes the figure an allegory of sorrow and pain.
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SANAT & TASARIM DERGİSİ
The iconographic reference to the lamentation of Christ brings the Algerian woman in mo-
tivic correspondence to Mary and the interpretation suggests that the Algerian woman mourns
her children. So the recourse to the iconographic representation of patterns of mourning incre-
ases the symbol effect and immediately conveys the meaning (Sullivan, 2012).
Visual 8. Hocine Zaourar/AFP: Bentalha, Algiers, Algeria, September 23, 1997, World Press Photo of
the year 1997.
The specific modalities of perception, constituting themselves in the context of media, last
but not least arise from the effects of a continuous flow of images that provides us round the
clock with pictures of current events through different media channels.
Within this constant
image stream, we perceive images only in the context of other images, which necessarily leads
to a trivialization and reduction of attention. The images are less read and decoded than merely
scanned, i. e. covered in search of something striking or special.
This becomes especially clear when you consider the working conditions of most image edi-
tors, who investigate the mass of images they select through digital databases for the publicati-
ons they work for. Here, image editors take your selection of search terms that enter into these
databases. According to their input, they mostly get a variety of images of different providers
that appear on their screens. For the journalistic image selection image editors make, the first
step is therefore to get maximally 3 x 4 cm small photographs
depicted on the screen, in a later
step to click to enlarge them, and then subject them to a closer scrutiny. It is clear that in the first
step certain image-formal aspects and aesthetics, namely those relying on an easier readability
of images in small format, are rather selected as, for example,
images with a complex screen
layout. Not least herein lies the reason why many pictures focus on shock effects since they offer
the possibility to draw attention in the scanned image stream. In this respect, especially affective
values of the images come to the fore. The preferred terrain of photojournalism is therefore the
image affected with emotions. In this context, Susanne Holschbach speaks of a “style of the hu-
man”. In the following, I assume this to be the typing of an imagery setting on emotions because