Anadolu university journal of art & design cilt / volume sayi / number aralik / december 2016 issn: 2146-7692

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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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45
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 

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