Picturing the News: Gender representation in newspaper photography

by mgunther

This work has been commented by 1 editor(s). Read the comments

Title

Picturing the News: Gender representation in newspaper photography

Concept author(s)

Michelle Gunther

Concept author year(s) of birth

1976

Concept author(s) Country

Australia

Friendly Competition

Radical intimacies: dialogue in our times (2014)

Competition category

Critical writing

Competition field

academic

Competition subfield

student

Subfield description

Griffith University Queensland College of Fine Art Bachelor of Fine Art

Check out the Radical intimacies: dialogue in our times 2014 outlines of Memefest Friendly competition.

About work

Abstract

Picturing the News: The Australian 1973-2013 (2014) is a strategic artistic intervention I have created to draw attention to the continued absence of news media representations of women and the frequently poor quality of women’s media representations that do appear. The proposal is for the creation of a website that will allow the user to explore, arrange and interact with mass media imagery across time in order to create critical dialogue on the issue of gender representations in Australian news media. The project will use the artistic devices of appropriation and demystification to critique the media and its practises, as represented by The Australian newspaper’s images. This paper will argue that Picturing the News: The Australian 1973-2013 is a very effective project designed to clearly communicate the underrepresentation and misrepresentation of women in Australian news imagery to a potential large audience in an engaging and interactive way. First it will examine the process of photographic communications to articulate why news photography is such a powerful communicator of ideology; secondly it will discuss the contemporary Australian news media in the context of feminist media critiques of representation, and finally it will examine how the successful artistic interventions of both Sarah Charlesworth and the Guerilla Girls relate to, and inform, my own work on gender representation.

Keywords

Gender representation newspapers photojournalism

Editors Comments

Daniel Marcus

I’m not sure how much Ms. Gunther’s work has to do with this year’s Memefest theme, but it is certainly a worthwhile project, in keeping with several studies made in a previous generation of media critiques – look at Judith Williamson’s Decoding Advertisements and Erving Goffman’s Gender Advertisements in particular. I am wondering how this project could be expanded, to allow for new contributors and an expanded realm of analysis, particularly with the new tools of digital media available. With more texts under review, the analysis can attain greater theoretical heft and complexity. Opening the site to other analysts could allow for a variety of studies to move into dialogue with each other (see, there’s the theme!), for larger and more nuanced patterns to emerge, perhaps across different forms of journalism and media, including advertisements. Again, this sort of work was done in the 1980s, and sometimes there is a reluctance in the humanities to follow through with more contemporary studies along the same lines. But seeing more contemporary examples, perhaps mixed with older ones as this study does, both can show the power of traditional patterns of representation, and follow changes that have occurred, both in the context of changing gender relations. You might also consider expanding beyond the question of gender to include studies that focus on race, age, class, and other factors. Bringing old and new studies into dialogue with each other, and inviting other analysts into the discussion in a shared space, could transform this into a major project.

Ms. Gunther might also have something to say to Mr. Bustamante and his argument about the relative freedom of images and image contemplation in the current era. Mr. Bustamante is not naïve about the power of images, but I’d be interested in hearing them discuss their respective projects together.

--Daniel Marcus

Comments