engleski

Picture a life behind the razor wire: The characteristics of visual discourse on migrations

The interdisciplinary nature of discourse analysis opens the possibility of a deeper look into the visual domain as a part of general discourse on a topic. Media discourse is an example of a discourse routinely supplemented by visual content, aimed at framing and punctuating the content of written text. As text is open to an analysis of its language and context, so it is possible to examine the visual content through the mechanisms of visual grammar, as conceived by Kress and van Leeuwen (2006). Whereas the grammar of language describes the ways words are combined into sentences and texts, visual grammar describes the manner that particular visual elements (people, places, objects) are combined into particular statements. The paper utilizes Kress' and Leuwen's basic devices and concepts of visual image analysis (the ‘zone’ in which an element occurs (left/right, bottom/top, centre/margin) ; the ‘salience’ bestowed on it (via foregrounding/ backgrounding, relative size, colour, etc.) ; and ‘framing’ devices such as vectors between participants) to illustrate the characteristics of visual design in the general context of discourse on migrations on the corpus of texts and photographs from columns and commentary sections in four Croatian daily newspapers (Jutarnji list, Večernji list, Slobodna Dalmacija, Glas Slavonije). The corpus spans a one-year period (June 1 2015-June 1 2016), marked by intensive migration processes, heavily covered in the media. The paper uses examples from the corpus, with special emphasis on so-called "iconic photographs" to illustrate the representative, recurring visual motifs (e.g. barbed wire, train (track), processions of people, children's faces), their interaction with the text and ways of representing subjects in photos. The examples, and their analysis, are juxtaposed to those suggested by previous research into visual metonymy (Vezovnik and Šarić 2020) and contemporary approaches to multimodal metaphor (Forceville and Urios-Aparisi 2009). Particular emphasis placed on antithesis, as a stylistic figure also realized as a visual device and argued to be commonly featured in the discourse on migration, whereby it is suggested that visual antithesis occasionally serves to further emphasize its textual correspondent.

migration, visual discourse, antithesis

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