Paper Title
Controversial Images: An Introduction
Keywords
- controversial images
- media controversy
- visual culture
- media effects
- public discourse
- celebrity culture
- privacy
- representation
- media ethics
- press intrusion
- war porn
- violence
- morality
- sexuality
- political imagery
- religious imagery
- abu ghraib
- diana princess of wales
- public vs private
- taboo
- media saturation
- media spectacle
- objectification
- cultural debate
- media and trauma
- censorship
- voyeurism
- eroticization
- kink
- fantasy
- pornographic imagery
- media sensationalism
Article Type
Research Article
Journal
Research Impact Tools
Publication Info
Volume: 7 | Issue: 1 | Pages: 1-6
Published On
January, 2009
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Abstract
Controversies are socially significant events which become the object of intense cultural fascination. They often generate extreme and heated public and sometimes political dispute. Attention may be focused on the motivation, significance, or impact of a particular event and the controversy may vary in type, size, and outcome. Controversies often become the focus of media attention and they are a driving force for many media. They often literally make news. Media interest in controversies is not new, as illustrated by the media coverage following Orson Welles' CBS radio broadcast of "The War of the Worlds" in 1938 (Cantril, 1940; Hand, 2005). But in contemporary societies, controversial images are increasingly the focus of public fascination, marking key areas of dispute and acting as reference points for social, cultural, and political arguments. Two very different examples illustrate the range of issues that have been raised by controversial images. Media reports of the death of Diana, Princess of Wales in 1997, in a car chase to avoid paparazzi, focused on the tragedy in terms of the way it illuminated the relationship between the public, the media, and celebrity figures, press intrusion, and the rights of public figures to privacy. It became "received wisdom" that Diana was "driven to her death by the pub- lic's fascination with her image" (Lumby, 1997, p. 105). The revelation of prisoner abuse and torture at Abu Ghraib prison in Iraq in 2004 provoked condemnation from around the world of the US military's violation of the Geneva Convention. It also sparked debate about the increas- ing prevalence of atrocity images and of what Baudrillard termed "war porn" (2004). Controversies around images erupt in all forms of media; in joumalism, film and television, in advertising, photography, music video, pomography, the arts, games, cartoons, and increas- ingly, online. The images themselves are also increasingly becoming the signs and symbols of major contemporary concems - often centered on sex and sexuality, political and religious conflict, violence and morality, and the boundaries between the public and private, between adults and children, and between ideals and taboos. Images generate controversies for different and sometimes contradictory reasons - because they reveal something that has been covered up or because they make visible what should not be seen. In other instances it is not the question of exposure but context which causes controversy - where images are placed or who is allowed to see them. Academic discussions about the negative "effects" of some media images or their ability to objectify some groups of people, robbing them of their humanity, have passed into common language as sources of concem. And sometimes it is the sheer volume of images in our media-saturated societies which generates criticism; as joumalists and media students never tire of saying, we are "bombarded with images."
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