Twelfth International Conference on The Image

Abstract

During crises, such as the on-going Syrian war, witnessing practices are often strategically hindered with international journalists forced out of conflict zones (Burchell 2020), but what genres and practices of witnessing emerge amongst those who stay and what if they could tell their story again? This paper examines the AFP Correspondent blog using a practice-theory approach (Schatzki 2001; Couldry 2004; Burchell et al 2020) uniquely applied to photojournalism by engaging the relational networks of international news agencies, and emerging melange of genres through the networked spaces of photo-news production. Though the AFP Correspondent blog, photojournalists strive to make sense of their experiences of conflict, highlighting the manner in which institutional processes of news production pry the visual and the objective of traditional agency output from the embodied, relational, and temporal experiences of the photographer. This paper centres upon emerging genres of witnessing (Frosh 2006; Peters 2009) as they are influenced by and adjusting to the wider landscape digital networked media, both in the reliance on citizens turned agency photojournalists and in the embrace of the subjective retrospective accounts through the online blog (Matheson 2004; Zelizer 2007; Wahl-Jorgensen 2015). By applying Critical Discourse Analysis (Fairclough 1992, 1995) to AFP policy documents and 14 AFP Correspondent essays by regional editors and Syrian citizen-photojournalists, a framework has been developed to better understand how the changing conditions of photojournalism on-the-ground and of journalistic output online come together as new genres and practices of photojournalistic witnessing of global crises.