Suffering Body: narrative tensions for a politics of the images in photojournalism

Abstract

The aims of this article is to identify the elements that make the photographic image a narrative space that operates cultural codes that encloses their repertoire in order to compose interactional ways that define the experience of seeing suffering. We assume that the suffering body brought by the journalistic photograph, in the images here analyzed, do not really implies exploring forms of submission of the look to compassion, but invites to search some indications of resistance, subjectivation and revelations that can evidence how people photographed find ways to difficult the elaboration of subtitles to their faces and bodies creating dissonances and dissensus between their “appearance” and the narrative register (visual and verbal) of its exposition.

Keywords

• Suffering
• Body
• Photojournalism
• Politics
• Narrative