How do Black Lives Matter? On the visual construction of protest in German-language daily newspapers and on Instagram

Abstract

The violent death of George Floyd at the end of May 2020 triggered a global protest movement: Starting in the US, numerous rallies, demonstrations, and vigils took place around the world, taking a stand against racism and police violence. This protest was and is subject to different visual representations and mediated expressions, which have an important share in the production of meaning around the protest actions. Based on a picture type analysis of the (image) coverage of the protests in Austrian, German and Swiss newspapers as well as on visual expressions on Instagram in the context of demonstrations in German-speaking cities, the article deals with visual constructions of protest and discusses their meaning against the background of social, media, and political contexts. Different dominant image types emerge in each case: In media coverage, for example, images of demonstrators as a mass are predominant, which make the individual participants imperceptible. On Instagram, there are mainly internal perspectives of the demonstrations through individual self-dramatizations of the demonstrators. It also becomes clear that journalistic images show protests with a high news value, especially with regard to tense conflict situations in the US context, while on Instagram the communalization via group images and thus the staging and mobilization of the participants comes to the fore.

Keywords

• social media
• visual communication
• cultural studies
• social movements
• press photography
• photojournalism
• image communication
• visual analysis