Visual Meanings and Vectors of Immersion: plastic regimes of the beholder’ s entailment in the visual forms of photojournalism

Abstract

We intend to examine some aspects of visual discursivity in photojournalism and their relations to the beholders’s instancy active role. Once considered the passional and sensorial frameworks of visual meaning from these images, the article acknowledges the consolidation of a model for the visual arrest of actions in photojournalism which is based on the principle of their subjects’ actualization, plastically manifested in the instant’s spatialization, as a central element of the processes of implicating the audience’s previous visual experiences. In such aesthetic dimension of visual testimony, we also invoke the ethos of images of suffering – and the principle of reciprocity that enables their semantical features – along with the dedramatization of the instant in contemporary photojournalism.