Iconic Images

Within hours of its publication online, the “pepper-spraying cop” image from the Occupy Wall Street movement at the University of California–Davis became an Internet meme.The outraged public manipulated key signifiers of the famous picture, creating hundreds of digital derivatives that offered new takes on what happened. With the use of iconographic tracking and visual rhetorical analysis, the study argues that Internet memes are more than silly jokes or social commentary.Through rhetorical transfigurations, they can deliver social justice and launch public shaming campaigns, serving as online instruments to respond to an off-line event.

This paper suggests that reference to phenomenal qualities is best understood as involving iconicity, that is, a passage from sign-vehicle to object that exploits a similarity between the two. This contrasts with a version of the ‘phenomenal concept strategy’ that takes indexicality to be central. However, since it is doubtful that phenomenal qualities are capable of causally interacting with anything, indexical reference seems inappropriate. While a theorist like David Papineau is independently coming to something akin to iconicity, I think some of the awkwardness that plagues his account would be remedied by transitioning to a more inclusive philosophy of signs.

This article begins by providing context for the iconic photograph ‘The Falling Man’, which shows a single figure falling from the World Trade Center on 11 September 2001. It describes how the initial extremely restricted but varied experience of seeing people falling from the Twin Towers gave way to a single image: a photograph by veteran Associated Press photographer Robert Drew which has become known as ‘The Falling Man’. This photograph has been the subject of consider- able debate, especially in relation to trauma, national identity and aesthetics. In what follows, this debate is used to describe how ‘The Falling Man’ photograph gives structure to two mainstream Hollywood films: Incredibly Loud and Extremely Close (Stephen Daldry, US, 2011) and The Walk (Robert Zemeckis, US, 2015). A particular focus will be how this photograph is placed to different ends within classically constructed narratives that seek some semblance of order and resolution and also made subject to the full animating resources of the moving image. This movement – from a photograph recording a fraction of a second to a conventional narrative of longer duration, and from still photograph to moving image – enables both films to seek different forms of redemption via what Thomas Stubblefield describes as ‘the cathartic power of the fall’.

Iconic images are those that rise to the forefront of our collective, visual public consciousness to become the defining, enduring image of an event: a naked Vietnamese girl screaming out in pain following a napalm attack, U.S. Marines raising the American flag at Iwo Jima, and a German dirigible engulfed in flames and falling to the ground. Iconic images have a discursive value that helps citizens navigate and understand the political and social contexts of complex events. Traditionally, news photographs became iconic largely through their prominent placement on the front pages of elite newspapers across the globe. But, undeniably, in the age of digital news, mobile phones/tablets, and social media, the media component has changed the equation for the formation of iconic imagery and collective visual consciousness. With the speed, ease of access, and abundance of information sources available in the current age, a volume of images can now represent a significant (or not so significant) event. This monograph traces the development of iconic image literature and then proposes a model termed the "influence-network model of the photojournalistic icon," which predicts how photographs of events become iconic (or not).

The author proposes post-imperial analysis as a new research agenda for the study of (post-)GDR literature and painting. The article models this kind of analysis with respect to works by the authors listed in the title, focusing on the representation/destruction of the Soviet tank as an object embodying imperial sovereignty. More specifically, the author explores a series of scopic scenarios that dramatize the confrontation with Soviet tanks, drawing on Carl Schmitt's 1950s concept of iconographic space for its political theory and tracing the genealogy of this iconographic object, its constitution as aesthetic object, in the work of Soviet artists. Reading the (textual and visual) demolition of the tank as post-imperial gesture, the article studies strategies that either destroy aesthetic conventions or explode the object through a process of de-scription.

Because of quick changes in technology and switching from local to a globalized world, countries and cities are compelled to compete for one another to become an attractive workplace, social and cultural traveller destination. This paper introduces a new iconic architectural project in Kuwait "Sheikh Jaber Al Ahmed Cultural Centre", which used Titanium for the first time in the Middle East as a building envelope. The paper deals with the material and how it was employed in the building to deliver a unique design. The project was required as a national demand to meet the needs of the citizens culturally and to change the visual image of Kuwait City as well. The work aims to tackle how successful the experiment is by Qualitative and Quantitative framework methods. Two well-documented topics: Titanium as a promising architectural material, and Sheikh Jaber Al Ahmed Cultural Centre design in Kuwait as a global iconic project have been discussed to cover the pros and cons of each, followed by an analysed questionnaire that measures the project role in enhancement of the visual image of Kuwait City In addition to the development of cultural life among Kuwait residents .The Conclusion and recommendations will be presented to support the impact of building iconic Titanium sculptural project to the city visual image.

Iconic photographs possess broad social and symbolic significance, are widely replicated over time and circulated across media platforms, and fuel public discussion. In an era of digital memes, they have become generative resources for memetic performances that not only can draw on these images’ historic authority but can also undermine it. Based on the analysis of the ‘Accidental Napalm’ memes, our research leads to a fourfold taxonomy, from memes that expand or expound the meaning of the original picture to those that narrow and potentially destroy its significance. Assessing Hariman and Lucaites’ contention that appropriations of iconic images enhance civic engagement and public culture, we argue that some memes may actually dissolve the original significance of iconic photographs and potentially degrade, rather than enhance, public culture.

This paper tries to elucidate Peirce's notoriously obscure definition of metaphor (CP 2.277) in the context of his general theory of signs. It is argued that Peirce defined metaphor not as a proposition, but as a genuinely original iconic (meta-)sign that represents a novel sign relation and, hence, novel thought. The adequacy of this approach is discussed against the background of rival theories of metaphor. This shows, inter alia, 1) that metaphors can and must be interpreted like ordinary signs (which in particular allows for paraphrases); 2) how they get conventional and how they can be revived; and 3) that they are intrinsically independent of linguistic levels (e.g., words) and media (e.g., natural language). Peirce's theory thus turns out to be a reasonable explanation of a central semiotic phenomenon and, hence, promises to serve as a powerful tool for modern literary and cultural studies.

This thesis focuses on linguistic and conceptual peculiarities of the human trafficking situation as seen in modern media discourse. The research has revealed
the cobweb iconic construal of the human trafficking conceptual model,
which emerges due to the focalization of actants’ semantic roles. The correlation between this model and the system of metaphoric projections, whose image-schema is compatible with the cobweb megametaphor, has been elucidated.
Within the discourse these metaphoric projections are manifested
through micrometaphors and other stylistic means, as well as through axiological
lexical units and stylistically neutral grammatical and syntactic constructions.
Empirical research has helped to discover the readers’ response to metaphoric projections verbally presented in media texts that refer to the human trafficking situation.

Iconic photographs possess broad social and symbolic significance, are widely replicated over time and circulated across media platforms, and fuel public discussion. In an era of digital memes, they have become generative resources for memetic performances that not only can draw on these images’ historic authority but can also undermine it. Based on the analysis of the ‘Accidental Napalm’ memes, our research leads to a fourfold taxonomy, from memes that expand or expound the meaning of the original picture to those that narrow and potentially destroy its significance. Assessing Hariman and Lucaites’ contention that appropriations of iconic images enhance civic engagement and public culture, we argue that some memes may actually dissolve the original significance of iconic photographs and potentially degrade, rather than enhance, public culture.

This interview was published in the Vol. 18 2014 Issue of The Arizona Journal of Hispanic Cultural Studies. In it I interview the featured artist for this issue: Hugo Cataldo Barudi, an artist and director working in Asunción, Paraguay. In this interview we talk about digital art, painting, drawing, his last feature film (Semana capital, 2010), his next feature film (La chiperita, 2015) and filmmaking in contemporary Paraguay.

"Iconic Power is a collection of original articles that explores social aspects of the phenomenon of icon. Having experienced the benefits and realized the limitations of so called "linguistic turn," sociology has recently acknowledged a need to further expand its horizons. "Visual sociology" is emerging as a separate field and prominent scholars announce the coming of "the pictorial turn." The methods and themes taken up in these studies respond to this shift in social scientific interest. Each contribution to this book carefully tests the analytic purchase and empirical implications of iconicity. If we can succeed in understanding the iconic, we should be able to know our culture much better.

As the Australian sociologist of art Eduardo de la Fuente pointed out, "Iconic Power" is "the strongest theoretical statement to yet come out of the 'strong program' in cultural sociology." He emphasized the importance of 'iconicity' as the concept that more than 'ritual' or even 'performance' promises to break free of economistic, linguistic, and other kinds of reductionisms that plague the cultural sciences. The British cultural sociologist David Inglis praised the book's wide empirical coverage. For these reasons, "Iconic Power" can serve as a guide on how to approach the tremendous social efficacy of the visual and other non-discursive symbols. "

Iconic photographs possess broad social and symbolic significance, are widely replicated over time and circulated across media platforms, and fuel public discussion. In an era of digital memes, they have become generative resources for memetic performances that not only can draw on these images’ historic authority but can also undermine it. Based on the analysis of the ‘Accidental Napalm’ memes, our research leads to a fourfold taxonomy, from memes that expand or expound the meaning of the original picture to those that narrow and potentially destroy its significance. Assessing Hariman and Lucaites’ contention that appropriations of iconic images enhance civic engagement and public culture, we argue that some memes may actually dissolve the original significance of iconic photographs and potentially degrade, rather than enhance, public culture.

The Westerbork film has become an iconic piece of archive footage. It was granted world document heritage by UNESCO in 2017 and has been a subject in the periphery of the international academic debate on the relationship between archival footage  and  historical  inquiry  since  Harun  Farockis’  Respite  (2007).  Despite  its status as one of the most important archive films of the Holocaust, there has been next to no critical research on the provenance of the material. In the course of my dissertation research, it has become clear that at least parts of the edition in circulation today– namely the subject of all written and filmic publications since the early 1990s – is not the original, but instead an altered, shortened form, most likely produced in a Dutch archive during the late 1980s with the intention to present the footage in ways attractive to potential buyers. This essay lays out the extent of these modifications to the original footage and explores their effects on subsequent essays and films. The implications of these findings for the ethics of appropriation and general approaches to archival footage in different contexts such as historiographical research and public commemoration of the genocide of the European Jews are explored in detail.

the 2011 World Press Photo: a study of a modern-day Hagar in Yemen through the prism of collective memory in islam abstract This project offers historical and visual rhetorical analyses of the 2011 World Press Photo, arguing the award-winning image 1 echoes one of the most central collective memories within Islam: that of Hagar, the mother of all Arabs. The article posits that the woman in the photo is the modern-day Hagar who exemplifies strength, courage and independence, much like her predecessor millennia ago. In that, the woman, as captured in the winning image, creates a countermemory to the dominant collective memory of a Muslim woman in Yemen, who has emerged over the years as dominated by men and in need of protection. The analysis puts the 2011 World Press Photo within the Islam-centric context of interpretation, suggesting that looking at it only through the Christian-centred perspective, as was done in the West, robs the image of its polysemic qualities.

The shocking image of three-year-old Alan Kurdi lying dead on a Turkish beach transformed the European migration discourse as it appeared on twenty million screens around the world in just 12 hours in September 2015. The initial postings soon went viral, with three million comments and 53,000 tweets per hour – a social media storm which galvanised world attention on the refugee crisis and alerted the global consciousness to the magnitude of the tragedy unfolding right before our eyes. The heart-wrenching picture of the infant's tiny, lifeless body, dressed up as the next European child on a beach holiday, triggered a very sensitive nerve in people of all ages all around the world, raising questions about the dimension of empathy when prompted to regard the silent drowning of others. In this paper I tackle the role of photography, media and iconic images in producing a compassionate, sympathetic response to the refugee crisis in the global readership by looking at Fritz Breithaupt's theory concerning the ability to feel empathy as consistent with the possibility to imagine a story for the afflicted. I also argue along with Susan Sontag (Regarding the Pain of Others) and Virginia Woolf (Three Guineas) that photography has an arresting effect on the onlooker because it occasions the necessary pause to think and take in " the pain of others. " This empathic glance provides us with the necessary respite from the violence of man. Since Woolf argues that war is a man's business, I will contend that the narrative Breithaupt urges us to imagine when we look at the refugee child in the picture involves an absent mother who fell victim to war and its aftermath, thus proposing a gendered reading of this iconic image.

Directly Displaying Pictures The earliest speculations about Communication with Extrater-restrial Intelligence (CETI) centered on contact with the in-habitants of other bodies of our solar system, either our moon or other planets. Nineteenth-century astronomical theories made ...

Resumen: El texto propone la lectura de una imagen compartida y reconocida como foto icónica, es decir, como parte de la memoria visual colectiva: un fotograma que muestra a la excandidata presidencial Íngrid Betancourt durante su secuestro. La autoría anónima de la foto, su circulación en la prensa, su carácter de documento y su simbolización en el debate público no impiden analizarla también por sus características estéticas o estético-políticas. Por el contrario, veremos cómo toda foto puede ayudarnos a entender los lazos entre forma y discurso. Para hacerlo, se analizará su valor de prueba fotográfica de supervivencia, su sintonía con la larga historia de las imágenes y su capacidad de visibilizar lugares indecibles del paisaje geográfico y político colombiano de la primera década del milenio.

Abstract: The text proposes the reading of a shared and recognizable image as an iconic photograph, namely as a part of the collective visual memory: a still that shows the ex-presidential candidate Ingrid Betancourt during her kidnaping. The anonymous authorship of the photograph, its circulation in the press, its character as a document and its symbolization in the public debate do not impede us from analyzing it as well for its aesthetic or aesthetic-political characteristics. On the contrary, we will see how any photograph can help us understand the links between form and discourse. We will analyze its value as photographic proof of life, its consonance with the long history of images and their capacity to raise awareness, in a literal sense to put in images and to make visible nameless places of the geographic and political Colombian landscape from the first decade of the millennium.

In the 1960s, fashion started to shift focus on the fluidity of identity. This impacted American magazines such as Vogue and Harper’s Bazaar which are the corpus of this study. In magazines of seemingly unlimited means and growing readership, feminine role- models multiplied and became strongly polarized in their photographs. Some of these figures have
been endlessly re- staged in fashion editorials from the 1960s onward (and even before that) – such as the working single girl, the femme fatale or the chic socialite – to whom was granted an enduring iconic quality. Vogue and Harper’s Bazaar represent a platform between fashion’s artistic temptation and the commercial necessities commanding their production. The emergence, repetition and dissemination of such iconic figures through their pages can thus be analysed as an avant- garde- inspired game on stereotypes, ironically detaching itself from the consumer culture that it was embracing – a stance derived from the Pop Art revolution.
The readers’ compulsive fascination for these images was in the process deeply stimulated.
Yet the new norms set by such iconic models proved anything but subversive. My purpose here is to question the making of these fashion iconic figures and to show that they inaugurated new, modern, programmatic narrative and visual discourses, in which the collaboratively constructed narrative ultimately failed to offer readers a space for negotiation.

This article reports an empirical study of the emotional power of media language in terms of its influence on shaping public opinion concerning human trafficking. The primary interest in this research lies in revealing whether media texts filled with stylistic devices substantially contribute to a change of readers' emotional states, and if so, to what extent. The statistical sleuth has been undertaken in order to test the media effect. The results have great value for the study of media discourse within the paradigm of cognitive linguistics.

There is a recent passion for the noun "icon" and especially its adjective "iconic". The paper is a reflection on a semantic evolution exemplary in its speed. The word "icon" originally applies to a religious painting of the Eastern Church. Today the term applies to any reality (object, person, organization, institution ...) which symbolizes values and which is recognized by a certain number of people.
In front of the proliferation of current usages, we chose to study two new emblematic uses: brand-icons and idol-icons. Holt (2004) advocates that cultural branding is significantly involved in the process of accession to the status of iconic brand which is in fact similar to a cultural icon, a symbol of identity values that consumers may adopt. The term "icon" now applies to famous characters of science, of show business or even of politics. The word "idol" is more appropriate, these characters often being the object of a veritable cult.
The three expressions (Image-icon, brand-icon and idol-icon) have played an emblematic role in the semantic evolution of the word “icon”. A comparative analysis of the respective features of the three selected signs using the word "icon” highlights not only the variety of the realities they express but also their aesthetics, ethics, utilization and conventional basis, etc. These three expressions have in common, however, their peircian symbolic character. Indeed, they represent a signified conventionally recognized by an audience.
The likely reasons for such an evolution are being considered, leaning mainly on Gombrich (1994) considerations on the semantic inflation process. The desire to draw attention to the speaker (in this case, the brands) stirs the production of semantic emphasis and an often inappropriate use of vocabulary. Gombrich puts this unbridled desire as the main cause of the "corruption of language." Another reason lies in the need for sacred and the social role (and even spiritual) brands play in a postmodern period (Marrone 2007).
In this process of quantitative expansion of meaning, we lost the figurative and plastic dimensions of the icon to focus exclusively on the activation of the intelligible dimension. An opportunity not exploited by brands so far.
The paper concludes with considerations on the possible use of the inverted perspective by brands in order to create a closer link with consumers.

Is there any difference between the widely discussed ‘pictorial turn’ and the emerging ‘iconic turn’? If so, does it matter? The answers to these questions are positive if we look at the problem from a cultural sociological point of view. It has been observed that the concept of the ‘iconic turn’, coined by a German philosopher Gottfried Boehm, may capture more effectively the sense of life attributed to visual objects than W.J.T. Mitchell’s famous ‘pictorial turn’. This article endorses this conjecture and provides a theoretical context for its justification. It thus contributes to the emerging debate about the paradigm shift in studies of visual culture.

""In his chapter “Iconspicuous Revolutions of 1989: Culture and Contingency in the Making of Political Icons,” Dominik Bartmański revisits the European icons of the euphoric year of 1989 and asks what constitutes a powerful iconic fact. Specifically, he explains why the fall of the Berlin Wall emerged as the icon of 1989 and has retained this symbolic status ever since.

The answer is not obvious. 1989 was full of epochal events and important figures busy making history. Especially the earlier, politically unprecedented changes in Hungary and Poland had opened up a revolutionary space in which such events like the fall of the wall became possible at all. And yet they have not attained the same lasting influence on the international collective imagination. To reconstruct this phenomenon is to tell a story about how the iconic can trump the political. By demonstrating what counts in public perception as “revolutionary,” “political signal,” and “beginning” and “end” of a social process, Bartmański shows the role that iconicity plays in constituting these key categories and thus in structuring our ability to notice, understand, and remember events. By "public perception" Bartmanski does not mean only the "lay audiences" but also the producers of the journalistic facts themselves. Indeed, all social groups are deeply enmeshed in and responsive to the background codings and symbolic imperatives of a given culture.  It is precisely the various aspects of iconic power that makes events amenable to wide appropriation and socially "resonant". It is their iconicity that turns them into “objective,” temporal markers of history.

Of course, the key question is: what constitutes "iconic power"? Is it purely arbitrary signification structure or something different? What accounts for the fact that some symbolic representations and performances stick and others don't?

To answer these questions the present paper offers an analytical framework that identifies several constituent elements of iconic power. It distinguishes (1) "iconic capital," i.e. the historical accretion of symbolic resources associated with a given entity, (2) "cultural congruity," i.e. the fit between a given entity's character and the genre of cultural performance it is supposed to represent, and (3) "remembrance patterns," i.e. commemorative practices.

Each element is a bundle of material forms and affordances ("surface") and discursive content ("depth"). Only when all the elements coalesce in a felicitous way can an iconic effect emerge. Bartmanski observes that although open-ended and contingent, this iconic process is not arbitrary but instead rooted in the specific meanings structures that make certain social outcomes more plausible than others. 

Performing the cultural reconstruction of 1989 along those lines provides a "thick" elaboration of two observations that function as epigrams for the present paper.

The first is theoretical and was made by Roland Barthes in his essay "Rhetoric of the Image": "In every society various techniques are developed intended to fix the floating chain of signifieds in such a way as to counter the terror of uncertain signs."

The second was made by an anthropologist Daphne Berdahl who insisted that "among other things, the revolutions of 1989 were about visibility - making visible 'the people'."

Just like other chapters in this book, the present sociological interpretation of political symbols inevitably takes us beyond the surface of news pictures to the surfaces and depths of events, to singular bodies and powerful crowds, sights and sites, built structures, and symbolically constructed narratives. It is the new prism of iconicity through which the effects of shocking and euphoric events that seem deceptively simple and well known can be explained in full. """

In a context of globally networked social media, “viral” instances of collective affect and attention that coalesce around images of distant suffering merit consideration as significant moments of cosmopolitan expression. The case of Omran Daqneesh, the young Syrian “boy in the ambulance” whose photograph went viral in 2016, provides an instructive case study. Beginning with a quantitative assessment of the story’s diffusion and then tracing the trajectory of its viral diffusion and the affective response it produced as the image peaked and then subsided in public attention, analysis of the case illustrates how virality can articulate rhetorical cosmopolitanism, but also demon- strates the limits for political cosmopolitanism in producing sustained action.

Through several key case studies of terrorism in its relationship to the media, this research examines the essence of an icon today in a hyperworld of digital icons and their iconic events. As we experience these events exponentially, systemically in — and through — new media and news media, we are forced to examine links and connections between the traditional understanding and historical roots of the icon, iconography, and iconology, and new digital iconics acting with agency in cybersemiotics, where the static expectation of an image today is no longer defensible.

Because of exponential audience receptivity — through ubiquitous global media ownership and promulgation — the image or icon becomes an iconic: a relatively omnipotent, highly revered structural phenomenon of exponential potential. I define an iconic as an instantiation, a media moment in the global consciousness that rises to new stature due to its placement in that consciousness through a gestalt of its visual rhetorics in sync with tenets of digitality. I illustrate how the effects of this metamorphosis are far-reaching and powerful, and so far, they have been best realized in mediated messagings associated with rhetorics of terrorism, especially as terrorism archives in cyberspace through the permanence of iconics as a viral phenomenon.

This research also suggests that as an extension of the symbiotic relationship between terrorism and the media, iconics contribute to the proposition that the cyber network is borderline autopoietic, and they act with agency within the virtual. Their permanent presence can be understood to constitute an armory of available weaponry that the system or anyone connected to it can wield at will, should there be access and privilege. Consequently, as cyberspace becomes the next battleground for human values and objectives, the cyber network with its steady iconic creation machinations, omniscience, and ubiquity render new ethical and technological challenges.