Picturing the past
The Berlin Wall at 25
Bibliographic Data
| ID | 12898567 |
|---|---|
| Authors | Rachel Somerstein (SUNY New Paltz, corresponding author) |
| Year | 2017 |
| Volume | 79 |
| Issue | 8 |
| Pages | 701-721 |
| Publication date | 2017-05-18 |
| Peer Reviewed | Yes |
| Open Access | Yes |
| Type | ARTICLE |
| Venue | International Communication Gazette (JOURNAL) |
| Journal identifiers | ISSN: 1748-0485 • E-ISSN: 1748-0493 |
| Publisher | SAGE Publishing (PUBLISHER • US) |
| DOI | 10.1177/1748048517707388 |
| OpenAlex | W2614322414 |
| Language | EN |
| Citations received | 4 |
| References cited | 29 |
Although the mass media is an important tool that audiences rely on to learn about the past, the relationship among journalism, history, and memory is still underdeveloped; visual collective memory, like visual studies in other subfields, has received even less attention than written and textual representations of collective memory. To address that gap, this article uses a qualitative content analysis to assess how 15 newspapers commemorated the 25th anniversary of the Berlin Wall’s opening through photographs. Newspapers from countries that were capitalist and communist in 1989 are compared to identify the ways that different cultures ‘remember’ the same past. Five genres of images emerged: iconic photographs, memorials, metonymic and mythological portraits, metonymic relics, and images of resistance, though these genres were framed differently depending on a country’s political system in 1989. In comparing this cross-cultural collective memory, this study looks at what these visual commemorations reveal about cross-cultural anniversary practices, an area of memory studies that has received little attention
Art · Collective memory · Communism · Cultural memory · Journalism · Linguistics · Literature · Media studies · Metaphor · Metonymy · Mythology · Newspaper · Political science · Politics · Resistance (ecology · Sociology · Visual arts · Visual culture · Anthropology · Cultural Studies · History · Law · Memory, Trauma, and Commemoration · Rhetoric and Communication Studies · Visual Culture and Art Theory
Between Archive and Participation
Systemic Determinants of International News Coverage
Dresden, a Camera Accuses’
The visibility of disaster deaths in news images
A Matter of Culture
Picturing the Iraq War
Of Photographs and Flags
The Berlin Wall from a visual perspective
Counterrevolutionary Icons
Putting Memory in Its Place
Diplomatic Signaling in the Television Age
Media attention for climate change around the world
East Germans and the Berlin Wall
Common Belief and the Cultural Curriculum
Same events, two stories
Remembering Tiananmen and the Berlin Wall
Emerging Alternatives or Traditional News Gates
Newspapers commemorate 11 September
The restless searchlight
The opening of the Berlin wall on 9 November 1989, and East-West television cooperation
Anniversary Journalism, Collective Memory, and the Cultural Authority to Tell the Story of the American Past
Framing
Behold the Corpse
Forgetting the Last Big War
The Berlin Wall and its Resurrection as a Site of Memory
| Unique citing works | 4 |
|---|---|
| Citations per year | 0,57 |
| Citation span | 2019 - 2025 (7) |
| Citation velocity | recent |
| Highly cited | No |
| Citation types | Neutral: 4 |