Abstract

OLAYA GUALTEROS, Dixon Vladimir. Pictures of Victims of the Armed Conflict in Semana: Politics, Cultural Meanings, and Visibility. Palabra Clave [online]. 2020, vol.23, n.1, e2316. ISSN 0122-8285.  https://doi.org/10.5294/pacla.2020.23.1.6.

This article discusses how victims were made visible by some publications of the magazine Semana. It examines how images, in correlation with journalistic texts, contribute to building a visual regime that contains and reinforces the notion of victim identifiable in Law 975 of July 25, 2005 and Law 1448 of June 10, 2011. It is suggested that such images address viewers from a symbolic-sensitive perspective, thus becoming formative devices to understand and narrate the Colombian conflict. For this purpose, some of the themes and discourses on victims that circulated between 2010-2014 are analyzed. The morphological components of images are studied in relation to their accompanying articles, and their relationships with the cultural meanings of the time are identified. It is concluded that pictures of victims place a high value on sensitivity as incentive for the significance of politics, war and humanity, but also create visibilities that speak of horror and are immobilizing. Articles and photographs spotlight victims in a way that helps to establish static relationships and suspended identities, while putting events in a dangerous presentism that appeals to spectators to reconsider and construct certain ideological meanings.

Keywords : Photography; political violence; war victim; victim; politics; subjectivity; Colombia.

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