Abstract
Frequently when I’m in a rideshare vehicle in Australia, the driver asks the seemingly simple question: “Where are you from?” The question is sparked by just a few words of my own; through them, I out myself as being born overseas. The driver’s question could be motivated by habit, an innocent desire to pass the time, a curiosity about where the sometimes-exotic “other” hails from, or could subtly infer a lack of belonging.
Place, as I’ve come to learn from working and living in different hemispheres and in both urban and regional areas, matters a great deal to many people. It informs much of our perspectives, worldviews, and values. So does identifying who “belongs” in a place and who respects or transgresses on a real or imagined boundary, whether physical, cultural, or social. Sometimes this evaluation happens by evaluating written language or speech. At other times, it happens through analyzing visual phenomena, such as how someone dresses, who they accompany, or where they position themselves in a space.
My own worldview has expanded and shifted massively during the 6 years I’ve spent working in Australia. As but one example, the way I wrote my scholarship and referred to place in it (or ignored it as taken-for-granted knowledge) was a product of my upbringing in the States and my education there. Since coming to Australia in 2018, I’ve developed a greater appreciation for space, the peoples who occupy it or have done so historically, and how these histories and realities often are in tension with one another. This includes how mediated representations of these histories and realities are shown to various publics through the news media, which is the topic of Alex Scott’s Visions of Migration monograph.
Scott, a talented former photojournalist and photo editor, begins his monograph by acknowledging that “migration is a complex topic.” I fully agree. My own journey to dual citizenship has had its challenges but I readily acknowledge it was smoother, safer, and less public than many others’ migration journeys. Growing up in the ‘90s in the suburbs of Denver, Colorado, I witnessed firsthand some of the migration-related complexities Scott writes about. The Hispanic population of my home state tripled from some 400,000 people in 1990 to more than 1.2 million in 2020. Today, one in five Coloradans is Hispanic; this ratio increases to one in three around the Denver area. Growing up, I watched as signage became more multilingual and suburbs changed to accommodate this growing proportion of the population. I observed my family’s reaction as my sister began dating and eventually married someone who was a recent migrant from Mexico and who at the time spoke very little English. As a volunteer in a dual Spanish–English-language school, I observed the dynamics between more and less established migrants. These experiences allowed me glimpses into how friends and family navigated identities that were sometimes transitional, contested, and in tension. I also observed friends and family sometimes working to bridge gaps between the English- and Spanish-speaking populations, whereas others were content to let the gaps widen.
Scott focuses on visual news coverage of migrants emigrating north from Mexico in the 2015 to 2021 period. I couldn’t help think, however, about the much longer history of migration in the country and how much of the current population’s ancestors emigrated from Europe in the 1600s—a point Scott acknowledges roughly one third of the way through the monograph. The irony of a country largely composed of migrants failing to accept new(er) migrants is troubling. It also echoes the situation in Australia, where European peoples colonized the country in the late 1700s and have, since, become famously anti-immigrant (while also having a rocky relationship with the Aboriginal peoples who have called Australia home for some 60,000 years).
Scott sets himself a challenge by focusing on the “contingent and malleable” nature of the United States–Mexico border. It is here that rights, laws, and news routines are protean and subject to the whims of those who occupy the space at a particular time. Attempting to analyze the nature of these dynamic environments and those who traverse them is a daunting undertaking and one that Scott thoughtfully advances through an analysis of news images produced by three leading wire services and observations of and interviews with photojournalists to contextualize the on-the-ground realities that influence which news images are made and how. I should note at the outset that I would have preferred to read about the nuances and contextual factors gleaned through the observations and interviews first and then be able to interpret and appreciate the content analysis findings. I will return to this point later.
Reading Scott’s smartly written monograph raises three points for me that I wish to discuss: (a) what is news and who is consuming it? (b) who is making it? and (c) how can we as scholars best analyze its visual form?
What Is News and Who Is Consuming It?
I certainly support Scott’s argument that our understandings of “human migration are inextricably tied to news.” But I wonder what the concept of “news” means more concretely to different people in an increasingly fragmented (and polarized) media landscape. I think back to how, for a time, my dad subscribed to The Denver Post, until it became too expensive. He also got his news from (free) talk radio, including conservative host Rush Limbaugh. We didn’t have a TV in the house growing up (and my dad doesn’t have one to this day). This, paired with the canceled subscription to The Post, contributed to my light and sporadic consumption of news until my college years. Fast forward a decade and a half later and I, like the majority of most age cohorts, now get my news online. I tend to use news apps but an increasing number of people report getting news from social media platforms, which include a dizzying array of actors and information sources of varying levels of credibility. Of course, some people ignore the news entirely for various reasons, which is the topic of Toff, Palmer, and Kleis Nielsen’s much-acclaimed 2023 book, Avoiding the News. All this to say I would have appreciated a deeper discussion of “news” and how migration sentiment tends to be covered in it by platform or media. This would allow Scott to contextualize his findings within the broader media landscape and help the reader understand which sorts of audiences are seeing the news images he’s writing about—and critically, also, those who are not.
Who Is Making the News?
News is made by a wide variety of people occupying various roles across many different media. It is made, of course, not only by staff and freelancers but also by ordinary individuals who send in materials directly or who post content to social media that journalists then integrate into their reporting. Scott draws in his monograph on news photographs published by three major wire services. Despite being associated with the objective to “comfort the afflicted and afflict the comfortable,” much of mainstream news media is known for reproducing and defending the status quo, as Scott himself acknowledges. With this in mind and given Scott’s admirable inclusion of feminist media studies and (often-critically oriented) Latin American studies literature, I wonder how the analysis would change if an alternative or activist news media outlet had been included in the sample. Another opportunity for more sample heterogeneity existed when Scott supplemented his content analysis findings with interviews with staff or freelance journalists. But the organizations he mentions his interviewees worked for—Reuters, the AP, Getty, The New York Times, and The Washington Post—represent only elite and large media organizations. Comparing how local news outlets covered migration in contrast to national or international outlets, Spanish-language outlets in contrast to English-language ones, or alternative news outlets to mainstream ones would seem to provide a more interesting comparison and better suit the literature the study cites.
How Can We as Scholars Best Analyze Visual News?
I appreciated Scott’s multimethod approach, which can lead to more nuanced, comprehensive understandings of the phenomenon under study than is possible with a single method. If all we got was the content analysis, we would be left with many questions about journalistic practice and how decisions on the ground and in newsrooms influenced the vision we eventually saw published by the news media. Likewise, if we were only treated to insights from the observations and interviews, we would have a myopic view of the day-to-day dynamics of mediated migration and would lack an appreciation for its broader contours. Scott’s monograph raises two important aspects—sampling and theoretical lenses—that deserve further discussion and that I’ll attend to in that order.
Sampling is such an important decision in empirical work. Deciding what and how much to examine, and from which perspective or perspectives, has the potential to massively affect the end results. A simple example of this is viewing a piece of art in a gallery. If one positions oneself close enough to just inspect a part of the whole, the overall experience and interpretation can be quite different than if one positions themselves far back enough to take in the entire artwork or back farther, still, to examine the artwork in comparison to others in the gallery. Sometimes, the ideal is to adopt a census approach and examine all the available data. Other times, we might not have the time or resources to do this, so instead we extrapolate findings from a smaller portion of the data to estimate larger trends. Scott chose to use a sampling approach and focuses only on migration happening near the U.S.–Mexico border. Some of Scott’s variables, such as whether the scene represented “settlement” or “post-settlement,” seemed to be affected by this choice. Adopting a sampling approach is fine if the researcher is transparent about this and doesn’t overstate their findings but an explicit discussion of why the sampling decisions were made in the way they were is helpful, including to future scholars who engage with and build on others’ work. Were particular sampling decisions made because of feasibility concerns? A theoretical gap that the sample tries to address? Some other reason?
Returning to my earlier artwork in a gallery example, positioning and perspective matter but so, too, do the conceptual or theoretical lenses one brings to the viewing and meaning-making experience. Scott’s conceptual lens, 1 visual social semiotics, highlights how viewers infer meaning based on the way news images, in this case, are made. For example, someone being shown as looking at or away from the camera or being shown from above or below the viewer’s perspective has different meanings within the lens of visual social semiotics. This lens can work very well in advertising or design contexts when every aspect can be manipulated and posed for a particular purpose and to evoke a particular feeling or mood. Within photojournalism, though, the photographer doesn’t control everything to at all the same degree as a commercial photographer in a studio might. For example, rather than adopt a low-angle perspective to show someone as symbolically more powerful, it could be this particular vantage point was adopted to clear up an otherwise distracting and messy background or that the photographer had access limitations imposed on them and was forced to photograph from a particular angle.
In the case of “social separation” (whether objects or people were in between the photographers and who or what they photographed), this could be a conscious choice to visually show the person or object represented as “one of them” or “one of us,” as Scott infers, or it could also be motivated by aesthetics and a desire to incorporate depth and layering into what would otherwise would be a flat and basic composition. Likewise, in inferring that not looking at the camera and not being named in the caption evidences processes of othering, it is necessary to also ask whether the photographer had the opportunity to ask the subject(s) for their names, if language barriers existed that could have affected the possibility of a conversation, and if the relevant circumstances might affect the willingness of the subjects to be named even if time and language abilities enabled a conversation to take place? Scott later reveals more than halfway through his monograph (and again in the discussion) that this was sometimes the case. For example, one photojournalist interviewed said they were allowed in a detention center under the provision they couldn’t photograph any of the detainees’ faces or speak with them. Many of the questions the content analysis raised were later addressed by the results from the observation or interviews. For this reason, I wonder again if the results from Scott’s interviews could have come first and been followed by the results from the content analysis or if the results from the analysis could have been more tightly connected with those of the interviews (but he deserves praise for integrating images into the interviews a la the photo elicitation approach and for achieving richer interview data as a result).
The Importance of Time in Trying to Uncover “Truth”
Overall, Scott’s monograph engages with the long-standing tension between the constructed nature of (news) photographs, on one hand, and the ambition of their creators to show “accurate” images to their news audiences, on the other hand. In doing so, it is helpful to remember that accuracy, like, truth, is no simple binary. It is often a confusing mix of elements and competing priorities that make something “more or less accurate” or “more or less truthful” than another case. An ambition to show “truth” also underscores the time required to gain access and source trust that can result in “productive, comprehensive, fair, or ‘truthful’ representation.” This is a topic I’ve explored most fully in my 2018 study in Visual Communication Quarterly (“The Evolution of Story: How Time and Modality Affect Visual and Verbal Narratives”). Sadly, investment in longform visual journalism that affords this time seems to be an ever-increasing luxury in today’s spartan news production environments. Scott’s multimethod approach is needed to work toward a closer understanding of the visual (news) representation of migrants at the border. And I found refreshing his focus on access, embodiment, and camera reactivity, and on how these factors can drastically affect the vision that’s possible for journalists to capture and share with audiences.