PORTRAYAL OF SYRIAN CIVIL WAR AFFECTED MUSLIMS IN PHOTOGRAPHY: A SEMIOTIC STUDY

Abstract

Visual imagery is always constructed through various technologies, practices, and knowledge that are not the discovery of truth, but just the interpretation. War photographs are the cultural objects deployed alternatively to expose and recall, sanities or shock, plead and deliberate, and register the realities of war by criticizing the imagination of those realities. To justify this interpretation of these realities, one needs to have an explicit methodology. This present study aims at the semiotic analysis of war photography that tends to stand out as confessional and evasion visual war narrative.  The random sample for the study is based on the images from Syria. Total 5 images are analyzed qualitatively under Rose model (2001). Primarily, the production, image itself, and audience of the image are analyzed by several analytical tools of the selected war photographs. It is traced that how in broader systems of meaning, these photographs work. It is examined that signs in language correlate mainly with the pragmatics of the photographs; thus, the audience perceives them accordingly.