Book review: Helen Caple,Photojournalism: A Social Semiotic Approach

News reporting in the present digital age is generally multimodal, meaning that words and images typically work together in the process of meaning-making. Compared with many seminal works in news language (Bednarek, 2006; Bell, 1991; Conboy, 2010; Van Dijk, 1988), the analysis of news photographs has remained relatively underdeveloped, despite the fact that there has been a growing interest in multimodal discourse analysis. Photojournalism: A Social Semiotic Approach fully explores images and text-image relations in the news story context from a systemic functional linguistic (SFL)-inspired social semiotic perspective, thus covering both intrasemiotic and intersemiotic meanings. In this richly illustrated book, Helen Caple, its author, perfectly integrates her experience as a professional photographer with her expertise as a researcher in news discourse.

In the first of eight chapters, Caple reviews previous work on photojournalism and introduces her SFL-based approach. The reasons why SFL is particularly appropriate for the analysis of multisemiotic texts, as she emphasizes, can be attributed to its four orientations: the inclusion of the meaning-making potential of other semiotic resources apart from language, the omnipresence of context in discourse analysis, the availability of a metafunctional approach to all instances of communication, and the application of system networks to illustrate the relations between different features of a semiotic resource. A detailed description of the author’s data collection is also provided at the end of this chapter.

Chapter 2 focuses on the construal of news values in press photographs. News values, as ‘a threshold which an event has to cross before it will be registered as news’ (p. 23), are of great significance in media studies, and embrace such attributes concerning news events or news actors as negativity, timeliness, proximity, prominence, consonance, impact, novelty, superlativeness, personalization and aesthetics. Caple, however, takes a more discursive view of news values developed in Bednarek and Caple (2012), arguing that news values are not inherent in events, but are established by language and image in use. She further suggests that news values in images should be based on two general aspects: the contextualization of the image participants in the image frame, and technical considerations such as shutter speed, angle, focal length, etc. News values in press photographs are then elaborated on using the following nine dimensions: evaluative elements, references to emotion, intensification, comparison, negative elements, references to time and place, role attributes, references to individuals, and aesthetic elements.

The next chapter takes a metafunctional approach to the analysis of press photographs by exploring the representational, interactional and compositional meanings of images in the INNSC (image-nuclear news story corpus, with 1000 images). A representational analysis indicates that most of these news images fall into the process types of agentive, non-projective and action, with people as the chief participant situated in an easily recognizable circumstance. Kress and Van Leeuwen’s (2006) system network for interaction and Martin’s (2001) notion of facial affect are employed in the interpretation of interactive meanings. Although there is some positive affectual engagement, the interactive configurations of little direct eye-contact, little involvement, and the greater social distance established between the viewer and the represented participants suggest that the viewer is generally encouraged to contemplate these images. Compositional meanings can be analyzed along Kress and Van Leeuwen’s (2006) three simultaneous systems: salience, framing and information value. Caple, however, maintains that the system of information value could not be usefully implemented in the analysis of news images, even though it appears to work particularly well in advertising or magazine images.

Chapter 4, therefore, offers the balance network, an alternative approach to the analysis of composition in news images. Compositional configurations in this network consist of features that are either isolating or iterating and either endocentrically or exocentrically balanced. The isolating pattern makes one element or one group of elements the focus of the image frame, while the iterating pattern shows more or less stable relations between several elements in the image. Both can be subclassified into different types. For example, the isolating choice can be divided into centered and axial, with the former putting one element in the center of the image frame and the latter forming a dynamic and unequal relationship between elements along the diagonal axis. Caple’s compositional analysis of images in the INNSC demonstrates that two-thirds of these news images are within the isolating category, in which there is an almost even split between centered and axial. In addition, only 10 out of 1000 images are distinguished as being exocentrically balanced. While acknowledging that an evenly balanced image normally lends itself to being valued as aesthetically pleasing, Caple particularly stresses that some more dynamic images such as those in the category of axial or exocentric may give rise to more aesthetic appeal, for they create visual stimulation and encourage readers to actively engage in decoding images.

The next three chapters discuss text–image relations in three different types of news discourse. Chapter 5 concentrates on the image-nuclear news story, where the image takes on a central role in storytelling. The nucleus^{^}satellite pattern of hard news reporting can also be found in this specific type of news genre, in which the heading, the image and usually a minor clause at the beginning of the caption constitute the nucleus, while the remainder of the caption forms the satellite and can ‘explain, contextualise and appraise a textually dominant “nucleus”’ (p. 124). Caple labels the minor clause the ‘prosodic tail’ since this initial phase of the caption still carries the interpersonal meaning radiating from the heading and the image. The rest of the caption, however, being more informationally oriented, is characterized by experiential orientation and contextual extension. The former functions to specify the image in the form of participants, processes and circumstances, thus establishing componential cohesion between verbal and visual text, while the latter is chiefly used for the construal of news value. Caple further suggests that sometimes there might be an ‘evaluative clash’ between the somewhat playful stance encoded in the nucleus of an image and the more serious retelling of news in the satellite (caption).

Chapter 6 is concerned with other types of print news texts, where images work as satellites in their functional structures. Caple usefully extends Halliday and Hasan’s (1985) notion of cohesion to the analysis of text–image relations in news discourse, suggesting that co-reference, co-classification and co-extension could also be present in them, which can be realized by ideational features such as participant identification, activity, circumstance and attributes. However, the news process and the establishment of newsworthiness may result in fewer cohesive ties between words and images in news texts. The author, in particular, argues that it is important to take into account not just the number of ties, but also the types of cohesive ties. Three kinds of intersemiotic relations are proposed for news discourse: intersemiotic repetition, intersemiotic expansion and intersemiotic deviation, which are further examined in three news reports of the same event employing the same main photograph, with specific reference to the construal of news value. The possible influence of spatial configurations on text–image relations in news discourse is also considered in this chapter.

Chapter 7 shifts to the analysis of intrasemiotic relations in online news galleries, where sequences of images are used to tell a story. By investigating both cohesive chains and conjunctive relations in three event-based online news galleries, Caple finds that only one of them features some form of visual rhetorical structure and the sequencing of its images corresponds closely to the sequencing of events retold in the accompanied verbal text. In addition, clear semantic ties can be also identified between images and caption texts. The author concludes the chapter by pointing out that although ‘there is the potential for rhetorical relations to be established between image sequences, these are not consistently deployed’ (p. 200).

The final chapter describes the evolving mediascape by centering on innovative ways in which the media industry chooses to engage with potential audiences in the online environment. At the same time, the importance of the image has become increasingly obvious in news storytelling; as Caple firmly believes, it is ‘a full partner in the dissemination of news’ (p. 217).

By presenting a systematic analysis of press photographs and providing a set of useful tools for their interpretation, Photojournalism: A Social Semiotic Approach successfully redresses the imbalance between words and images in news discourse studies, and its insightful account of text–image relations, in particular, constitutes a timely and valuable contribution to the area of multimodal discourse analysis. In terms of its social semiotic approach, the book effectively demonstrates the availability of SFL theory in the exploration of both intrasemiotic and intersemiotic meanings in news texts where ‘the sense of text is being extended to other semiotic systems’ (Halliday and Matthiessen, 2014: 46). In addition, a great variety of authentic data, including a corpus of 1000 image-nuclear news stories from the Sydney Morning Herald, images provided by three professional photographers, and links to online news galleries from a range of news organizations, are used to vividly illustrate how the meaning of press photographs can be instantiated in news reporting. Also supporting the analysis are case studies developed around the reporting of particular events, which will offer readers essential help when they get started with their own research into news images.

There are two minor deficiencies in the book. One is related to the title of Chapter 7, in which ‘Text–image relations’ may give readers the false impression that the chapter still has its focus on intersemiotic meanings, although it does refer to them. The other concerns the misprint of ‘Table 3.5’ (line 3, p. 69) for ‘Table 3.4’. However, these cannot distract from the fact that this book can be highly recommended to those scholars who are interested in multimodal discourse analysis, journalism studies and communications studies.