Living inside the news. Covid-19 and press photography in Catalonia

Abstract

Situations of collective crisis, such as pandemics, urge the recovery of a series of specific visual tropes that help to explain them. Journalists use these visual tropes to narrate complex situations to a society which, overwhelmed by the circumstances, demands information that helps it to understand what it is experiencing. These are visual resources and preestablished templates that have proved effective in the past. Because of its duration, international scope and cross-cutting impact, the Covid-19 pandemic has become a unique crisis, and this has led to the need to review the way in which situations of conflict are explained. The pandemic has highlighted different strategies of visibility and invisibility adopted by institutions, public administrations and the media, and it has underlined the political dimension of images. In this research, methodological triangulation based on interviews and analysis of content was used to map the experience of press photographers from three major print media in Catalonia during the first seven weeks of the pandemic. Covid-19 has highlighted the transformation which photojournalism and the role of the news agencies and press offices are undergoing.