About to Die: How News Images Move the Public - Hardcover

Zelizer, Barbie

4

36 ratings by Goodreads

9780199752133: About to Die: How News Images Move the Public

Hardcover

ISBN 10: 0199752133 ISBN 13: 9780199752133

Publisher: OUP USA, 2011

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About to Die An analysis of about-to-die images in 19th, 20th and 21st century U.S. journalism, with some discussion of news images elsewhere, raises fundamental questions both about how these pictures depict the news, how they figure in collective memory and how they connect with the public at multiple points in time. In so doing, it suggests a refinement of how news images have been thought to function and h Full description

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Review:

Zelizer bolsters her arguments with extensive primary research, including readers' reactions from letters to the editor and blog postings regarding daring and shocking images. Her seventy-nine pages of notes are a treasure trove to readers and researchers because they are so detailed and thorough. (Journalism History)

Why are some deaths fit spectacles for the camera and others off-limits? What philosophical and social purposes do news images serve? Barbie Zelizer answers such questions in this ambitious new book, a stunning examination of a little-explored aspect of modern journalism. (Phillip Knightley, author of The First Casualty: The War Correspondent as Hero and Myth-Maker From The Crimea To Kosovo)

In Barbie Zelizer's most powerful, profound, and disturbing work, she shows that news photos do not document reality but are suspended precariously between the 'as is' and the 'as if,' touching feelings, touching off imaginations. With an astonishing cascade of evidence about iconic news images and the stories behind them, Zelizer offers little comfort, no certainty, but much illumination. (Michael Schudson, author of Why Democracies Need an Unlovable Press)

About to Die is an audacious and often chilling examination of how visual media handle the moment of death, from engravings of the Great Chicago Fire of 1871 to the Pacific tsunami of 2004. With an obvious and admitted debt to the academy's favorite photography buff Susan Sontag, Zelizer treats these images as both rare and powerful. (The Austin Chronicle)

An enlightening new book. (Slate.com)

About the Author:

Zelizer is Raymond Williams Chair of Communication and the Director of the Scholars Program in Culture and Communication at the Annenberg School for Communication at the University of Pennsylvania. She is the editor of several collections and the author of Remembering to Forget: Holocaust Memory through the Camera's Eye and Covering the Body: The Kennedy Assassination, the Media, and the Shaping of Collective Memory.

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