Fotojornalismo: da estetização à transformação do leitor em sujeito

Abstract

Every journalistic effort is a representation that aims at making discourse to seem true. In this sense, photography has been increasingly used, since for common sense it possesses the (illusory) ability of portraying the real. So, in the last decades there has been a process of aesthetization of printed journalism, with the constant use of pictures and graphics, as a result of the influence of television and the Internet, which have the instantaneousness of information as their ally.Starting from this view, this paper tries, through the semiotic analysis of a picture printed on the cover of the newspaper, Zero Hora of April 4th, 2005, to identify the role of journalistic photography, on the basis of the hypothesis that the image is not a mere illustration, but a complete text with its own meaning. This became clear in the coverage of Pope John Paul II’s death, where photographs complemented the journalistic discourse by giving more credibility to the information and, above all, allowing the readers to have a co-presence through the images and syncretic texts. Furthermore, the addition of the photograph to the verbal text leads to a presence in distance, enables an exchange of places between the addresser and the addressee, as if they merged on the newspaper page. Thus, syncretism (the use of more than one language) increasingly becomes the raison d’être of the printed newspaper.