News Images as Lived Images: Media Ritual, Cultural Performance, and Public Trauma

This article considers the relation between news images—images captured, selected, written about, printed, and distributed in the course of the news process—and cultural performances—those everyday embodied modes of expressive enactment by which individuals meaningfully and collectively create their worlds. While scholarship on media from a ritual perspective has contributed a great deal to understandings of the cultural dimensions of the production of news images, it remains focused on the sites and practices of encoding. This article calls upon the concept of performance to explore those sites, relations, and practices in which the decoding of news images obtain. After a review and critique of the literature on news as ritual and a definitional overview of the performance concept, it considers two cases which explore the ways news images of September 11, 2001 became lived images through specific cultural performances.