Icons

Iconic photographs provide important resources for constituting people as citizens, forming public opinion and motivating participation in specific forms of collective life. They relay social knowledge and dominant ideologies, shape understanding of specific events and time periods, model relationships between civic actors, and provide figural resources for subsequent communicative action. By following the copies, imitations and parodies that produce iconicity in the international media environment, one can get a glimpse of public culture in a global context. A primary example of how an image can become a global icon is the photograph of the lone protester in Tiananmen Square. Iconic photographs rarely have much news value – and certainly not for long – but they serve as moments of visual eloquence that provide symbolic resources for mediating fundamental tensions within a polity. Within an increasingly global visual environment, iconic images may be suited both for adaptation for communicative action within many different locales and for articulation of global public culture.