ABSTRACT
The image has a long history in the Northern Ireland conflict and cannot be separated from the violence of identity politics which has engendered sectarian division. The persistent drive to ensure the photograph is always spoken for, the institutionalised and institutionalising labour that ensures that the photographic image is never detached from the discourse which keeps it in place, is a 'kind of violence that surrounds the event of meaning and arrests dispute'. This is the violence of meaning that leaves its imprint on the photographic image; thus when An Phoblacht attempts to reveal 'the truth in pictures' it does so within a framework of relations between the media, the state and the photograph that both define and confine its dissent. The role of photojournalism in the campaigns, tribunals and journalistic investigations to find 'the truth' in the aftermath of Bloody Sunday are a useful illustration of this violence of meaning.
