Page 93 - Introduction to Electronic Commerce and Social Commerce

82 • Sport, Media and Society

of written, rather than spoken, discourse. For example, the headline in The Times,
‘Beckham Pledge: I’ll Be Back’ (Dickinson 2008: 104), uses punctuation marks as-
sociated with formal grammatical language style.

Words and Images: Newspaper Photographs

Bignell (1997) draws on Barthes’s (1977) analysis of the photographic message to
point to some of the ways words and image combine to create meanings in news-
papers. Despite being presented as transparent documents of an event, news photo-

graphs are painstakingly selected and modified to construct the right image for the
story. Images may be cropped to emphasise an aspect or digitally altered to render
an effect. Trick effects are common, for example, after the British tennis player Tim
Henman was knocked out of Wimbledon in 2004, The Sun created a photographic
montage on its back page, under the headline henman caps months of agony.
Faces of the stars of English sport (Tim Henman, David Beckham, Michael Vaughan
and Lawrence Dallaglio) were superimposed against a backdrop, evoking the police
identity parade in the fi lm The Usual Suspects, under the word guilty in enor-
mous red letters, with smaller red text beneath reading,‘... of Crimes against En-
glish Sports Fans’. Beneath each face were details of recent English defeats in the
sports of tennis, football, cricket and rugby. The words, colours and images worked
together to construct a range of meanings around sporting success, nationhood and
masculinity.
Newsworthy individuals are commonly the subject matter of newspaper photo-
graphs. The camera angle adopted for depicting individuals, their facial expressions
or the ways they are posed helps to discursively construct a viewing position for the
reader to adopt in relation to the person portrayed. Other people or material objects
featured in the photographs can ask the reader to make connections from one thing
to another. A story from the Daily Mirror (Sloan 2008) about the success of a fe-
male jockey was accompanied by a main image of the jockey, Kirsty Milczarek, in
a glamour pose, wearing a shoulderless evening dress and jewellery and gazing into
the camera, smiling with her lips slightly apart. A small circular inset below depicted
a young woman with a child (Milczarek as a toddler). To the right of the main pho-
tograph was an image of Milczarek on horseback during a race, above another of her
as a young showjumper. Underneath the main headline there was a further image
of Milczarek in her racing silks shot from below, posed with her hands on her hips,
looking into the distance. The poses and content of the photographs conveyed diver-

gent significations of femininity in relation to sport. The glamour pose emphasised
the jockey’s femininity, coding her as conventionally heterosexually attractive. The
images of her as a child and as young showjumper both infantalised her and con-
textualised her sport in more ‘feminine appropriate’ terms (Hargreaves 1994). In