Photography and Propaganda. Richard Cross and John Hoagland in Central America and in the news.

The author opens his article with various descriptions of
propaganda, using such diverse sources as Brecht, Goebbels,
Jacques Ellul, John Berger, and Herbert J. Gans. Following
Ellul, Barthes and Berger, the author carries out a reading of
the published images of two well-known American
photojournalists, Hoagland and Cross, who extensively covered
the civil war in El Salvador, where both of them were killed in
1985. The author's reading of the El Salvador pictures in mostly
American magazines, is described as ""not comprehensive or
systematic, but rather an informal reading of the effects of the
propaganda context.. a desire to articulate some of the cultural
and political meanings produced by this kind of image context
...to provide some inference in a process that is so pervasive
as to have become invisible''. The article includes biographic
information on both Hoagland and Cross.


Citaten:
Barthes, R.
Brecht, B.
Ellul, J.
Gans, H.J.
Berger, J.