| Popis: |
In this master's thesis the visual images by the public media of the so-called serial criminal »the Amager Attacker« will be studied. The purpose of the study is to illustrate the power, which the media possesses when representing people in public, but also to illustrate the power resistance, which appears at the same time in these representations. The two representation concepts, self-representation and alienated representation, by the Danish media- and visual culture researcher, Mette Mortensen, will be used to examine the power of the media as well as the power resistance of the Amager Attacker in the visual images. The self-representation confirms the Amager Attack as an individual, the alienated representation shows the Amager Attack as »the other«. The focus in these two concepts will reveal a tension field, a metaphorical tug-of-war, between the Amager Attacker and the public media to control these representations. The empirical data in the thesis consist of photographs as well as courtroom sketches, so the process of production will affect the authenticity of the two types of visual images. That is why, the theories of the two semiotic researchers Charles Sanders Peirce and Roland Barthes has become relevant. Their theories are used to describe the different processes of meaning of photographs and drawings. The empirical data is classified into three different groups based on the contexts where the visual images appeared. These groups are called: Group 1: Photographs from outside the Department of Forensic Medicine, Group 2: Private photographs and Group 3: Courtroom sketches. The analysis takes two photographs from Group 1 and 2, respectively, and two courtroom sketches from Group 3 as its starting point. |
