Critical analysis of dehumanizing news photographs on immigrants: Examples of the portrayal of non-citizenship

Abstract

This paper analyses the main visual characteristics of sub-Saharan immigrants represented as non-citizens in a sample from the Spanish press, and deepens on how this contributes to perpetuating the ‘we-they’ dichotomy. The data consist of all the news items published on sub-Saharan immigrants in the digital editions of the Spanish newspapers El País and ABC from 1 January 2016 to 1 January 2021. Kress and van Leeuwen’s visual grammar and van Leeuwen’s model for the visual representation of social actors will be the theoretical frameworks. The findings indicate that there are different visual ways to portray immigrants as non-citizens, which allows establishing this classification: representing immigrants’ arrival as illegal and clandestine, portraying them as invaders, representing immigrants as violent individuals or associating them with animalization. All these can be considered visual dysphemisms that problematize the arrival of immigrants and highlight the differences between Spanish population and immigrants.