Protest Photography and Consideration of Privacy

A qualitative analysis of BLM protest photos published by The Star Tribune, The Minnesota Daily, The Oregonian and the PSU Vanguard

By Ella Banken

Analysis and Conclusion

In my initial hypothesis, I predicted that the two student publications, the Minnesota Daily and the PSU Vanguard would have more similarities, as would the two regional publications, The Oregonian and the Star Tribune. Specifically, I predicted that the student publications would publish more Group photos, and less Individual photos. I thought that student journalists might try to focus less on individual faces, while professional journalists would adhere to more traditional styles of journalism. There have been conversations over the past few months about the negative impact that protest photography has on protestors (Aggeler), so I wanted to investigate whether young journalists were more likely to break standards.

After analyzing the four publications, this proved to not be the case. In fact, the publications that published more similar content was the publications based in the same regions. The Star Tribune and the Minnesota Daily published very similar amounts of Individual photos, about 40% on average of their published content. Photos of Marches/Demonstrations were 66% on average. Names included in captions were 31.7% on average between those two publications. The Minnesota publications published more photos with Individuals featured, less photos of Marches/Demonstrations and published more names in captions than the Portland publications.

Portland publications, the PSU Vanguard and The Oregonian, published a higher number of March/Demonstration photos (average 86.5%), less Individual photos (average 15.25%), and included fewer names in the photo captions (average 6.8%).

Minnesota publications included more business and event related photos, demonstrating the focus of community resurgence. Over the past few months many more protests occurred in Portland comparatively, lasting for a longer period of time.

“Between May 29 and Aug. 27, the Portland Police Bureau declared 23 riots and 22 unlawful assemblies (that doesn't include nights that started as unlawful assemblies and were later declared riots)" (Levinson).

The Portland publications published a higher percentage of March/demonstration photos, perhaps because there was a higher density of of this type of action.

This research supported the findings of Cowart et. al (2016) that police and protestors are rarely pictured together. Only 3.3% of all images analyzed showed police and protestors prominently in the same frame. 

One notable difference between the student and regional publications, is that regional publications published more photos of night events. Student publications published less photos of night marches, or what could be categorized as a riot. I did not code for this specifically, so further studies could explore this topic.

In conclusion, there was not a notable difference between the types of photos published by student publications versus regional publications. The main differences found were between the publications in Portland and the publications in Minnesota.