Shaping the Notion of Media Influence: the Remediated Images of the Vietnam War

Abstract

The photojournalistic icons of the Vietnam War result from a cultural construction and a process of iconization that took place over several decades. With every reprint and remediation, these pictures lost some of their historical context and came to be read as purely symbolic images. Their meaning has been simplified over time to bend them to a media discourse focused on the writing of history. This article presents a detailed examination of the reprints of these images in the American press since the end of the war and shows how they came to be chosen as representatives of the war but also of the work of photojournalists. Iconic photographs are now used as illustrations of the notion of media influence and represent its most popular incarnation.