Projetos fotojornalísticos de longo prazo: emancipação, subjetivação e suas legitimações

Abstract

This thesis explores the role of long-term photojournalistic projects in promoting emancipatory and subjectivation discourses, and how they are validated by awarding institutions such as the World Press Photo (WPP). The research seeks to answer how these projects contribute to more complex visual narratives and how the WPP recognizes and legitimizes these productions. The central hypothesis suggests that, although these projects may challenge traditional photojournalism narratives, awards face limitations in fully validating these practices, often favoring consolidated images and conventional tropes. The goal is to analyze how projects awarded in the Long-Term Projects category between 2015 and 2021 address issues of political subjectivation, intellectual emancipation, and scenes of dissent, considering how these narratives engage with institutional validation processes. This period was chosen due to structural changes in the awards starting in 2022, which regionalized categories and reorganized the scope. The analytical methodology is primarily grounded in the concepts of political subjectivation and intellectual emancipation developed by Jacques Rancière, especially in their articulation with notions of body and affect as explored by Laura Quintana. The visual analysis focuses on the essay The House That Bleeds by Mexican photographer Yael Martínez, which portrays the escalating violence driven by drug cartels in his country and how this violence has affected his family and community. The main findings of the research indicate that projects like Martínez’s offer dense and sensitive visual narratives, breaking away from photojournalistic clichés by documenting a trajectory that moves from individual action to collective movement, interpreted through the theoretical framework proposed for this analysis. However, despite the recognition of these innovative narratives, the World Press Photo still struggles to fully validate the diversity of emancipatory discourses, generally privileging consolidated tropes in its main categories.