Visual motifs and representations of power in the public sphere

The images to represent power and the public sphere in the media are frequently articulated through visual motifs that hail from cinema, painting and other iconographic legacies. Far from separating the images from their traditional sources, the expansion of social networks has endorsed the importance of the user-viewer's background when reading the self-representation of the various scenarios of power in the public sphere political, economic, judicial, police, or even the social movements themselves. We hypothesize that there is an organized combination of motifs to represent usual situations in the everyday life of the public sphere, which appeal to the spectator’s prior knowledge of the spectator of these staging models, thus configuring a fertile space for reflection on their ambiguity and political and communicative effectiveness.