De Lincoln a Putin: el motivo visual del líder político caminando en los media españoles

How is power represented in politics? From the cinematographic fictions of Abraham Lincoln to photographs of politicians such as Barack Obama, Angela Merkel, or Vladimir Putin that have adorned the covers of national and international newspapers, the image of the walking leader has established itself as one of the most recurrent iconographies in the visual representation of political action. Despite this, the political leader walking has not been an object of analysis in studies on visual communication or political iconography. Starting from the prominent presence of this “visual motif” in the media and public imagination, we postulate that this perpetuation responds to a continuation and recognition of iconographic traditions that, despite their evolution and transformation, remain valid. Within the Movep research project, we developed a hypothesis on the representation of the political leader walking by studying a sample of the covers of the Spanish newspapers with the largest circulation (El país, El mundo, and La vanguardia) from 2011 to 2017. At a theoretical level, we start from the studies of political iconography by Carlo Ginzburg (2011), Horst Bredekamp (2007), and Christian Joschke (2012), all framed under the theses of Aby Warburg (1905) on pathosformel. The methodology used starts from visual semiotics and iconographic historiography to determine the predominant figurative features of the images. Likewise, by linking the analyzed photographs with audiovisual fiction and the plastic arts, we interpret the connoted planes of the image and identify the visual story that emerges from them, which is translatable into an ideology or political position of the actors involved. Thanks to this framework and using an analysis of the composition of the images, the dynamics with the physical environment, and the gestures of the subjects, we establish seven categories that expand the meanings.