Post-Photojournalism: Post-Truth Challenges and Threats for Visual Reporting in the Russo-Ukrainian War Coverage

The visual framing of war has always been the most challenging area of photojournalism, and even more so in the post-digital age, when the transition from analog to digital becomes almost indistinguishable. We examine the photographic coverage of the Russo-Ukrainian conflict during the first half of the full-scale invasion of Ukraine by analyzing the major Russian and Ukrainian newspapers: Rossiyskaya Gazeta and Ukrayinska Pravda. These media are the most representative open-access newspapers from countries at war in terms of the number of users and articles dedicated to war coverage. Based on a sample of 17,546 news articles published during the first six months of the war (10,376 Ukrainian and 7,170 Russian) and focusing on a precise selection of key events of the conflict, we combine and integrate quantitative methods and in-depth analysis. Both newspapers share structural features to classify and access the reported issues by tagging them with a significant range of keywords that contribute to shaping readers’ and viewers’ perceptions of the conflict. In our mixed methods research, we examine the sample to establish a categorization of the main characteristics of post-photojournalism, where old practices collide with the new dynamics of the post-truth era of photojournalism.