The photo caption as informative unit in the Spanish press: uses and characteristics

Abstract

The photo caption continues to perform an essential communications function in the traditional press. For this reason, a study of the characteristics and uses of captions is key to gaining a clear idea of the current degree of photojournalism’s effectiveness in digital communications.

This article sets out to identify the main characteristics of the text legend and the image credit line, the two units that together make up a photo caption, and to trace the evolution of their use, based on an analysis of selected images drawn from several mainstream Spanish newspapers. For this study, content method analysis was applied to a sample of approximately one thousand photojournalistic images that appeared in selected Spanish dailies during the period 2005-2012. Our findings suggest that there has been a gradual decline in the use of the text legend and a commensurate rise in both the number of photographs published without any form of identification and the proportion of images drawn from new alternative sources.