Narratives of the war and newspaper photography (perception of the full-scale Russian invasion of Ukraine by The Guardian)

In this study, the authors combine a narrative approach to newspaper photography analysis with a quantitative, computer-assisted analysis in order to discover how the perception of the full-scale invasion changed depending on the phase of the full-scale war. Method. The study material included 2665 captions for photos in publications from the “Ukraine” section of The Guardian, from February 24 to December 31, 2022. We used Python modules and libraries to process data. With the bs4 module and the lxml library, photo captions were extracted. As far as photo captions are used to describe the photo, the authors used the descriptions to get the stories and then the narratives. We used the Spacy library’s dependency parser to get the basic narrative’s components. With this instrument, it is possible to automatically analyse the sentence’s structure and define subjects, predicates, and objects. The texts were divided according to the full-scale war periodization, according to the General Staff of Ukraine: 1st phase: February 24 – April 2022 (the battle for Kyiv, retreat of Russian troops from Northern Ukraine); 2nd phase: May – August 2022 (the battle for Donbas); 3rd phase: September – December 2022 (Kharkiv, Kherson offensive operations, attacks on Ukrainian energy infrastructure, blackouts). The proposed algorithm for defining narratives makes identifying similarities and changes within the phases possible. Conclusions. The photos used by the Guardian maintain the emphasis on the humanitarian agenda, which is an established focus in war photography, showing war not so much through the perception of the military as through the suffering of civilians. Thus, the narratives reveal a transformation in understanding the full-scale war: from being perceived as horrible and terrifying, provoking a worldwide reaction in the first phase, to being normalised and symbolised in the second and third phases.