Hi Readers !
Lately in ASTU class, we have been discussing about a second graphic novel : Safe Area Gorazde by Joe Sacco.
Today I want to focus on how Sacco’s portrayal of the media (and himself within it) relate to current conversations about the media.
One aspect that I really appreciate about Sacco’s way of reporting is the war is that he is fully aware of the impact of his choices and informations that he reveals.
A large number of big media are well-known to report “flash news” Immediately after an event happened which can lead to falsified or reliable informations. However, Sacco thinks more on the long-term : he stays in the same conditions as the population in Gorazde for long period of time and he is realizing a journalist job but with a mind of an historian. Indeed, his principle stands in the fact that every informations that he reports will be part of how History is going to remember those events. Undeniably, Joe Sacco have a very singular mode of expression : he uses “comic journalism” to report the events. Not only does he is story-telling the history of his interviewees but he is also portraying himself witnessing and experiencing the post-war consequences. It is very intriguing for me when I see the author drawn in the book, almost like an autobiography. It reminds me that it is only a point of view of someone, like a filter and not the objective truth, and I really appreciate that he is not pretending to be invisible. Through the story, he is also featuring big medias trying to get a scoop from the situation. As a reader, I feel like Sacco is trying to distant himself from them, portraying the big camera as a unnatural element where people feel some kind of obligation to adopt a specific behaviour or act in a particular way like selecting what images to show, what words to says.
Furthermore, in Safe Area Gonrazde, Joe’s glasses represent the irony that there is still a distance, an opaque point of view that see the war in a more objective perspective despite his attempt to be closer to the citizens. Nevertheless, at the end of the story, Edin compared Joe Sacco to the rest of the journalist “you were asking the same questions” which makes us realize how he emerges from a regular journalist to a more aware global citizen. In the end, Joe makes the readers feel the importance of his work and how his journalist method are better than the big media.