Associate Professor Ilija Tomanić-Trivundža, PhD.
Ilija Tomanić Trivundža is an Associate Professor at the Chair of Media and Communication Studies at the Faculty of Social Sciences of the University of Ljubljana and a researcher at the Center for Social Communication Research. His primary research interest spans across the field of visual communication with special focus on the social and political role of photography in contemporary mediated communication. He also investigates journalism from the perspective of the processes of collective identification. His current research focus is on issues of new visibility and historical development of press photography.
Ilija Tomanić Trivundža was the president of European Communication Research and Education Association - ECREA (www.ecrea.eu) between 2016 and 2019 and its vice-president between 2012 and 2016. He was also the president of the Slovene Communication Association.
Ilija is the local coordinator of the research group Desire - Center for the study of Democracy, Signification and Resistance (www.researchcenterdesire.eu), which brings together researchers from Vrije Universiteit Brussel (Belgium), University of Ljubljana, Charles University in Prague (Czech Republic), University of Essex (Great Britain) and Aristotle University of Thessaloniki (Greece).
He was a visiting researcher at the University of Tampere in Finland (2016), the University of Southern Illinois Carbondale, USA (2016) and the Vrije Universiteit Brussel in Belgium (2023-2024). He was one of the curators of the photography exhibition On the other side: Slovenian photoreportage (Jakopič Gallery Ljubljana, January-June 2021).
He published his contributions in recognized international journals Cultural Studies, International journal of communication, Journal of language and politics, Journalism practice, Journalism, Javnost-The Public and others. He is the author of the monograph Press photography and visual framing of news (FDV Press, 2015). Ilija is one of the editors of the journal Membrana: magazine on photography (www.membrana.org), and acted as an editor of the book series Routledge Studies in European Communication Research and Education between 2014 and 2020.
In 2020, he received an award from Faculty of Social Sciences for outstanding achievements for promotion of internationalization of the faculty, and in 2011 and 2013, he was awarded Jabolko kakovosti for excellence of implementation of Erasmus intensive life-long learning programme ECREA European Media and Communication Doctoral Summer School.
Notable Publications
1
Theorizing the visual: key debates, controversies, and questions for visual journalism
The chapter introduces key debates and contestations linked to the conceptual interrogation of images within the context of visual journalism. Although media and journalism studies have, over the past three decades, begun engaging with images in ways that go beyond mere lamentation over the ever-increasing visuality of news and social communication, the intellectual project of "thinking photography" within the context of journalism remains somewhat peripheral. The chapter addresses the split between (older) representational and (newer) non-representational theories of photography. It presents recurring debates on indexicality, iconicity, and visual symbolism as disputes about the meaning of a stable pool of theoretical signifiers—ethics of viewing, nature of the medium, visual narration/aesthetics, truth, and professional eyewitnessing. In the second part, the chapter focuses on two strands of contemporary non-representational debates on photojournalism and press photography. The conceptual shifts and new avenues of research in the first strand concern the reconceptualization of the notion of eyewitnessing, while the second strand emphasizes the altered temporality of ubiquitous networked images. In the concluding section, the chapter outlines some of the blind spots of contemporary non-representational and representational debates on press photography.
2
“Eritreja, moja dežela”: Photoreportage and Positive Representation of a Distant Other
The article analyses how distant Others are represented in “Eritreja” photoreporatge, that appeared in ten consecutive issues of the Mladina magazine between August and November 1988 and is regarded as the most extensive photoreportage ever published in Slovenian printed media. Multimodal framing analysis complemented with semi-structured interviews with the photographers are conducted to the examine verbal and visual strategies for the construction of Otherness. The divergence of this particular photoreportage from the leading news topics ( famine and war) and its positive representations of the distant Other are traced to the photoreportage’s resonance with the domestic political agenda (Slovenia’s struggle against the centralisation of Yugoslavia) and Mladina’s editorial policy (advocating freedom of speech via challenging taboo topics in Yugoslavia).
3
“Symbolic photographs” as floating and empty signifiers. Iconic transformation of news photography
The article discusses the use of “symbolic photographs” – images in news reporting which have no direct connection to reported events – in news reporting. Such images deviate not only from the self-professed journalistic norm of factual reporting but also fundamentally challenge the act of civic eyewitnessing constitutive for visual journalism. Concepts of floating and empty signifiers from Discourse Theory are applied to “symbolic photographs” to analyse their ambivalent act of signification, their particular mode of iconicity and, by extension, the journalistic and political implications of their repetitive use.
4
Photographic Flâneur, Street Photography, and Imagi(ni)ng the City
This article argues in favor of continuous symbolic relevance and analytical power of flâneur to pose significant questions about our present social condition, but proposes this can be achieved not by looking at the flâneur as a specific sociohistorical subject but rather through the notion of flânerie as a specific practice of observation, knowledge accumulation, and production of texts. The article first develops the analytical model of flânerie, which is then applied to the genre of street photography to demonstrate how it can be understood as photographic flânerie. In the subsequent part, the article shows how certain contemporary visual practices that represent contemporary developments of the genre of street photography—such as certain types of Google Street View captures and certain types photographic documentation of urban exploration—can be understood as photographic flânerie’s adaptive responses to the changing conditions of visibility in contemporary societies, the blurring of the division between the public and private domains, and the destructive inscription of neoliberalism into the physical space of the city.