Global Media Journal Arabian Edition Summer/Fall Vol. 1, No. 2, pp. 49-66 Affective imagery and collective memory El-Ibiary | 49 Affective imagery and collective memory: Discursive analysis of iconic images of pain By Rasha El-Ibiary * American University in Cairo History decays into images, not into stories. --Walter Benjamin Affective imagery and pictorial representations help constitute our memory of wars, and human sufferings. From the burned Vietnamese girl running naked from napalm, to the televised killing of the Palestinian boy Mohammed al Durrah, to the Twin Towers’ collapse our memory of fatal events is inevitably constructed. To a great extent the audience… hold[s] the same images of world major events. Though they interpret of those images differently, to a surprising degree the original images are identical—they are the dramatic ones, the ones depicting violence, the ones prompting emotion (Moeller, 1999, p. 4). In our media-saturated world, films and pictures became increasingly our vehicles of memory. “We are acquainted with events at which we were not present through the films or photographs we have seen of them” (Waterson, 2007, p. 52). Nevertheless, the meaning of visual images remains intensely constructed by complex, intertwined relationships binding the image depicter, the nature of the news media, the politics delimiting its scope and projection, the way it is interpreted by specific readers/viewers, and the moment of its reading. The meaning of images from Abu Gharib are “completely different for the American soldiers who took them, the Iraqis who feature in them, and the international audience to which they have now been revealed,” says Anna Gibbs (2007, p. 126). Images are always deeply politicized, offered in a specific context, time, to an audience, via a specific medium, to enhance a desired reading/viewing of them. They acquire their importance * Rasha El-Ibiary is an adjunct assistant professor of Journalism and Mass Communication at the American University in Cairo. She holds a Ph.D in political communication from Newcastle University, UK, and is the author of One war, two televised worlds, Saarbrucken, Germany: LAP Lambert Academic Publishing, 2010. E-mail: rousha@aucegypt.edu