Images and doing border in the German media discourse

Chapter 5 analyzes the visual media discourse at the background of migration and border politics and policy-making in Germany. Complementing the analysis of situated discursive practices of meaning-making in political contexts ( Chapters 3 and 4 ), it examines the structured visual order making the border visible in less consciously perceived images of the everyday. Building on a large visual dataset of more than 4,000 image–text relations, the chapter analyzes visual chronologies, patterns, and selective (in)visibilities on the first and second pages of the two largest quality print newspapers in Germany between 2014 and 2016. It argues that despite a new iconography of the border and a diversification of motifs, the visualization of the long summer of migration presented neither a shift of the visual order, nor new offers for interpretation for the European political community. Instead, the visual discursive effect naturalizing the border between a European inside and non-European outside remained the same as before. This happened, for instance, through the key theme of looming crisis and overstrain, non-representations of welcome culture, and the repetition of the visual signs of the fence and barrier. The chapter concludes that this new border iconography does not set conditions of possibility for inclusionary policies, but reaffirms exclusionary ones.