Crossed analyses of a sport photograph. Sport photojournalism and disabled athletes: Presentation of body and meaning production

This paper presents three analyses, separately constructed by three researchers, of the same sport press photography, made by Bob Martin (sport photojournalist) during the Athens Paralympic Games in 2004. The first one, which has a sociological approach, compares the studied photo to those of a diachronic corpus of disabled swimming's photos produced in France. The second one, which is more semiotic, casts a synchronic glance by placing the image in the rhetoric chain of the sport's photography and in the photographer's production. The third one relates the image's composition to the thesis of the liminal situation of disabled people, which symbolizes the social place they are assigned. The goal of this work - which is the result of interactions in a methodological interdisciplinary seminar - is to lead to an epistemological and methodological reflexion about the conditions in which images are used in social sciences; the richness, the interests and limits of their use as data in the study of the disabled's social representations as well as their evolution will be particularly considered. © 2009 Association ALTER.