REPRODUKSI REALITAS POLITIK DALAM FOTO JURNALISTIK PADA KAMPANYE PEMILIHAN PRESIDEN 2009 DI INDONESIA

One of the interesting phenomena related to General Election (Pemilu) in 2009 is the intensity of involvement and role of media in the process of constructing figure images among candidates running for the election (for members of parliament, president and vice president) both as individual and their capacity as a political party member. The bigger political parties having more capital tend to mobilize people through media in various ways as indicated by the news of journalistic photos, especially on the headline news, published by Indonesian printed newspaper. The newspaper competed to promote their candidates in the campaign time for presidency election. Pictures of the candidates, as mostly published by printed newspaper, were among the most promising tools of campaign strategies to communicate with prospective voters for candidates. Those pictures of candidates were intended not only to be published by printed media as a news, but also to construct economic and political values which reflect how central the function of photojournalism in them. The visualization of persons or candidates had become very important instrument indicating that photo journalistic has been on the stage in the general election time. The main questions of this project are why cultural reproductions took place in the process of construction of political reality in the campaign process and why ideology, norms and symbols were used and tended to influence the journalistic photos in the campaign process of the presidential election in 2009. This project employs theories of cultural reproduction. In this project, photos are analyzed as sign or symbols reflecting two meaning