Visualising Moral Legitimacy: The Framing of Civic Agency in 2025 Indonesian and Philippine Protest Photojournalism

Abstract

Although front-page photojournalism powerfully shapes democratic narratives, comparative visual analyses of Southeast Asian protest photography remain critically limited. This paper investigates the visual framing of civic agency in Kompas and The Philippine Star during the 2025 mass protests in Indonesia and the Philippines. Analysing a corpus of nine headline photographs, the study utilises a mixed-methods design combining Krippendorff's quantitative content analysis with Barthes' qualitative semiotics to compare visual grammar, emotional expression, cultural symbolism, composition, and power dynamics. The findings reveal six institutional patterns: collective representation over individual leadership, controlled emotional expression, cultural symbolism, structured visual composition, reduced state visibility, and minimal indicators of violence. Specifically, Kompas employs a reflective-symbolic mode rooted in Reformasi memory, while The Philippine Star uses a moral-declarative mode, utilising banners and assertive emotions. Across both publications, state authorities were visually decentered, deliberately excluding spectacles of conflict. Within the selected corpus, these patterns suggest a culturally situated mode of protest representation that emphasises civic legitimacy, symbolic meaning, and visual restraint. The study contributes to visual communication research by showing how civic agency can be constructed through collective presence, cultural symbolism, and the visual decentering of state authority. A primary limitation is the study's exclusive focus on nine photographs from two traditional print newspapers during a single protest period, indicating that future research must explore how digital platforms alter these visual narratives.