Picturing Natural Disaster: Compositional Meaning Analysis in the Jakarta Post Online News Gallery

A photograph on newspaper has been known for years as an illustration of the news which has the meaning behind of it. A photograph also used to strengthen the emotion described by the text. The used of a photograph in mass media is getting greater nowadays. However, nowadays photograph on newspaper used only for the complement of the news, the decorator, as if it does not have meaning at all. The Jakarta Post one of the online newspaper tries to portray the paost situation of natural disaster through their photographs. The cyclone Cempaka which has hits Java Island since the end of November 2017 has remained the condolence. This natural disaster which happened mostly in East Java and Yogyakarta, has taken several victims of the dead or declared missing. This news becomes a widespread topic in several media in Indonesia. This research aimed to examined the compositional meaning in terms of information value, salience, and framing of The Jakarta Post Online Newspaper Photographs portraying natural disaster. This study used visual grammar by Kress and Van Leuwen (2006) as the analytical tools to investigate compositional meanings. This study analyzed five Photographs from The Jakarta Post Online Newspaperportrayingnatural disaster of Cyclone Cempaka. As a result, the study revealed that The Jakarta Post's Photographs tend to portray the physical destruction, especially private and public facilities building to gain emphathy from viewers.