Image Brokers: Visualizing World News in the Age of Digital Circulation

424 Pages·2016·3.505 MB·English

by  Zeynep Devrim Gürsel

Contents
Introduction: Formative Fictions and the Work of
News Images 1
PART ONE. IMAGE-MAKING 43
1 What Precedes the Digital News Image? 47
2 Global Views Inc.: Visualizing Politics, from Shock
and Awe to the Fall of Saddam Hussein 79
3 Agence France-Presse: What Is the Dominant? 126
4 Newsworld: Everyday Practices of Editing the World 160
PART TWO. WORLDMAKING 185
5 Barnstorm: An American Rite of Passage 189
6 Visa Pour l’Image: Personal Visions and
Amateur Documents 223
7 World Press Photo: Developing World Photography 239
Conclusion: Waiting for the Dust to Settle 281
Acknowledgments 311
Appendix A: Cast of Characters 319
Appendix B: Timeline of the “War on Terror” 321
Notes 325
Bibliography 369
Index 391
Introduction
Formative Fictions
and the Work of News Images
A messenger walked over to Jackie’s cubicle and delivered a large enve-
lope. Jackie, a photo editor at Global Views Inc., shoved it to a corner
of her desk, not hiding her exasperation: “It’s Friday afternoon. The
magazines are about to close, and this photographer sends me fi lm!”
Jackie worked in the New York offi ce of Global Views Inc. (GVI), a
visual content provider. It was March 21, 2003, the day the United
States and coalition forces launched a massive aerial assault on Bagh-
dad, what the US military and media referred to as the “shock and awe”
campaign. Emphatically Jackie pointed at the envelope full of rolls of
fi lm: “Unprocessed fi lm!” Though they had arrived by express courier
and had been shot only two days earlier, it was clear that these undevel-
oped rolls of photographs of protests in California against the imminent
Iraq war could not keep pace with the digital news cycle. They were
historical artifacts, obsolete even before being developed. Jackie wasn’t
going to call a photo editor at Time or Newsweek or any other maga-
zine to tell them about these photographs. She wasn’t going to try to
sell them by making an argument that they provided a fresh angle on
the state of a nation on the brink of war or that this photographer’s
personal vision illuminated something new about antiwar rallies. In
fact, the rolls of fi lm didn’t even get processed before the following
week, when they were digitized and immediately archived and linked
to images of Americans protesting wars past, instantly becoming poten-
tial historical images for a future date. Before the end of the fi rst day
1
2 | Introduction
of the 2003 American war in Iraq, one thing was certain: this was a
digital war.
Jackie is a professional image broker. Her work and that of other
image brokers is the central topic of this book. Image brokers act as
intermediaries for images through acts such as commissioning, evaluat-
ing, licensing, selling, editing, and negotiating. They may or may not be
the producers or authors of images. Rather, image brokers are the peo-
ple who move images or restrict their movement, thereby enabling or
policing their availability to new audiences. For example, by not devel-
oping the fi lm sent to her immediately, Jackie kept the images on the
rolls of fi lm out of circulation for several days. We can think of many
diff erent kinds of image brokers—from art dealers to those uploading
videos onto YouTube; however, I focus on those who broker news
images professionally. These individuals—the people making the deci-
sions behind the photographs we encounter in the news—and the
organizations in which they work, whether agencies, publications, or
visual content providers, act as mediators for views of the world. Image
brokers collectively frame our ways of seeing.1
This is a book about photography and journalism based on fi eld-
work conducted at a time when the form and the content of both were
signifi cantly unsettled. I look back to a period of major technological
and professional transformation in the news media, one during which
the very infrastructures of representation were changing radically.2 The
shift to digital photography and satellite communication on the cusp of
the new millennium occurred with shocking rapidity; it allowed photo-
graphs to be transmitted from anywhere in the world and made avail-
able online almost instantly. Some news publications had printed digital
images considered to have unique journalistic value as early as 1998,
during the coverage of the war in Kosovo.3 By early 2003, having the
capability to transmit digitally was essential for a photographer to even
get an assignment in Iraq. At least two of the older veteran combat pho-
tographers, who didn’t yet feel entirely comfortable shooting digital
images, had gone to Iraq accompanied by young assistants to provide
them technical support. Perhaps the starkest monument marking the
material changes in the photojournalism industry was a sign placed on
the now-obsolete chute that for decades had been used to send rolls of
fi lm down to the photo lab at a major US newsmagazine. The sign read:
“RIP (Rest in Peace).”
To observe the international photojournalism industry during this
time of uncertainty, I conducted over two years of fi eldwork at key
Introduction | 3
nodal points of production, reproduction, distribution, and circulation
in the industry’s centers of power: New York and Paris. I use the term
nodal point deliberately, because I sought out points of intersection
among various actors and institutions, junctions in a system where
choices had to be made such as which images to select, which publica-
tions to pitch them to, where to make them available, and what to
assign to a specifi c photographer.4 From 2003 to 2005 I conducted
fi eldwork in the newsroom of a large corporate “visual content” pro-
vider (chapter 2); the Paris headquarters of Agence France-Presse (chap-
ter 3), a French wire service; and the editorial offi ces of two mainstream
US newsmagazines (chapter 4). I also attended several key photography
events, principal among them Barnstorm (chapter 5), a photography
workshop for emerging photographers founded and run for many years
by Eddie Adams, an American photojournalist who made several iconic
images of the Vietnam war;5 Visa Pour l’Image (chapter 6), the largest
annual photojournalism festival, held in Perpignan, France; and several
events organized by World Press Photo (chapter 7), an Amsterdam-
based international platform for documentary photography that organ-
izes the world’s most prestigious annual photography competition and
also off ers seminars on photojournalism. I began this project because I
believed that the manner in which the world was depicted photograph-
ically had signifi cant consequences and was an increasingly central part
of politics. As I watched what began as a war that had to be covered
digitally become a digital war of images, I grew increasingly convinced
of the political potential of visual journalism. It is far too important a
practice not to be scrutinized and engaged analytically.
A TIME OF RAPID CHANGE
The beginning of the American war in Iraq was a moment when photo-
journalism as a domain was uncertain.6 This uncertainty stemmed from
digitalization. Whereas digitization has been defi ned as “the material
process of converting analogue streams of information into digital bits,”
digitalization refers to the way many domains of social life, including
journalism and military operations, are “restructured around digital
communication and media infrastructures.”7
Photojournalism was transformed not only by digital cameras, online
distribution, and the digitization of analog archives, but by the signifi -
cant institutional and cultural changes that digitalization enabled. The
war in Iraq was not just a digital war, but also the fi rst war in which
4 | Introduction
visual content providers were important image brokers. For example,
Global Views Inc., where Jackie worked as part of the news and edito-
rial team, is not a news organization but rather a visual content
provider—a corporation that produces licensable imagery and for
whom news is just one of many product lines. Hence, regardless of their
personal beliefs and motivations, Jackie and her GVI colleagues were
producing and selling visual content, commodities that just happened to
begin their lives as representations of news. They were not part of the
press. Yet during the year that I observed daily work at GVI, I watched
Jackie and the rest of the editorial team broker many of the most sig-
nifi cant and widely publicized journalistic images of the early war in
Iraq. As Jackie edited them for GVI’s digital archive, they were trans-
formed into visual content, available for purchase for a range of edito-
rial and commercial uses. I researched photojournalism as the produc-
tion and distribution process behind news images increasingly became
part of the commodity chain behind visual content.
Another manifestation of digitalization was the change in the very
nature of the “photojournalism community.” Amateur digital images
such as the Abu Ghraib photos and cell-phone pictures of the 2005
London bombings, rather than the work of professional photojournal-
ists, were the key images that shaped public opinion. Moreover, images
in the press, from photographs to cartoons, were not just illustrative of
current events but often also newsworthy themselves or even factors in
causing events, thereby playing a critical and highly controversial part
in political and military action.8
In other words, I studied a very loose community of people collec-
tively engaged in visual knowledge production at a time when the core
technologies of their craft, the status of the images they produced and
brokered, and their own professional standing amid a growing pool of
amateurs and citizen journalists were all changing rapidly. As a result,
the professional identity of image brokers, the very value of their exper-
tise, and the ways in which images entered into journalistic circulation
were hotly debated topics worldwide. Conducting fi eldwork during
tumultuous times yielded informants who were constantly questioning
and negotiating what their professional world would look like, end-
lessly debating where their fi eld of expertise began and ended or could
be extended.9 This was very fortunate for me as an anthropologist. As
long as I was in the right places, there was no need to provoke conversa-
tions about the state of visual journalism; I could just listen in on con-
versations that were already taking place regularly.10
Introduction | 5
It was also a time when there was a very dominant news stóry that
concerned a great many journalists. This book opened with Jackie at
her desk a few hours after television news had shown footage of “shock
and awe.” However, the dominant news story in question was not just
the American war in Iraq, which would in fact go on for almost nine
years and was a signifi cant event itself. Rather, the news story that dom-
inated journalism and formed the backdrop of my fi eldwork was
neither the war in Iraq nor the war in Afghanistan but the “War on
Terror.” This was a signifi cant journalistic dominant because this was
not an actual war but a discursive construct that as an umbrella term
provided semantic coherence for a whole range of activities, both within
the United States and internationally. The “War on Terror” is not a
single event or an actual war, then, but a war that was actualized, made
real, in part by news coverage of it. Throughout this book when I refer
to the War on Terror (without quotation marks from here on), it is this
mediated idea of a military campaign against terrorism activities that I
am referencing. The War on Terror is inseparable from its representa-
tions; it is always also a war of images.11
SEPTEMBER 11–13, 2001
Not only are the War on Terror and its representations inseparable, but
September 11, 2001, is a key, if controversial, originary moment for
both the United States’s military operations in Afghanistan and Iraq,
and the professional transition to digital photography. It is common
knowledge that there had been terrorist attacks before, even at the same
site—the 1993 bombing of the World Trade Center. The 9/11 attacks
were events of a diff erent scale. Similarly, the fi rst digital camera system
marketed to professional photojournalists was introduced by Kodak in
1991, but even a decade later, many in the professional world of pho-
tography still resisted using digital images because of what they per-
ceived as inferior image quality. However, when the Federal Aviation
Administration grounded all fl ights for three days following the attacks
of September 11, 2001, the photojournalism industry was obliged to
accept digital transmission regardless of whether the photographs being
transmitted were analog or digitally produced images; images could
move only digitally. The pace and scale of the digital circulation of news
images changed dramatically. The standard of sending undeveloped
rolls of fi lm via air, and consequently predigital technologies and scales
of circulation, were grounded along with the US airline industry. Only
6 | Introduction
a year and a half later Jackie was astounded that a photographer shoot-
ing a time-sensitive topic such as antiwar protests could possibly send
images he had shot in California to New York as fi lm, let alone unproc-
essed fi lm.
The inseparability of the War on Terror and its representations can
also be attributed to the fact that the hijackers who crashed two planes
into the World Trade Center launched an attack in the realm of the
image world at the same time as their attack on the physical towers and
the Pentagon. As has been noted at length elsewhere, this was an act of
spectacular terrorism not just because of the images of fi reballs and gap-
ing buildings but also because, due to the delay between the two crashes,
millions of spectators drawn to their screens to view the aftermath of
one attack witnessed the second attack and eventually the crumbling of
the towers on live television. Hence, the events inaugurated a new type
of spectacular terrorism where a visual assault on spectators magnifi ed
the symbolic impact of the physical attack and prepared the way for
visual revenge.12 The intertwining of the War on Terror and the world-
wide circulation of digital images was perhaps nowhere more evident
than in the notorious photographs of American torture in Abu Ghraib
prison. However, rather than approach these images as the images of
the war, Image Brokers provides the context of a visual and political
economy of images in which the Abu Ghraib images were merely some
of the most controversial and widely circulated.13
Yet for all the claims about the future of visual news being radically
transformed by digitalization and forever changed by the FAA ban,
much of the work of the image brokers I observed was structured by
ideologies about photojournalism and institutional protocols that had
long histories. If I wanted to understand how news images functioned
by analyzing image brokers, their work, and the contexts in which this
work was performed, I couldn’t simply begin with digital photojournal-
ism. Therefore, this book is on one level an institutional narrative tell-
ing the story of technological innovation, a now-historical account
focusing on a thin slice of time: the early twenty-fi rst century and the
beginning of the War on Terror. Yet on another level it is an attempt to
address, through the work of contemporary image brokers, some ques-
tions about documentary images and their relationship to political
imaginations that long predate digital journalism. Moreover, although
this book builds on scholarship about images of suff ering and atrocity,
I did long-term fi eldwork with image brokers to be able to analyze such
images alongside frames of everyday life.14 I agree with the critical
Introduction | 7
importance of analyzing what philosopher Judith Butler calls “frames
of war.” Yet each time we focus our scholarship exclusively on confl ict
photography we risk narrowing our investigation in ways similar to
how the US military manages visual access through embed positions. By
not focusing exclusively on the coverage of war or of atrocities but
rather on the everyday work of images brokers, I hope to render visible
how framing mechanisms are always at work—with signifi cant political
ramifi cations—before, during, after, and alongside military action.15
I could not hope to understand how photographs moved and accrued
value through their international circulation by studying any one insti-
tution or subject matter. So rather than analyze a single object of mass
media in a bounded geographical setting—news images of Afghanistan
or photographs in the French press—this book focuses on the networks
through which international news images move. It highlights the struc-
tural limitations and possibilities that shape decisions about news
images as well as their use in contemporary ways of worldmaking.
Not all photographs are news images. Certain photographs become
news images through their circulation.16 For example, a family photo-
graph of former president of Iraq Saddam Hussein became a news
image once it was removed from the album in his palace and circulated
as a visual document of an opulent lifestyle, one that interested news
publications could purchase for use.17 To understand news images, we
need to attend not only to the specifi c frame in question, with its par-
ticular aesthetic and material qualities, whether fi lm or digital, but also
to the context in which any particular photograph is produced and the
route it travels to become news.18 Though credited to a single individual
when credit information is provided at all, a news image is produced by
a network. After the photographer’s initial framing of the shot, the fi nal
image encountered in a publication has passed in front of the eyes—
and, until recently, through the hands—of several decision makers:
image brokers and their institutions. The business of news images can
be seen as a global industry: the raw material comes from many diff er-
ent locations, the labor is often mobile, and once packaged, the prod-
ucts can travel around the world as complete packages or as material
to be repackaged as part of new assemblages. Although on some level
this is a commodity chain similar to others, manufacturing news as a
product line (journalistic “content”), it is also a genre of knowledge
production, a mode of worldmaking through which we understand the
times and places in which we live. Hence, news images are very particu-
lar products.