The Icon,Distributed: The Spectral Visual Politics of News Photography

Introduction

There is a handful of photos that, through widespread and persistent recirculation, have become widely recognised and remembered. These pictures provide broad publics with ‘a real, stable referent’ ¹ that facilitates debate. ² Scholars call these photos icons. But those who study them have begun to question whether individual photos can continue to anchor public discourse as they have in the past. ³

As our media landscape changes, so does the way viewers engage with photos, including icons. Over the past decades, the number and variety of photos in circulation has been growing exponentially, but our capacity for attention has not, which means that fewer photos are likely to become widely recognised and remembered, and so, that a key visual resource for public debate may be disappearing. ⁴

At the same time, viewers are using the iconic label to describe photos more than ever before, a phenomenon that Hariman and Lucaites suggest is a symptom of anxiety, an expression of a desire for continuity in a media landscape that seems increasingly devoid of it. ⁵ If Hariman and Lucaites are right, there is a clear need to identify alternative visual forms that might anchor public debate and provide viewers with a sense of continuity. If they are wrong, then the increased use of the label suggests something else entirely: a stabilising visual form from which viewers derive a sense of continuity may be emerging or already exist and the traditional conception of the icon simply cannot account for it. In both cases, there is an evident need to rethink iconicity today.

In this article, my objective is to propose a new way of thinking about what it means for photos to be iconic. I focus on the news industry because most of the photos that scholars call icons have originated from the news. I ask: How does the icon shape broader news photography and how can it be retheorised to account for this broad influence today?

I argue that we need to rethink how icons work in the news in two fundamental ways.

First, with regard to individual news photos, I describe how iconicity can be understood as a degree of adherence to a generic iconic blueprint. From a visual perspective, it follows that iconicity is itself best understood as a spectrum, reflecting this degree of adherence, not, as it is usually understood, as a category established through the inclusion of certain photos and the exclusion of others.

Second, I argue that news photography as a whole can be thought of as an icon because it shares a common visual structure. It is from this relatively stable visual structure that viewers derive a sense of continuity. I distinguish this new theorisation of the icon from five existing forms proposed by scholars over the past three decades that also privilege photographic multitudes rather than singular photos. Like these existing forms, the news icon that I outline in this article refers to a form of stability that is not evident in discrete photos but that becomes discernible through continuous exposure to news photography. Unlike these existing forms, however, the news icon that I theorise affords stability through a recurring visual structure, not through recurring content, whether a recurring theme, narrative, object, or subject in news coverage.

The retheorisations of iconicity and the icon that I advance provide an explanation for the increasing use of the language of icons that does not cast viewers as deeply anxious or simply mistaken. They explain how viewers are able to derive a sense of continuity from the stable visual structure of news photography at a time when the metaphor of a photographic flood has never seemed more appropriate.

This article has four sections. In the first section, I examine the political role of icons. After defining the category of iconic photos, I discuss the stabilising role that these icons play in public culture and I outline a generic iconic blueprint that I use as a basis to later retheorise iconicity and the icon. In the second section, I discuss why scholars have begun to question whether icons can continue to anchor public discourse as they have in the past. In the third section, I discuss the influence of icons in the news industry, and, drawing on the generic iconic blueprint that I outline in the first section of the article, I advance a definition of iconicity as a spectrum of visual adherence to this blueprint. In the fourth and final section of this article, I discuss the implications of this retheorisation of iconicity as a spectrum. Here, I describe how this notion requires that we rethink the news icon: as a unifying visual structure discernible across news photography, not as singular news photos. Before the conclusion, I briefly discuss the implications that my retheorisation of iconicity and the icon might have beyond the news.

The Political Role of Iconic Photos

To understand their political role, it is important to be able to distinguish iconic photos from other photos. Unsurprisingly, there is no consensus about the definition of icons. ⁶ Contemporary investigations of the pictures do, however, gravitate around the analytical category laid out in an influential body of work by Hariman and Lucaites. ⁷ Their definition of iconic photos is as follows:

[they are] (a) widely recognized and remembered, (b) thought to represent important historical events, (c) [evoke] strong emotional responses, and (d) [are] appropriated across a wide range of media, genres, and topics (c). ⁸

In addition to these characteristics, based on Hariman and Lucaites’ work, Lene Hansen suggests that a photo must continue to resurface, in original or appropriated form, at least a decade after their initial publication. ⁹ Certainly, all scholars agree that endurance in public memory, their ‘celebrity’, ¹⁰ is a key marker of iconicity, even if disagreements surrounding the speed at which photos can become iconic remain. After all, ‘some pictures prove more resistant to the passing of time than others’, while others only become ‘the representation of [an] event’ over time, ¹¹ and in all cases ‘the prominence of a news icon may rise and fall in relation to changing social realities’. ¹² Ultimately, the speed at which photos rise to prominence is only relevant in discussions of iconicity if their salience in public memory endures, and an assessment of such endurance is necessarily retroactive – when exactly photos can be said to have become icons remains an arbitrary threshold.

Few photos become icons. Hariman and Lucaites claim that, in the West, there are ‘fifteen, twenty, maybe thirty [iconic photos] at the most across a span of generations’. ¹³ To put things into perspective, according to recent estimates, nearly two trillion photos are made a year. ¹⁴ Rigney and Smits refer to the handful of photos discussed by Hariman and Lucaites as a ‘hyper-canonical’ variety. ¹⁵ Relaxing the definition of icons to include important, but not hyper-canonical photos would still yield a numerically negligeable set relative to the overall number of photos produced. While Hariman and Lucaites provide little quantitative data to support their claims about quantities, recent research suggests that they appear to have at least been correct about the existence of iconic photos and about their rarity. ¹⁶

Icons provide a sense of continuity to broad publics. Through recirculation, icons become the ‘recognizable tips of informational icebergs’ in an endless cycle of breaking news. ¹⁷ Widely recognised and remembered, they become ‘facilitators for debate’, ¹⁸ and in this sense, they serve as a ‘safe haven in the storm’ that grounds discussion in a ‘real, stable referent’. ¹⁹ They become a shared cultural resource upon which broad publics can draw. Crucially, icons are ‘customer-friendly images’ ²⁰ because they commodify history. ²¹ The importance of the events that the photos depict justifies their subsequent recirculation for commemorative purposes, ²² or, as Barbie Zelizer notes, to illustrate other events of the same genre. ²³ In both cases, this recirculation makes viewers more receptive to the photos. ²⁴ But icons are also customer friendly because, despite being relatively sanitised, a precondition for wide circulation, ²⁵ they can still shock viewers. ²⁶ They shock because they contrast ‘everyday situations and experiences familiar to a viewing audience’ with the ‘severity’ or alleged significance of depicted events. ²⁷ That icons shock may not sound conducive to creating a sense of continuity, but the shock that they cause is precisely why they become prominent in public discourse, a prerequisite for becoming widely recognised and remembered.

Icons provide a sense of stability to broad publics. Icons do not just continually resurface; their meaning also becomes relatively stable. It may be simplistic to claim that ‘icons tell people what they already know’, ²⁸ but they certainly ask questions that particular publics already have easy answers for ²⁹ – part of how they attain widespread appeal – triggering ‘believer-friendly epiphanies’. ³⁰ They articulate the new through old visual structures, ³¹ including by quoting existing icons. ³² By replicating existing visual blueprints, ³³ iconic photos convert new situations into timeworn scenarios, ³⁴ granting viewers an ‘instant and effortless connection’ to the deeply meaningful. ³⁵ Through particular cultural lenses, iconic photos become containers for cherished values, partially affirmed in opposition to profane ones. ³⁶ Insofar as icons shock, thus, they tend to slip ‘between [viewers] and reality like a ‘protective layer’’. ³⁷ Icons transform new situations into timeworn scenarios.

While icons provide viewers with a sense of continuity through their enduring presence in the media landscape, they are not fully stabilising at the level of meaning. Different publics worship different icons because they attribute different meanings to the same pictures. Over time, as they recirculate, the meaning that people ascribe to them also changes. ³⁸ As with all photos, icons are part of an ‘open-ended process of circulation that contains a multitude of spectators, each one having a distinctive encounter while also aggregating into multiple patterns of response’. ³⁹ Unlike other photos, however, because of the process of debate that icons facilitate through their continued recirculation, and their replication of existing visual blueprints, distinctive encounters with these photos are more likely to become part of the dominant patterns of response in a given cultural context. ⁴⁰ Indeed, although their meanings ebb and flow, ‘processes of online circulation, memeification, and commodification mostly do not threaten the original meaning of the iconic photographs’, instead they appear to ‘reproduce the dominant message(s) that made them iconic in the first place’. ⁴¹

A large part of the reason that photos become icons is that they are visually striking. To borrow a term from the jury of the 2024 World Press Photo, icons can be said to have an ‘iconic composition’. ⁴² It is possible to extrapolate a generic blueprint of this composition from scholarly descriptions of icons. I have grouped similar characteristics together for the sake of legibility, but they are not distinct; they are mutually constitutive and reinforce each other. Following Martin Kemp, it is important to note that the blueprint that follows is fuzzy: the category it establishes may ‘have broadly agreed characteristics but [its] boundaries and membership are open to dispute’. ⁴³ Additionally, few of the characteristics are explicitly visual, and none of them has a singular form of visual expression, so there is a need to imagine how these characteristics might look.

Uncertain Iconic Futures?

Over the past centuries, icons have weathered significant social, political and cultural change. Originally religious, they survived the death of God. ⁷⁶ During the 19th century, the natural miracle that photography was seen to represent – it was originally called the ‘pencil of nature’ and ‘sun painting’ – replaced divine impressions and the divinely inspired penmanship of monks. ⁷⁷ With God increasingly out of the frame, icons became the sacred pictures of ‘modern religion’ like science and human rights. ⁷⁸ These photos also weathered the profound crises of the 20th century, which might have been expected to act as iconic barriers. ⁷⁹ The Holocaust, chief among such crises, deeply marked photographic theory as audiences questioned the role that photos should play, and indeed could play, in representing what many viewed as simply unrepresentable. ⁸⁰ While no singular icon emerged from the camps, despite the ‘flood’ of horrifying news photos that swept the world after their liberation and documentation, ⁸¹ icons remained a fixture of the post-Holocaust world. Indeed, more icons and more genocides were still to come, and today, it seems to be fundamental changes to the media landscape that pose the greatest threat to these photos.

Three key trends upended the established pipelines of 19th- and 20th-century public photography that had helped produce icons: the shift from analogue to digital photography, the increased affordability and resultant pervasiveness of digital camera technology, and the apparition and persistence of networked platforms that not only permit but also encourage their users to make and share photos almost instantaneously.

These three shifts have made it increasingly easy for ordinary people to produce and peruse ever-growing collections of public and private photos. Traditionally, many iconic photos originated in news coverage, but the top-down monopoly that legacy media held over the public photo has been fractured. ⁸² Only decades ago, photos on the front pages of leading newspapers or inserted beside television newscasters served as the shared photographic basis for deliberation at the national and even international level. Today, photos susceptible of becoming icons are increasingly born online. ⁸³ The rise of social media platforms has diversified the sources of the photos people see, and ‘impromptu publics’ now catapult them into greatness from the bottom-up in unpredictable ways. ⁸⁴ While the news still plays an important role in producing and circulating photos that become a basis for broad conversation and deliberation, it no longer monopolises this dynamic.

Over the past decades, these three trends have also encouraged a fundamental shift in photographic practice, one from photography as memorialisation to photography as communication. ⁸⁵ People have always used photos to communicate, but they increasingly use them as the visual equivalent of speech acts, as visual supplements or substitutes for the written or spoken word, and less as visual cues for memory or artefacts intended for repeated viewing. Fewer and fewer photos are meant to be treasured. ⁸⁶ The destruction not only of artworks but also (analogue) photos of people has often been viewed as ‘barbaric’, ⁸⁷ but destruction is now a condition for the creation of many digital photos. With Snapchat, for example, the ‘unstable and short-lived’ nature of the picture, which is automatically destroyed if not saved, is precisely what makes the application attractive to its users. ⁸⁸

This shift from photography as a practice of memorialisation to photography as practice of communication is reshaping the dynamics that underpin iconicity. Used as ephemeral forms of communication, the role ascribed to photos in establishing broad and enduring cultural memory, which underpins the stabilising role associated with icons, is diminishing. ⁸⁹ This shift in practice, permitted by the gratuity of digital photography and encouraged by platforms like social media, results in a mass exchange of photos. Our capacity for attention, however, remains limited. So, with more and more varied photos to attend to, striking ones can only stand out for a short time before being displaced by others. ⁹⁰

People regularly describe modern photography as a flood. Scholars take part in this discourse too. They liken photography to a storm, a blizzard, a torrent, a flood, a deluge and a tsunami. ⁹¹ Death is a central theme in photographic theory, ⁹² so central in fact that Peter Buse describes us as trapped in a ‘melancholic paradigm’ entrenched by theorists such as Walter Benjamin, Roland Barthes and Susan Sontag. ⁹³ But photographic theory is also trapped in a paradigm of suspicion. ⁹⁴ In the West, a distrust of representation is often traced back as far as Plato and his view of art as duplicitous: just as susceptible to empower as it is to disempower. ⁹⁵ Originally, a distrust of representation in the broadest sense, the charge of duplicity mainly clung to pictures, somehow eliding the written and spoken word despite their routine malicious uses. ⁹⁶

Critics have long complained about the volume and nature of photos in circulation. There are ‘too many photographs in the world’, they lament, which suggests that they think that there are too many photos of the wrong kind in the world. ⁹⁷ Invariably, it is the wrong people who make the wrong kind of photo. ⁹⁸ For Michel de Certeau, the so-called ‘wrong people’ have always been the ‘massive marginality’ of capitalist markets, that is, the consumers whose formal responsibilities were not judged to include the production of cultural artefacts. ⁹⁹ Indeed, photos did not become the most suspicious kind of picture just because ‘they conform so closely to reality’, ¹⁰⁰ they became so because it also quickly became clear that with a camera, anyone could make them. In 1884, the New York Times already compared the proliferation of cameras to a cholera epidemic – a waterborne disease – and referred to amateur photographers as ‘camera lunatics’ – a joke of course. ¹⁰¹

The family of metaphors that cast photography as a flood is not a recent phenomenon. The photographic flood was originally analogue. In 1927, Siegfried Kracauer already complained that a ‘flood of photos [was sweeping] away the dams of memory’ betraying ‘an indifference to what things mean’ ¹⁰² – although it is worth noting that for Kracauer, the wrong people were the bourgeoisie, ¹⁰³ not the massive marginality evoked by de Certeau. Influential photographic theorists and public intellectuals including Roland Barthes and Susan Sontag have also relied on metaphors of flood or ones that threaten a flood. John Berger likened advertising, often incorporating photos, to the climate and its weather systems. ¹⁰⁴ Victor Burgin, who likened photos to our natural environment, also described news and advertising imagery as a flood. ¹⁰⁵ Roland Barthes did so too in Camera Lucida, almost in passing. ¹⁰⁶ Moreover, at the turn of this century, while the first digital cameras were hitting the market, Susan Sontag bemoaned the loss of ‘sacred and meditative space’ required to turn photos into ‘objects of contemplation’. Such places, she claimed, were being paved over by consumer architecture that privileged quantity over quality – a sort of flood plain. ¹⁰⁷ Today, Anna Kornbluh, while not a photographic theorist, describes us as trapped in a cyber-flood plain, ‘drowning in a deluge of images without context, words without meaning, information without distinction’ ¹⁰⁸ – echoing the words of Kracauer a full century later.

Flood metaphors are pervasive in discourse about photography – it is difficult to write about photography as anything but a liquid – but they have always been highly misleading. The use of natural metaphors to describe data erases the agency involved in the production and circulation of media by suggesting that they arise and move naturally. ¹⁰⁹ The image of a flood is particularly mystifying. Brownian motion, the movement of particles suspended in liquids, is random. As David Campbell notes, however, the way people encounter photos is not ¹¹⁰ – neither in 1927 nor today. Take the internet. The image of a flood obscures the fact that people are not exposed to the billions of photos that people circulate daily. The structure of the internet and the choices that users make as they navigate it – or withdraw from it – results in exposure to a relatively small and curated selection. ¹¹¹

Not only do flood metaphors evoke randomness, but they also downplay the agency of those who view photos. Viewers find themselves not just in nature but also at the mercy of its destructive power. Even milder language, like talk of flow, ‘intimates potential disaster’ since flow ‘always risks overflow: there is always the sense of always just managing, the risk of too much, of flooding’. ¹¹² For De Certeau, consumers are far from hopeless. For him, the different and calculated ‘ways of using products imposed by a dominant economic order’ constitutes a whole ‘other production’. ¹¹³ These tactics of consumption, more so than the consumed products, are what ‘introduce a Brownian movement into the system’. ¹¹⁴ ‘Everyone knows’, writes W. J. T. Mitchell, ‘that television is bad for you, and that its badness has something to do with the passivity and the fixation of the spectator’. ¹¹⁵ But de Certeau, who himself complained about the ‘cancerous’ growth of sight-centric phenomena during his lifetime, including television, rightly asked: how much do we really know about what spectators ‘make’ with the imagery when they are thought to be doing nothing at all? ¹¹⁶ The answer to this question is that we do not know all that much. In fact, Hariman and Lucaites see this kind of question, and the importance it ascribes to the interpretative agency of consumers, as the basis for moving beyond the paradigm of suspicion, to theorise the photo as an abundant public good. ¹¹⁷ They are explicit: language of flooding is hindering this shift. ¹¹⁸

The trends discussed so far do not set up conditions favourable to the emergence or endurance of icons as stable referents that facilitate public debate and deliberation. Quite the opposite. The growing (but cautious) consensus is that the ‘Golden Era’ of ‘photographic icons may have come to an end’. ¹¹⁹ Few scholars have sought to validate this claim – it will take years if not decades to be sure – but the number of photos that qualify as iconic, following the strict academic definition outlined in the previous section, does appear to be decreasing. ¹²⁰ This is why Hariman and Lucaites view the increasing use of the term ‘icon’ as a symptom of desire for stable referents and a sense of continuity in today’s hyperactive media environment. ¹²¹

To address the uncertainties surrounding the future of the photographic icon, uncertainties amplified by the purchase of liquid metaphors, and our relative inability to think photography without them, scholars have mainly sought to theorise faster icons. The ‘hypericon’, ¹²² the ‘instant icon’, ¹²³ the ‘instant news icon’ ¹²⁴ and the ‘instant global icon’ ¹²⁵ are concepts that not only capture the wide or global fame of pictures but also the high speed at which they attain such fame. They are very influential today, but they suggest a Brownian view of photography. As Zygmunt Bauman notes, fluids ‘do not keep to any shape for long and are constantly ready (and prone) to change it’ and so ‘for them it is the flow of time that counts, more than the space they happen to occupy: that space, after all, they fill but “for a moment”’. ¹²⁶

These speed-centric theorisations of the icon do not address the issue of diminishing stability and the loss of a sense of continuity. The initial speed of their spread does not assure their endurance in public memory. ¹²⁷ As Mortensen, Stuart, and Peters acknowledge themselves, these conceptualisations of the icon, which Gillian Rose calls ‘viral icons’, share a blurred boundary with all the other media that rapidly attain fame of a usually ephemeral kind. ¹²⁸ While faster icons might help us better understand the current photographic landscape and associated communicative dynamics, ¹²⁹ they do not function as icons have in the past. ¹³⁰ There is a clear need to retheorise iconicity and the icon with stability and continuity in mind.

The Iconic News Logic and Iconicity as a Visual Spectrum

To understand how icons shape news photography, it is worth considering why so many of these photos have originated in news coverage. Up until a couple of decades ago, the news, often called the ‘first rough-draft of history’, ¹³¹ held a near monopoly over the public photo of world events. The advent of the internet, and social media platforms in particular, has not only sped up this drafting process, ¹³² but it has also decentralised it and made it conversational. ¹³³ However, there is more to the close relationship between icons and the news than the role it plays in this drafting process and its access to a broad audience.

How the industry commodifies information explains the close relationship between icons and the news. Successful news coverage requires a form of storytelling that is ‘accessible, understandable and formulaic’. ¹³⁴ Indeed, ‘journalists are often faced with telling news of the unusual and unexpected [. . .] on tight deadlines with little information’, which means that they need to rely on established forms of knowledge, on cultural memory. ¹³⁵ Some scholars go so far as calling the news a form of ‘stereotyped novelty’. ¹³⁶ The same logics extend to its visual coverage. ¹³⁷ News photography is also characterised by visual imitation of established forms, ¹³⁸ not least because the alignment of meaning between text and photo is a central feature of photojournalism. ¹³⁹ News photos, like the words that journalists write, need to and do produce ‘recognitions of the world as we have already learned to appropriate it’. ¹⁴⁰ Scholars also describe photojournalism as a machine of visual self-replication. ¹⁴¹ The fact that many icons hail from the news is not so surprising considering the news industry strives to do what the icon must do by definition: ‘[reduce] complex social relations to a consumable image rather than elaborating a situation’. ¹⁴²

Existing icons shape news photography in the present. Photographers view these photos as the ‘command performance’ of photojournalism; they are instances ‘of visual eloquence [that become] the standard against which everyday efforts in news and documentary photography are to be measured’. ¹⁴³ Notably, ‘an icon supports its claim to iconic status through referencing older icons’ – a dynamic scholars call ‘inter-iconicity’. ¹⁴⁴ This handful of widely recognised and remembered photos serves as a template for photographers and editors (and everyone else), but the icon is more than this existing collection, it is also an ideal.

Photos have the potential to become iconic. As its command performance, icons ‘condense techniques and functions that [are] distributed more broadly’ in photojournalism. ¹⁴⁵ This claim, while true, emphasises the singularity of icons rather than the similarities present across the overwhelming share of non-iconic news photos. Dahmen, Mielczarek and Perlmutter invert this focus by outlining the notion of an ‘iconic potential’ to discuss non-icons, both inside and outside of the news. ¹⁴⁶ As they put it: ‘In the modern era, any photograph taken by anyone could potentially become iconic’. ¹⁴⁷ After all, the iconic status of photos has always involved some measure of ‘dumb luck’. ¹⁴⁸ Crucially, they argue, this potential varies from photo to photo. ¹⁴⁹ In a response to this argument, entitled Predicting the Present, Hariman and Lucaites acknowledge the validity of the premise, but they reiterate the value of the icon when used as an analytical category for ‘figuring out what has happened and what it means, not what will happen’. ¹⁵⁰ Although the notion of an iconic potential suggests predictive applications, its value does not necessarily lie in prediction.

The notion of an iconic potential also shapes news photography in the present. Photographers do not find icons, they produce them by drawing on a deep well of cultural resources, from ‘the middlebrow arts’ and ‘popular iconography’ to ‘visual grammars learned from film’ and ‘advertising’. ¹⁵¹ Even as they document routine events, these photographers are always searching for ‘exceptional photographs’. ¹⁵² So do editors. They ‘sort through the clutter’ of photos already curated and later submitted by photographers ‘to select the most dynamic and telling ones’. ¹⁵³ The exceptional photos that photographers and editors are looking for are not icons, but the icon: photos that satisfy the generic iconic blueprint. At every stage of the news pipeline, the trained eyes of professionals look to make and select photos with the highest iconic potential.

From a strictly visual perspective, the iconic potential of a photo is already actual. Certainly, news professionals seek to predict the reactions that viewers will have upon seeing the photos they select for publication, ¹⁵⁴ but only in time can they know if their predictions were correct, and only in time can one assess if iconic criteria are satisfied. The importance of an event, for instance, is not a given but the product of discourse and the outcome of deliberation. Visually, however, the iconic potential of a photo is already manifest. News professionals can assess it in the present because its assessment involves a comparison between the visual structure of the photo and established cultural resources, it does not involve speculation about public reception. From a visual perspective, whether or not a photo becomes widely recognised and remembered is irrelevant. Because icons, both as an existing collection and as an ideal, shape the production and selection of news photos, news photography can be said to follow an iconic logic.

Thinking about the influence of this iconic logic on news photography as a whole requires reconceptualising iconicity as a matter of degree. If the iconic potential of news photos varies from photo to photo, ¹⁵⁵ and is, from a strictly visual perspective, actual rather than potential, then with visual structure still in mind, the notion of iconic potential is best understood as an iconic degree. This notion of iconic degree, in turn, evokes iconicity as a visual spectrum rather than a binary category of photo that includes icons and excludes all other photos, as it is usually understood. A variation in iconic degree would thus refer to the extent to which the visual structure of any (news) photo adheres to the characteristics of the generic iconic blueprint, outlined in the first section of this article, with adherence to each characteristic itself a matter of degree. This understanding of iconicity can also be used to highlight patterns of deviation from the iconic logic, revealing topics of coverage that may not be as amenable to iconic representation as others. Dynamics of climate change without a photographable human element is an obvious example. This understanding of iconicity can also help identify topics of coverage characterised by intentional deviations from the iconic logic. Coverage of refugee crises and protests, which tends to rely on photos of faceless crowds, represents a clear deviation from the iconic blueprint. Such intentional deviations may evidence topics where the search for highly iconic photos is abandoned in favour of a reliance on dehumanising and sensational alternatives that, while far less iconic, may better serve the ideological and commercial incentives of the news industry.

To describe the news as driven by an iconic logic, one that, from a visual perspective, is actual rather than potential, has implications for how one thinks about iconicity in individual photos. Assessing the degree to which a photo adheres to the generic iconic blueprint can tell us something about the extent to which, and the manner in which, they challenge or reproduce the dominant visual structure of western news photography. The news is also a commodity of repeated consumption, which raises important questions about the effect that this logic has on viewers over time rather than in encounters with individual photos.

Theorising News Photography as a Distributed Icon

Today, discourse about photography tends to emphasise speed rather than space, whether virtual or mental. As I noted in previous sections, influential retheorisations of icons do this too. The notion of physical space is almost absent, which is understandable: ‘merely a few minutes are now enough for a news publication to disseminate a photograph taken thousands of miles away’. ¹⁵⁶ However, as Kornbluh notes, in media environments that privilege speed, speed itself becomes a style. ¹⁵⁷ Styles ebb and flow over time, but they have a distinctly spatial character: they spread. In this final section, starting with the newsroom, I discuss how acceleration across the news pipeline has reinforced the iconic logic, and with space in mind, I theorise news photography as an icon, an icon with a distributed form.

A sense of urgency drives newsrooms. Fully digital news pipelines now make sourcing, selecting, and publishing photos a faster process than ever before, but this increased efficiency has only hurried the pace of editors’ work. The emergence of the 24-hour news cycle has shortened the time between news deadlines, hastening the process through which editors select photos. ¹⁵⁸ The trade-off between speed and quality has always been a factor in newsrooms, but the sense of urgency surrounding the selection and publication of news photos has increased with digitisation; speed is now a chief concern for editors. ¹⁵⁹ This concern is understandable. Increasing talk about photos becoming global icons instantaneously, ¹⁶⁰ and the prospect of their rise to fame itself being worthy of news coverage, ¹⁶¹ make photos a form of breaking news in and of themselves rather than a mere visual accompaniment. The discourse surrounding the photo of Trump, bloodied and defiant, is a good example of this phenomenon.

The sense of urgency in the newsroom also shapes the practice of news photographers in the field. Freelance photographers now supply the news with the majority of its photos. ¹⁶² These freelancers have to match the tempo of the industry with the added threat of precarity associated with unsalaried, assignment-based work. While the freelance model is not without benefits for the photographers, like greater work flexibility and editorial control, their relationship with editors has become almost exclusively transactional. ¹⁶³ To make a living, they often need to ‘go in, grab a dozen easy, superficial pictures, get out, edit, distribute and start the next job in less than a day’. ¹⁶⁴ Not only must they shoulder the burden of their production costs upfront, which heightens the financial precarity of their work, they receive little or no feedback about their photos from editors. ¹⁶⁵ It is the sold pictures that become the template for future sales.

These dynamics reinforce the iconic logic of the news. Rushed, both editors and photographers must rely on a visual shorthand to make and select photos to satisfy constant demand and to make a living. Combined with the sensational and formulaic visual tendency integral to the news as a media commodity, the result is an intensification of the iconic logic, and by extension, a phenomenon of visual convergence. It is hardly surprising that prominent photojournalists lament that in the digital era the news has become a machine of superficial visual self-replication. ¹⁶⁶ Academics discuss this visual shorthand, but they tend to focus on the tropes associated with their research interests, and by extension, with the coverage of specific subjects, like refugee crises, protest, war, or climate change. Respectively, standout tropes include faceless crowds and crowded boats, ¹⁶⁷ confrontations with law enforcement, ¹⁶⁸ child victims ¹⁶⁹ and polar bears. ¹⁷⁰ But academics rarely if ever discuss the foundational visual logics that cut across coverage and underpin these different narratives, like the iconic logic outlined in the previous section, even though these logics establish the very boundaries of visual possibility in the news – the visual grammar through which individual tropes can be articulated.

From a visual perspective, the news functions as a distributed icon. If one steps back from specific subjects of coverage, the stabilising effect that the iconic logic produces at the scale of news photography is best understood as a form of enduring ‘multiple unity’ – to borrow an expression from Jacques Rancière’s discussion of photographic seriality. ¹⁷¹ If the iconic logic describes the tendency the news has to privilege photos with a high degree of iconicity, the unity of this multiplicity is to be found in a common visual structure, distributed across photos and evident in each to varying degrees.

Rather than testifying to an anxious desire for stability, the increasing use of the language of icons highlighted by Hariman and Lucaites likely testifies to the existence or emergence new kinds of stability, like the distributed news icon. Just as the traditional definition of the icon hinders the discussion of icons with shorter lifecycles, ¹⁷² the concept is unhelpful for identifying new or emerging forms of distributed stability since the label can only be attributed to individual photos. This is problematic because as people contend with greater volumes of visual data, they also learn to sift through them more efficiently, producing new forms of media literacy at the expense of the traditional kind. ¹⁷³ For instance, running parallel to the increasing monetisation of focused attention, ¹⁷⁴ art historian Claire Bishop describes the emergence of a new form of disordered attention, one that involves practices of skimming and sampling. ¹⁷⁵ This form of attention explains how the stability associated with the distributed icon emerges: it is identifiable through the abundance of photos as they race along the information ‘superhighway’ to borrow Kornbluh’s expression. ¹⁷⁶ It may be difficult to read individual numberplates while standing next to a highway, but it is relatively easy to identify popular car colours. Abundance is, after all, a prerequisite for pattern recognition. The pervasiveness of the shared iconic structure of the news, while of varying degree in individual photos, provides viewers with a relatively stable and enduring visual referent across news photography.

Five conceptualisations of distributed icons already exist and are worth surveying to illustrate and distinguish the distributed news icon I have evoked above. Over the last few decades, as the media landscape became digital, a handful of scholars probed the validity of the icon as it was traditionally defined by privileging the notion of space rather than speed.

First: generic icons. As will become clear, these icons are not actually of a distributed kind, but the idea of their multiple unity warrants their inclusion in this list. David Perlmutter presciently coined the ‘generic icon’ nearly 30 years ago ¹⁷⁷ – before the emergence of the connective environment that has since sparked further interest in generic visuals. ¹⁷⁸ Unlike ‘discrete icons’, the memory of which is tied to individual pictures (those that Hariman and Lucaites refer to as icons), or the broader category of ‘generic visuals’ like stock photography, ¹⁷⁹ ‘generic icons’ present across different photos through a unifying visual narrative. ¹⁸⁰ While the visual narrative itself is memorable, for example ‘protester being beaten by police’ or ‘political leaders shaking hands’, the generic icons themselves do not remain individually memorable. ¹⁸¹ Perlmutter stops short of ascribing the term icon to the memorable narrative, the ‘multiple unity’ of the collection, instead ascribing it to discrete and easily forgotten photos, falling back into the traditional notion of the icon as a singular picture. Nevertheless, by labelling individual, forgettable photos as icons, Perlmutter set an important precedent for discussions about the changing form of the icon in subsequent scholarship. His concept, far from outdated, is undergoing a productive revival today in the fields of politics and international relations, ¹⁸² with some scholars in other fields even theorising the visual form independently of his work, ¹⁸³ a testament to its continued relevance and analytical value.

Second: bio-icons. Bishnupriya Ghosh lays out a compelling case for the iconicity of people, which arises from the popularisation of their biographies. ¹⁸⁴ Discrete photos of these people (e.g. Gandhi, Obama, Trump, Hitler), even if not iconic per se, do function as debate facilitators since stability is ‘focalised through biographical fragments that induce recipients of the image to assign specific properties to the image’. ¹⁸⁵ Here, of course, the religious antecedent is clear: religious icons often depict saintly (or satanic) figures. The same dynamic could be said to apply to photos of notable things. For instance, Boudana, Cohen and Frosh note that the ‘event architecture’ of aggregate icons, discussed shortly, often ‘includes the formal visual dimensions of actual architecture’. ¹⁸⁶ This dynamic also applies in the case of ‘bonding icons’. ¹⁸⁷ For example, in 2015, during the aftermath of terror attacks in France, a logo that amalgamated the peace sign, the Eiffel Tower, and the national motto circulated widely. ¹⁸⁸

Third: what I will call collective icons. In their research on the way people remember the visual coverage of Hurricane Katrina seven years on, Dahmen and Miller noted that more than ‘one memory, one moment, one person, one event, or one photograph’ stood in for the events that followed its devastation. ¹⁸⁹ Influenced by Perlmutter, among others, they suggested that the nature of the media environment justified a redefinition the icon: ‘Perhaps the moment in time [of the icon] becomes a motif across time where themes of visuals replace the singular photo’ and the ‘photos become more collective and thematic rather than individual and episodic’. ¹⁹⁰ Dahmen and Christensen, reach a similar conclusion in their analysis of the 10-year anniversary coverage of 9/11, despite the recurrence of one (iconic) photo: ‘iconicity – as we have traditionally defined it – is more evasive in the digital era’. ¹⁹¹ In neither case do the authors explicitly name this new visual phenomenon, so to reflect their emphasis on its collective nature, I have called it the collective icon.

Fourth: aggregate icons. Boudana, Cohen, and Frosh describe the ‘aggregate icon’ as ‘the aggregate image of the scene created by multiple photographs’ – like the ‘visual scene’ of the burning towers on 9/11. ¹⁹² It is unclear whether the collective icon evoked by Dahmen and Miller qualifies as an aggregate icon, since the destruction wrought by Hurricane Katrina was less localised than that of the 9/11 attacks, and photos of the destruction may not have been able to establish a unified ‘visual scene’ as described by Boudana, Cohen, and Frosh. ¹⁹³ Nevertheless, the aggregate icon certainly qualifies as a collective icon, since the visual scene in question was not captured as a moment in but across time and space. In all but the case of generic icons, the term ‘icon’ is used to refer to a ‘distributed’ and ‘mental or virtual entity’ rather than to one or even many discrete photos – to borrow the description of the aggregate icon offered by Boudana, Cohen and Frosh. ¹⁹⁴

Fifth: constellations. Samuel Merrill discusses iconicity and virality through the prism of internet searches that generate constellations of pictures. ¹⁹⁵ Although Merrill does not describe these constellations as icons in and of themselves, he motions towards their multiple unity by drawing on the concept of the ‘assemblage’, ¹⁹⁶ borrowed from Deleuze and Guattari, which refers to an entity that becomes meaningful through the machine-like imbrication of heterogenous elements into a functioning whole. ¹⁹⁷ As Taina Bucher notes, algorithms, like those that power internet searches, ‘make the world appear in certain ways rather than others’ by ‘ranking, classifying, sorting, predicting, and processing data’. ¹⁹⁸ One can draw an analogy between the algorithms that power image searches and the iconic logic of the news, which describes the formulaic practice of visual production and selection in the news industry that ‘appears’ the world through news photos, and by extension, between constellations and news photography as a distributed icon.

The distributed news icon extends this spatial lineage of the icon in new ways. The ‘generic icon’ is the only type from the above list that enjoys a relative degree of prominence in ongoing discussions about icons. The other four types remain relatively fringe concepts in the literature on icons. The distributed news icon I have proposed in this article reaffirms the significance of this spatial lineage, but it also sets itself apart from the above types in notable ways. Specific to the news, the distributed news icon is the product of an institutional visual logic, which is also the basis of its stability. Apprehending the stability of the icon, even conceptually, requires thinking iconicity through both a visual lens and as a question of degree since it is the tendency to produce highly iconic photos, which do not qualify as icons themselves, that establishes visual stability across news photography. By extension, it is visual structure, not content (whether a recurring theme, narrative, object, or subject) that forms the basis of the icon’s multiple unity. The distributed news icon cuts across topics of coverage, and does so in the present, its reception is ongoing. There is no need to wait a decade to acknowledge its influence on the way viewers imagine the world.

The power of the distributed news icon is immense. Each news photo is a component of a relatively stable whole, but this whole is not one that viewers can encounter in one photo, as is possible with widely recognised and remembered discrete icons. And so, unlike discrete icons, which stand out from the so-called ‘flood’, distributed icons emerge through abundance, so their constituent photos remain largely unremarkable when encountered individually. While repeated exposure to discrete pictures enables them to become individually memorable, ¹⁹⁹ the visual structure of the distributed news icon becomes familiar without the need for the same picture to be repeated. With the distributed news icon, the emphasis that scholars place on widespread memorisation and recognition with discrete icons shifts to that of the multiple unity of news photography – the common visual structure produced by the iconic logic of the news. While viewers derive a sense of continuity from the distributed news icon, it is difficult to engage critically: it is spectral, always a matter of degree, but also, everywhere and nowhere, ghostlike.

The distributed news icon underpins content-based narratives. The dynamic through which the distributed news icon functions sounds almost identical to the dynamic through which ‘millions of banal, anonymous images reproduce normative conceptions of gender, race, class, and other forms of social identity’, ²⁰⁰ but there is a key difference. The process of visual imitation in the news is the product of a deliberate form of communication that privileges legibility. ²⁰¹ The generic iconic blueprint upon which I have based the iconic logic establishes the boundaries of visual possibility in the news, that is, the ‘shape of stories’ to borrow Kurt Vonnegut’s literary concept, ²⁰² but it does not predetermine the protagonists or the moral character of the roles that they are cast in. While the shape of stories constrains how viewers imagine topics of coverage, like refugee crises, protests, war and so on, at the very least, this means that the iconic logic of the news does not preclude the industry from telling more ethical stories. Without absolving the news industry of its role in perpetuating and even generating harmful and dehumanising visual narratives for profit, or omitting humanising ones, if the news privileges legibility, the industry will tell more ethical stories if more ethical stories become the broader legible norm. The news is only one front on this discursive battlefield, and as Stuart Hall described the field of culture, it is one ‘where no once-for-all victories are obtained but where there are always strategic positions to be won and lost’. ²⁰³

Conclusion

In this article, my objective was to propose a new way of thinking about what it means for photos to be iconic. My discussion focused on news photography because most of the photos that scholars call icons have originated from news coverage. I asked: How does the icon shape broader news photography and how can it be retheorised to account for this broad influence today?

I argued that we need to rethink how icons work in two fundamental ways.

First, I described how iconicity can be understood as a degree of adherence to a generic iconic blueprint. I discussed how, if one focuses on visual structure of photos, iconicity is best understood as a spectrum, reflecting this degree of adherence, not, as it is usually understood, as a category established through the inclusion of certain photos and the exclusion of others based on their reception. In other words, from a visual perspective, all (news) photos can be understood as more or less iconic.

Second, I argued that news photography as a whole can be thought of as an icon because it shares a common visual structure. After describing how the news is characterised by an iconic logic, a tendency to produce and select photos with high degrees of visual iconicity, I discussed the effect of this logic: the transformation of news photography as a whole into a distributed icon.

I made these connected arguments across four sections. In the first section, I discussed the political function of icons. I defined the icon as a category of photo, highlighting the stabilising role icons play in public culture and the sense of continuity viewers derive from them. I also outlined a generic iconic blueprint that I used as a basis to later retheorise iconicity and the icon. In the second section, I discussed why scholars have begun to question whether icons can continue to anchor public discourse as they have in the past. Here, I drew attention to three key trends that upended the established pipelines of 19th and 20th century public photography, the eroding effect these trends have had on the stabilising role of the icon, and a family of metaphors that has contributed to the proliferation of speed-based theorisations of new iconic forms. In the third section, I discussed the influential role that icons play in the news industry, notably the role that the idea of icons plays in shaping news photography in the present. Drawing on the generic iconic blueprint that I outlined in the first section, I outlined a definition of iconicity as a spectrum of visual adherence to this blueprint. In the fourth and final section, I described how the notion of iconicity as a spectrum required rethinking the news as a distributed icon. The stability of this icon, a shared visual structure, only becomes discernible across news photography.

Theorising how sources of visual stability are being reconfigured in the digital age is crucial to our understanding of the way that power and politics function today. As I have shown, scholars have been probing the traditional definition of the icon for decades, and while many of their concepts seem promising, the work of Hariman and Lucaites structures much of the academic engagement with the politics of prominent photos. At the heart of this work, is an understanding of the icon as a discrete picture, but this understanding limits how we think about visual stability. In this article, I have made this case with reference to news photography. This is a small part of the picture. Take artificial intelligence, for example. In a recent discussion of the implications that this technology has for photojournalism, David Campbell highlighted two important points. The first, is that these models still only identify and reproduce patterns, and the second, is that current models still need to be trained on data produced by people to avoid breakdown. ²⁰⁴ For the foreseeable future, then, artificial intelligence models are likely to reproduce common visual structures from photos made by people. The iconic logic of the news is therefore already bleeding into artificial intelligence output. While the models are trained on datasets almost entirely made up of amateur photos, which downplays the influence of photojournalism, a more diffuse connection remains. Just as icons serve as the command performance of photojournalism, photojournalism serves as a command performance for broader photographic practice beyond the industry. Leaving aside this connection, even if the visual grammar of icons was revealed to be absent in the synthetic output of artificial intelligence, it would be difficult to discuss this output, or even the most prominent pictures therefrom, with reference to iconicity if iconicity is still understood as a binary category and a descriptor for singular pictures. After all, unlike photos, the synthetic output in question is a visual average of vast numbers of existing photos. Understanding iconicity as a matter of degree associated with a common and relatively stable visual structure offers a far more compelling basis for engaging this synthetic imagery and for theorising its political implications.