Abstract
The news image as commodity is at the center of Zeynep Gürsel’s anthropological take on the business and culture of photojournalism. She opens Image Brokers with the question “What kind of a product is a news image?” a rhetorical move that underscores her dual interest in what news images produce materially as worldmaking objects and how they are materially produced as objects made in the world of journalism. In pursuit of an answer to that question, she deftly mines newsroom chatter and business practices to surmise both global photojournalism’s limitations imposed by bureaucracy and the complex interplay of editorial and corporate interests. The book’s strength lies in its thick description, illuminating the inner workings of a field whose practices are often as obfuscated as they are important to global knowledge production. Gürsel is Associate Professor of International Studies at McAllister College.
The book is split into two parts, titled Image Making and Worldmaking, respectively. Part One lays out the daily workings of photojournalism in business contexts, joining the lineage of scholarship on cultural production as commerce. Part Two considers the “ideologies that inform the practices and larger communities of photojournalism.”
The first chapter rehearses the history of photography as it relates to the production of news images—from Daguerre’s state-sponsored introduction of photographic technology to current digital news imagery moving across international news “wires.” Diverging from the typical history of photojournalism, Gürsel emphasizes the intricate relationship that developed between the news image as a cultural product and as a traded global commodity. A thorough unpacking of news photo agencies, newsmagazines, and their various internal structures follows in the next three chapters. In Part Two, the exclusive tribalism of photojournalism is clearly displayed as Gürsel recounts her time at the highly selective Eddie Adams’s Workshop or “Barnstorm” and World Press Photo’s elite enclave.
Throughout the book, thick description envelops the reader in the world of photojournalism—from the photo sales floor of Agence France-Presse to the cafe dealings of photo editors attending world-revered photojournalism festival Visa pour l’Image. By examining the flow of visual information through various “nodal points”—Gürsel’s term for the spaces that buy and distribute news images—the reality of the rapidly changing newsroom is preserved, as she observed it in the heyday of digitalization. Through Gürsel’s painstaking analysis of corporate and newsroom rationale surrounding the flow of images, it becomes apparent how precarious and important photojournalism’s status is in the world of visual content providers.
There is one glaring gap in Brokers’s wide ethnographic net. The lack of fieldwork at a major daily newspaper is unfortunate, as it could perhaps have given even better insight into the rationales of the myriad processes through which images are brokered. From the moment of photographic capture on assignment through digital upload, circulation to wire services, and into the daily grind of web photo galleries and picture spreads, a multitude of decisions are made that are absented from this book. These processes cannot be fully understood without reference to the looming daily deadline, which reduces journalistic choices to the most necessary (if not exactly the “lowest”) common denominator. It is here that analysis of image brokering might have been most enlightening to the reader intrigued by newsroom practices that daily produce and reproduce visual interpretations of our world.
“News images matter,” Gürsel claims, and her book is an excellently researched analysis of why the production and circulation of such images must be thoroughly understood. The need to make news images’ particularities visible as both a worldmaking agent and a commodity is effectively impressed upon any reader of this text. Missing, however, is a more thorough discussion of what these processes of worldmaking mean for the viewers, many of whom derive most if not all of their knowledge of foreign people and places from such imagery. An “imager broker” in this context is both ideological and material, someone who trades on representations of others via the commodity of images. But that ideological thrust of image brokering, though hinted at meagerly across the book, is far too minimal for what this subject deserves and is fundamentally disappointing.
In addition, Gürsel’s emphasis on the particular time and space of photojournalism’s digitalization marks her 2016 book as already out of step with the current time. Salient as her work was in 2003, we are now fully in the midst of Buzzfeed News, Instagram fame, and iPhoneography (where even the term iphoneography has become a relic of the recent past). As titans of global news media strive to remain both relevant and solvent in the digital media realm that seems ever to have outpaced its predecessors, this lengthy rumination set when digital was new misses an opportunity to look ahead. Certainly, the publishing timeline of academic texts cannot keep apace with the 24-hr news cycle or leaps in technology, but the limits of such a timeline are painfully apparent in the 11-year gap between Gürsel’s ethnographic research and the publication of that work. She speaks to news image producers as brokering the “futurepast.” So too are scholars of media archiving the current/past while guessing at the future important.
What is now necessary is a continuation of this work that delves into economies of attention inclusive of contemporary technology such as Instagram and Snapchat, where the world of images and ideas has effectively shifted in the time since Image Brokers’s ethnography. Today, online virality is the standard and images are as likely to be brokered by 15-year-old selfie champions as by news image editors. It is precisely this always-in-flux “newstime” and tech time that Brokers ultimately fails to capture. Even as its pages strive to report and emphasize the complexities of digitalization, the book itself falls prey to the relevance-reducing waves of technological momentum.