Abstract
This exploratory, mixed-methods study uses semi-structured interviews to identify the sources of interference that news photographers encounter and then, using survey research, assesses these interferences’ prevalence. It also uses interview and survey data to identify photographs that photographers are prevented from taking and ones taken despite interference. In so doing, the study illuminates how the constraints photojournalists encounter shape their work and, ultimately, the types of images missing from the mass media. Men and women, and freelancers and staff photographers, encounter different types of obstructions. Anxieties about public visibility, and the desire to control images, predict higher rates of interference. News scenes, police activities, accidents, and private spaces were among the most common scenes photographers were prevented from photographing. Taken together, this study contributes to Shoemaker and Reese’s hierarchy of influences model, by explicating the extra-media and individual sources of influence that shape photojournalistic practice.
Introduction
According to the State of News Photography, a 2016 survey of photojournalists who submitted work to the World Press Photo competition, 60.2 percent of 1198 respondents reported feeling at risk of ‘injury or death during work’ (Hadland et al., 2016: 19). News photographers also face verbal and legal harassment, physical blocks, and other obstructions (Woodward, 2009). These encounters profoundly shape what photographers can access and, ultimately, determine the well of images that can make it into the mass media. As photographer Mitch Epstein recalled regarding American Power, his project on US sites of energy production: ‘I went out on each shooting trip with trepidation. I had to think a situation was really remarkable to put myself on the line for it’ (Woodward, 2009). While any story demands that photographers choose some scenes and omit others, what of the photographs that photographers do not take because of verbal, physical, or other interference? How do concerns about public visibility, and individual and institutional desires to manage images, affect news photographers in the field? What silences or ‘black holes’ in the landscape of visual representation emerge as a result?
This exploratory, two-phase, mixed-methods study has two purposes. First, it uses semi-structured interviews to identify the sources of interference that news photographers encounter and then, using survey research, assesses these interferences’ prevalence. Its second purpose is to use semi-structured interviews and survey research to identify the photographs not taken because of interference. In so doing, the study’s goal is an initial attempt to shed light on an understudied ‘phenomenon’ (Creswell, 2003): how the constraints photojournalists encounter shape their work and, ultimately, images missing from the mass media. In that way, this article contributes theoretically and empirically to Shoemaker and Reese’s (1996) hierarchy of influences model, by explicating the extra-media sources of influence that shape photojournalism. Doing so fills a gap in the study of photographers’ field practices, specifically ‘the processes by which they construct images’, which has ‘long been neglected’ (Bock, 2009: 260). Moreover, by considering a different site in the process of news production from which to assess absences in visual news – before gatekeeping winnows the photographs that make it to press – this project contributes methodologically to the study of silences, which can be easy to miss (Ott et al., 2011). These silences are especially important given news photographs’ role constructing audience perceptions of reality (Midberry, 2017). What they don’t show – as far as the news world is concerned – might as well not exist.
I begin by reviewing the hierarchy of influences and discuss how extra-media influences, employment status, and gender shape photographers’ access to news. I explore the anxieties generated by publicly visible photographs and explain how polysemity, a photograph’s capacity to mean different things to different people, and indexicality, its evidentiary quality, heighten these concerns. I discuss how iconoclasm, the desire to control images, manifests in the constraints news photographers face. After analyzing my findings from a survey and semi-structured interviews, I lay groundwork for building theory about the influences that shape news photographers’ field experiences.
Literature review
Hierarchy of influences
Shoemaker and Reese (1996) establish five levels of influence on news content: the individual, such as gender; media routines, such as gatekeeping; the organization, such as ownership structure; extra-media influences outside the journalistic enterprise; and ideology. These forces, Shoemaker and Reese (1996) explain, shape how stories are told and framed. The levels of influence also interact with one another. For instance, journalists rely on sources (routines), who in turn may be influenced by their own institutions’ drive to shape news that serves their interests. Gender, discussed further below, also interacts with routines, from the assignments editors make to gatekeeping decisions (Bissel, 2000). Taken together, these influences determine that ‘not everything “eligible” to be mass media content actually gets into the media’ (Shoemaker and Reese, 1996: 252). In the case of news photographs, such absences can partly be explained by constraints photographers face, described below.
Extra-media constraints
Photographers, image management, and public and private space
The First Amendment protects photographing and video-recording in and from public space, including private property ‘plainly visible’ from public space; people, including police, without their consent; and government facilities and officials (Stanley, 2011). In practice, however, photojournalists frequently encounter challenges accessing public space (Sherer, 1987). Anecdotal reports of police challenging photographers’ rights are widespread, though photographers are legally permitted to photograph police activities so long as they do not interfere. News photographers may also need background checks or credentials to cover ‘state actors’ like public schools and universities which (legally speaking) are neither public nor private; courtrooms; government business, like the Senate floor; the White House; and to access police-controlled scenes (Bock et al., 2016). Although most state judicial systems allow cameras in courtrooms (according to judges’ discretion), the federal government forbids them. Images are thought to potentially influence a trial’s outcome, which interferes with the constitutionally protected right to a fair trial (Bock and Araiza, 2015: 315; Calzada, 2010: 8; Reporters Committee for Freedom of the Press, n.d.) – an example of the risk of public visibility.
When it comes to specific news events, the state can curtail photographers’ access. For example, the FAA closed civilian airspace during such ‘hotly-contested’ demonstrations as the protests in Standing Rock and Ferguson, Missouri (Eidelman, 2016; Rothert and Rowland, 2014). The ban on photographing soldiers’ coffins returning to the United States, which lasted from 1989 to 2009, started because then-president George H.W. Bush was shown in a split-screen, joking with reporters as coffins containing the remains of US soldiers who had died in Grenada emerged from a plane. This public image threatened the World War II veteran’s brand and ultimately led to 20 years of silence regarding the visual costs of war, which lasted through the bloodiest years of conflict in Iraq and Afghanistan.
When photographers do gain access, the state manages them. Congressional staff control ‘camera shots’ and ‘placement’ (Bock, 2009) and may require photographers join a pool (Sherer, 1988: 47). Both the Obama and George W. Bush administrations restricted photojournalists’ access and supplied the media with images ‘curated by the president’s staff’ (Hendler, 2010: 19). Photographers have also been banned from the White House pool for taking and circulating unflattering presidential portraits (Bock, 2009). Such retribution pressures photographers to take favorable images.
Journalistic and public-safety norms also shape access. Photographers are not legally permitted to enter crime scenes (Blumer, 2002). They can be kept from ‘imminent danger zones, such as a burning house’ (Blumer, 2002: 34–35). Private property owners are also entitled to keep photographers out. Naturally, some might wish to protect themselves from bad press, particularly if they are engaged in disturbing activities. But photographs can also be profitable, which also motivates such obstructions. By blocking photojournalists from covering school sports, for instance, schools can capture the proceeds from reprints and live feeds (Calzada, 2010).
In all, photographers’ access to unplanned news events, credentialed sites, and constitutionally protected space varies. Access may depend on the whim of a single police officer, PR manager, or property owner. What unifies these differences is site managers’ desires to control image production and to shape the photographs that publicly circulate.
On the surface, obstructions to photographing major events, like soldiers’ coffins, seem more troubling than an unflattering photograph of a politician. But the very randomness of these constraints demonstrates the importance of assessing the photographs that do not get made. For photographs matter not only for their documentary value but for what they symbolize: a politician sweating; the price of war. Taken as both indices and symbols, then, constraints on photography limit photojournalists’ capacities to function as ‘watchdog[s] … for the people’ (Mäenpää, 2014: 93) and to fulfill their public service role (Deuze, 2005).
Freelance versus staff access
Photographers may also experience differences in access based on their relationship with news organizations, which falls under the routine level of Shoemaker and Reese’s (1996) hierarchy of influences model. They may need press credentials to enter ‘breaking news events’, ‘disaster areas’, courtrooms (Sherer, 1988: 45–56), or press pools (Bock, 2009). Obtaining credentials can be harder for freelancers than staffers. One’s employment status may also determine whether she has the support to work in a hostile environment (Istek, 2017).
But shifting notions of what constitutes a photojournalist, amplified by technology that has put a camera on virtually every mobile phone, may afford greater access for freelancers who seem like ‘only’ a member of the public. For instance, some sites open to the public restrict ‘the media’, as occurred near Ground Zero after 9/11 (Blumer, 2002: 34). One photographer recalled, ‘You had 30,000 volunteers who had access, and they all had their own personal handi-cams. Yet we professionals were kept 20–30 blocks away with only pool feeds once a day, escorted in and out’ (Blumer, 2002: 34). This differing access suggests evidence of the desire to control the images that make it into the ‘public gaze’ (Frosh, 2001).
Gender and access
Gender’s influence on photographers’ access to news scenes – the individual level of influence – is underexplored. But academic and professional publications alike report that women are tracked into lifestyle, ‘fluffy’, and ‘low-rung’ assignments while men are given stories perceived as dangerous (Darian-Smith, 2016; Hardin and Shain, 2005; Lyttle, 2017). These findings are borne out by literature on women and journalism more broadly, which shows that men are assigned ‘political or analytical’ pieces (Melki and Mallat, 2016: 66), ‘sports news’ (Schmidt, 2018: 66), and ‘better assignments’ (Elmore, 2007: 21), while women are assigned ‘human interest’ or ‘soft’ stories (Schmidt, 2018: 66). Logically, different assignments give rise to different obstacles and require photographers negotiate alternative paths to access.
Sexual harassment almost certainly shapes photographers’ field experiences as well. Although its impact on photographers specifically has not been studied, Brown and Flatow’s (1997) survey of Indiana journalists found that reporters are harassed by sources and colleagues, and the International Women’s Media Foundation’s global survey of reporters found that about half of its respondents had been sexually harassed (Barton and Storm, 2014). Such harassment shapes what journalists can access and what they must endure to achieve that access. Moreover, targeted reporters may change their ‘work routines’ and assignments (Brown and Flatow, 1997), which, in turn, leads them to different stories and different obstacles. At its most extreme, sexual violence can stop photographers altogether, and sources have used rape as retribution (Caballero, 2001: 106).
Visibility, anxiety, and the public photograph
Photographers, like other reporters, often ‘ru[n] into individuals who’ are ‘host[ile] to the news media’ (Sherer, 1991: 86). For photojournalists, this hostility can be explained in part by concerns about visibility on the ‘public screen’ (Finnegan and Kang, 2004), that is, as objects of our ‘collective and anonymous … public gaze’ (Frosh, 2001). In such a context, publicly visible photographs can strip a subject of individuality, ‘oblitera[ting] the subtle distinctions between people and fetishiz[ing] them as types’ (Halberstam, 2013: 96). In so doing, one’s individual power is ‘obliterated’ as well.
The marriage of categorization, public visibility, and powerlessness is evident in colonialist photographic practices. These include Louis Agassiz’s daguerreotypes of slaves, created to provide visual ‘documentation’ of blacks’ inferiority (Wallis, 1995); French Army photographer Marc Garanger’s photographs of Algerian women forced to remove the veil (Estrin, 2010); and photographic composites used to visually ‘define’ criminal, racial, and moral categories (Sekula, 1986: 7). Such practices were designed to exercise the camera as a weapon to punish, humiliate, and taxonomy, with the resultant photographs evidentiary and symbolic examples of superior and inferior types.
Being publicly ‘seen’ in a news picture can also be used intentionally to police. This is most clear when photographs expose hypocrisy, such as photographs of Governor Chris Christie and his family enjoying July 4 on an empty public beach after he had ordered a state shutdown. Even when the subject is not engaged in wrongdoing, publicly circulated photographs can still shape behavior because of their potential to be seen by anyone at any time; this ‘could be seen-ness’ incites anxiety in subjects and induces them to self-police (Frosh, 2001). Such anxiety is amplified by the ‘shadow archive’ of ‘social and moral hierarchy’ in which all images take their place (Sekula, 1986: 10). That is, all public images, including news photographs – the stuff that makes up our collective ‘public gaze’ (Frosh, 2001) – invite comparison to and comprise our culturally generated archive of elite and degraded.
Polysemity, indexicality, and iconoclasm
The danger of visibility is amplified by photography’s polysemity: its capacity to mean different things to different people. As a result, it can ‘misrecognize and misrepresent’ subjects (Halberstam, 2013: 96). This misrepresentation emerges in part from context. The photograph of Alan Kurdi’s body – the 3-year-old who drowned fleeing Syria – appeared in global media as an index and a symbol of Syrian refugees’ plight. But Dabiq, ISIS’s magazine, published it with a caption warning of the dangers of ‘abandoning … the Islamic homeland’ (Berenson, 2015). Similarly, the neo-Nazi site Daily Stormer published photographs of Jews and asked readers to ‘“take action” against them’ (Hauser, 2016). These examples demonstrate how photographs’ meanings can transform and can even be used against their subjects. Importantly, though loosed from their indexical roots, such photographs retain their trace of the real. Thus, the stakes for public photographs are quite high: they portend the potential for many meanings and public uses while simultaneously offering visual ‘proof’ of these claims.
It is perhaps no wonder, then, that publicly circulated images confront iconoclasm, the desire to control, shape, and silence false or ‘outmoded’ images and erect new ones (Mitchell, 1994: 234). Calls for removing Confederate monuments and installing new statues are iconoclastic confrontations. The government’s control of images and its effort to supply the media with those favorable to US interests – especially evident during war – is an iconoclastic attempt to destroy other visions of the country and install true(r) pictures.
Finnegan and Kang (2004) refine the concept, distinguishing ‘gross’ from ‘subtle iconoclasms’. They define the former as ‘stigmatizing and bringing down idols’ (p. 382) and ‘subtle iconoclasm’ as both destroying ‘false’ images and creating new ones in their stead. News photographers encounter both forms. When a state or institution blocks a photographer’s access altogether, as the FAA has done in recent years, that is ‘gross’ iconoclasm. What an institution manages a photographer so to shape the images she takes, as do Congressional staffers, that is ‘subtle’ iconoclasm. Both forms occlude photographers’ work.
Research questions
The First Amendment, private ownership, credentialing, public-safety procedures, work status, and gender are among the extra-media, and individual forces that shape what photographers access. Moreover, photographers also confront concerns among sources and site managers about public visibility and face attempts to manage and silence images meant for the public.
Based on this literature, the study offers the following research questions:
RQ1. What sources of interference do photographers encounter?
RQ1b. What are the most prevalent sources of interference?
RQ1c. How do photographers’ individual qualities affect interference?
RQ2. How does anxiety about visibility affect the interferences photojournalists encounter?
RQ3. What subjects are photographers prevented from photographing?
Methods and research design
This exploratory study employed a mixed-methods design consisting of semi-structured interviews and survey research. A taxonomy of the extra-media interferences that photojournalists encounter was not available; thus, a meaningful survey could be best created following an initial, exploratory approach. While previous surveys of photojournalists assessed photographers’ encounters with the law (Sherer, 1991), they did not identify the full range of interferences photographers encounter. To reach this study’s goals, I needed to ‘buil[d] a new [survey] instrument’ (Creswell, 2003: 216). Approval from the Human Research Ethics Board applied to both phases of the study.
The first phase, a qualitative exploration of news photographers’ constraints, consisted of semi-structured interviews with seven participants conducted by phone during November and December 2015. The ‘open ended and nondirectional’ questions elicited ‘a description of the phenomenon being addressed’ (Creswell, 1999: 461). Participants had to be over 18 with at least 2 years of work experience. They were sought through word of mouth, snowball sampling, and from professional photojournalism agencies. They included staff and freelancers and men and women working in a range of beats. Two more interviews were conducted during December 2017. These latter interviews did not shape the survey instrument but nuanced the findings.
A research assistant transcribed the interviews verbatim. I employed the constant comparative method (Glaser, 1965) to identify themes regarding the constraints photographers encountered. I coded each ‘incident’ into a category, compared subsequent iterations to the emergent categories and then reviewed the categories to assess which could be integrated into previous ones (Glaser, 1965: 439–441). I developed these themes into a taxonomy of interferences (Somerstein, 2017) used to develop the survey instrument described below.
Drawing on the survey and interview data, I also used the constant comparative method to identify photographs not taken and those taken despite harassment.
Survey data
The survey, a self-administered questionnaire, emerged from themes from the qualitative portion of the study. Interviews generate meaningful material for surveys ‘by establishing common word usage, framing ideas, and identifying quantifiable trends’ (Hinnant and Len-Rios, 2009: 93). The survey’s reliability is attested to by virtue of its questions being ‘grounded in the views’ of the study’s subjects (Creswell, 1999: 460).
I constructed a convenience sample by sending emails to organizations that represent photojournalists and asking them to circulate the survey among their members. The National Press Photographers Association sent it on my behalf to the New York Press Photographers Association and the Associated Press to circulate among their members. To reach freelance journalists, the survey circulated in a Facebook group of freelance journalists. The survey included open and closed questions.
Variables
Interferences
In total, 14 types of interferences were examined. The survey asked participants to select ‘past five years, past year, past month, or never’ regarding the sources of interference they encountered while doing their jobs. These were recoded into a dichotomous variable, as never having occurred or having occurred during the past 5 years.
Subjects that aren’t photographed
Respondents answered the open-ended question, ‘What event(s) or subject(s) have you been prevented from photographing?’ These responses were coded using the constant comparative method (Glaser, 1965).
Anxiety about public visibility
Three questions measured the degree to which photographers perceive that sources, subjects, site managers, or others are anxious about public visibility. Participants answered the following on a 5-point Likert-type scale from strongly agree (5) to strongly disagree (1): in my career, I have encountered people who are hostile to the visual news media (photographers and videographers); people are really nervous about being photographed; people are suspicious of the camera.
Iconoclasm
One question asked if photographers encounter iconoclasm, that is, others’ desires to control, shape, and silence images. Participants answered on a 5-point Likert-type scale from strongly agree (5) to strongly disagree (1): it is common for my subjects and/or passerby – people who are NOT in my photograph – to threaten me, tell me to stop photographing, or warn me that what I am doing is illegal.
To assess the photographs that journalists do not take, photographers were asked the open-ended question, ‘What events or subjects have you been prevented from photographing?’ The answers were then broken down into a coding scheme reduced to 10 categories. Entries with more than one code were broken up into separate instances (i.e. ‘Fires. Car accidents. Perp walks’ was coded into three separate categories).
Limitations
The relatively small number of survey participants may have resulted in underpowered analyses. (Not all people answered all questions; N varies from 65 to 87, with fewer participants answering questions about gender and relationship to news organization.) The sample is majority male and White and mostly comprised photographers living in the United States; a more diverse group may provide different and more-nuanced findings. Using the constant comparative method does not ‘guarantee that two analysts working independently will achieve the same results’ (Glaser, 1965: 438), thus a different researcher may conceive different categories of photographs that were not taken.
Findings
Table 1 shows the respondents’ demographic data.
Demographic data.
Table 2, which addresses RQ1b, identifies the extra-media interferences that photojournalists encountered over the past 5 years. The most common were physical barriers (86%); people who were not the subjects of their photographs, but who chased and/or yelled at the photographers nevertheless (85.9%); communications and public relations personnel (81%); and police, military, sheriffs, private security guards, or others who guard or manage access to a news site (77.9%). Over the past 5 years, the least common constraints were needing medical attention as a result of being attacked (14.5%), facing detention or jail (22.1%), and physical attacks (41.2%). These findings are comparable to other studies, like Sherer’s (1991) finding that 37 percent of news photographers had been assaulted ‘sometime’ in their career and that 13.8 percent who had been hurt needed ‘medical attention’ as a result (p. 85).
Interferences encountered over past 5 years.
HIPAA: Health Insurance Portability and Accountability Act; FERPA: Family Educational Rights and Privacy Act.
Open-ended responses provide further detail about these extra-media interferences, particularly from people who are not the photographs’ subjects. One participant mentioned being prevented from photographing ‘domestic disputes where I’ve had police yell at me “for my safety” … the “for my safety excuse” being the most widely used reason to prevent me from taking photos’. Another recalled, We were not prevented ultimately, just suffered prolonged harassment by bystanders during an active police scene (e.g. bystanders standing in front of our cameras, yelling at us, demanding to view our credentials, then looking us up on social media to continue to harass us by threatening to write to significant others and friends).
To address RQ1c, how photographers’ individual qualities affect the extra-media interferences they encounter, independent-samples t-tests showed statistically significant differences between men and women (Table 3). Men are more likely than women to have their credentials questioned or denied, to be jailed, and to be physically attacked. But women were more likely than men to encounter regulations governing privacy in private spaces, like Health Insurance Portability and Accountability Act (HIPAA), or proprietary restrictions on commercial spaces. Women were also more likely to be blocked by communications/public relations departments.
Gender differences in interference.
HIPAA: Health Insurance Portability and Accountability Act; FERPA: Family Educational Rights and Privacy Act.
All variables were coded from 0 = never and 1 = occurring during the past 5 years. N ranged from 45 to 48 for men and from 21 to 22 for women.
p < 0.05; **p < 0.01.
At the routine level, independent-samples t-tests also showed statistically significant differences between staff and freelancers regarding the extra-media influences they encounter. Freelance photographers were more likely to have their credentials questioned or denied. But staff photographers were more likely to encounter interferences from fixers, cultural codes and taboos, and to have their organizations evaluated by sources using the Internet (Table 4).
Staff/freelance differences in interference.
All variables were coded from 0 = never and 1 = occurring during the past 5 years. N ranged from 30 to 32 for freelance photographer and from 30 to 31 for staff.
p < 0.05; **p < 0.01.
To answer RQ2, how anxiety about public visibility affects the extra-media interferences photographers face, I created an averaged index of photographers’ answers to these three questions (Table 5). I combined the averages of three responses: Cronbach’s alpha is 0.78, M = 4.00, and standard deviation (SD) = 0.73. An ordinary least squares (OLS) regression found that anxiety about public visibility had a significant effect on the interferences that photojournalists encounter (B = 0.335, p = 0.008), with an R2 of 0.112. Thus, the more the anxiety about visibility, the greater the extra-media interference. When anxiety about the public photograph, iconoclasm, and job status are included in the OLS model, they explain 16.4 percent of the variance in interference that photographers encountered (Table 6).
Means and standard deviations anxiety about public visibility.
Influence of anxiety of visibility, iconoclasm, and job type on interference.
Cell entries are standardized coefficient beta weights.
The semi-structured interviews further illuminate how anxiety about public visibility manifests. ‘A cop came up to me and was … incredibly concerned with what I was doing and said that a good number of people reported me saying that I was suspicious’, said one photographer about taking photographs at Penn Station. Another noted that subjects of her feature work were concerned she was going to do an ‘exposé’. And a newspaper photographer recalled that when photographing children in schools – even with signed release forms and a press pass – ‘There’s a level of fear that I picked up on in general with office staff, with, authorities in schools, parents even. And then I would feel like – do I really seem that scary?’
Photographs that aren’t taken
To address RQ3, What subjects are photographers prevented from taking?, I used the constant comparative method to review and analyze the open-ended answers. This analysis revealed two categories: photographs that photographers are kept from taking, and photographs that photographers take despite interference. Open-ended responses and semi-structured interviews elaborate these categories. They are described in descending order of frequency.
News scenes
Fires and their aftermath came up the most, including ‘removal of a building after a fire’. This category also includes natural disasters ‘such as tornado-damaged areas, floods’, bomb threats, and street fights.
Private spaces
These include exhibitions at museums; concerts; sporting events; and ‘commercial/retail spaces, inside and out of buildings’; one respondent recalled the lengths to which organizers strove to make a space ‘private’: at ‘outdoor concerts (they even put up black tarps around a temporary fence so nobody could see inside)’.
Insights from the semi-structured interviews shed further light on this category. A photographer with 14 years of experience noted, at ‘any, like, science/research/technology facility there will be limits on the photographs you can make. I photographed at a distillery and they had proprietary things they didn’t want to be photographed’. He also observed that ‘higher socioeconomic status folks that are actually in power and pulling the strings, like, they have a pretty good idea about how much control they need to have over their image and so they’re not you know, going to places where they can be photographed’. In other words, powerful people protect their privacy using the protections of private space. But private spaces might also be protected because of the commercial potential for images of sporting or music events.
The power of private institutions is also evident in the experience of another interviewee, who devoted years to a project about labor and delivery. She made such photographs with hospital and patient consent. Even still, one hospital bans anyone from photographing the moment the baby emerges – even its parents – because, she said, such images can end up as ‘evidence’ in court.
Accidents
These were primarily car accidents but also included plane crashes. In a semi-structured interview, one former newspaper staff photographer with 20 years of experience recalled how such a constraint would play out: I would be told that I would have to stay back for however long and um, no one would come and really brief us, you know … So you’d be standing out there for hours, um, and you … just wouldn’t be able to photograph anything.
Police activities
These include ‘police actions’ such as a police chase ‘which ended in police shooting at suspects’; arrests; ‘perp walks’, and criminal activities committed by off-duty officers.
Participants said that police often invoke ‘the law’ when saying that photographers cannot take their picture, even if they know that legally, photographers can proceed.
Children/vulnerable populations
While photographers reported needing model-release forms to photograph children in schools, both interviewees and survey participants said they were blocked from photographing children in public space. ‘Company policy doesn’t allow to get anyone on film who is a minor even in public space, wide shots included’, wrote one.
Other groups in this category included recipients of Meals on Wheels.
Protests/rallies
Interferences in this category can result in physical harm. As one survey participant explained, ‘Most recently photographed the protests at the US inauguration – was attacked by “black bloc” protesters who also attempted to steal my camera. Local police used flashbangs, stinger balls and pepper rounds – was hit by a pepper round’.
Crime scenes
Participants did not specify beyond ‘crime scenes’, ‘homicides’, and ‘recovering dead bodies’.
Public figures
These were mostly American politicians but included visiting dignitaries. Survey participants mentioned Donald Trump repeatedly, including one denied access ‘even with an approved credential’.
Courtrooms
Notably, this extended to courthouse steps.
Civic events
A handful of examples fell into this category, including events inside public libraries and ‘people’s faces at voter registration drives’.
Photographs taken despite harassment
Three categories emerged of photographs taken despite interference.
Children
One interviewee said that if he photographs children in public space, ‘I’ll always get uh, looks. I’ll get a dozen parents um, … you know, “Why are you taking pictures of my kid?”’ Similarly, a survey respondent reported, ‘I have had parents at sporting events yell at me for photographing a crying athlete, or being somewhere they thought I should not be, but had permission from officials to shoot from there’.
Police
This includes police activities like arrests. As one survey participant wrote, ‘Told by police that it is against the law to photograph a policeman w/o permission (common)’.
Public space
Some of these interferences seem due to misunderstanding about the constitutionally protected right to photograph in public space. As one respondent wrote, I get a lot of people telling me I cannot photograph buildings when I am on public space and the subject is in plain view. Mostly from private company security, I often call local police to explain to private company that photography in public space is legal.
Another wrote, ‘City officials who did not know they legally have to let me as close to a scene as the police tape and tried to prevent me from going further’. Police are often cited as drivers of this interference.
Discussion
This study set out to apply Shoemaker and Reese’s (1996) hierarchy of influences to identify the extra-media interferences photojournalists encounter, assess their prevalence, investigate the presence and explicate the effects of concerns about public visibility, and offer an overview of photographs taken despite harassment and ones not taken at all. More broadly, this article offers a model for looking for absences in the photographic record by focusing on photojournalists’ news-making processes, rather than assessing published photographs.
The findings indicate that the most common sources of extra-media interference are physical/infrastructural blocks, people who are not the photographs’ subjects but who harass photographers nevertheless, members of communications and public relations departments, and police and other security personnel who manage access to news sites. The findings also provide evidence of the hostility that photographers encounter and suggest widespread evidence of both gross and subtle iconoclasm at nearly every rung of society, from police to passerby, parents to private property owners, even within sites central to the public sphere, like voter registration drives and libraries.
In terms of interactions between Shoemaker and Reese’s (1996) extra-media and individual levels of influence, T-tests found significant gender differences regarding the nature of interferences, with men more likely to be detained or jailed, physically attacked, and to have their credentials questioned. Women are more likely to be stymied by bureaucratic interferences, like paperwork and PR professionals. These findings add nuance to the literature on gender differences in assignment (Darian-Smith, 2016; Hardin and Shain, 2005; Lyttle, 2017). If men are clustered in ‘dangerous’ stories, like armed conflicts, that might explain why they are more likely to experience physical confrontations and jail. Bureaucratic interferences, which women were more likely to face, may also reflect a difference in beat, with women doing features (or human interest stories, in which they are overrepresented) and men in spot news (where paperwork and PR-driven access might not apply).
These differences in interference might also reflect gendered strategies that sources and site managers use to drive men and women away. For instance, even in dangerous settings, sources may underestimate women, considering them ‘harmless’, which may enable them to ask questions men can’t (Caballero, 2001: 106). To that end, one interviewee said that he believes his sex engenders police aggression: ‘It would seem to me that as a guy, police officers are generally more aggressive towards me … [They] always come out on their toes’. Sources’ gendered expectations also seem to interact with concerns about public visibility, supporting or obstructing photographers’ access. For instance, a female photographer framed her gender as an asset for ‘taking pictures of kids doing cute kid things’. Her ‘younger male coworker … would get a lot more scrutiny if he were doing the same thing … People will think he’s a weirdo and a creep’. This stereotype may feed back into photographers’ assignments and may help explain why women are tracked into human interest or ‘fluffy’ stories.
In the survey’s open-ended responses, several women also identified sexual harassment as a source of interference. One described ‘inappropriate comments/sexism that made photographing in that area uncomfortable and difficult to continue’; another wrote, ‘I’m constantly disrupted by men who try to engage me while I’m working with seemingly innocuous questions about my equipment or my project’. These interferences can alter photographers’ projects; an interviewee described a feature she ‘[had] wanted to work on forever’ and ‘dropped’ because of a site manager’s physical advances.
T tests also found staff photographers more likely to encounter extra-media interferences than freelancers, with the exception of credentialing troubles, which coheres with previous scholarship (Bock et al., 2018; Calzada, 2010). This may be due to staffers being better known to the institutions they cover. Freelancers who can ‘pass’ as ‘the public’ may be able to avoid concerns about public visibility and attain greater access. Open-ended responses provided evidence for this: a photographer with 6 years of experience said, ‘The administration I once worked for stopped me from photographing an Iowa legislative session so I hired a freelance photographer and got pictures anyway’. Likewise, several open-ended responses pointed out that ‘the public’ sometimes has better access than photographers. As one participant wrote, ‘There have been times when the public has better access than the press …, mostly crime scenes’; another said, ‘I see civilians walking around sites unaccompanied I can’t go’.
Both semi-structured interviews and survey data provided empirical evidence of anxieties about public visibility, and the OLS regression showed that anxiety about visibility predicts greater extra-media interference.
Gross iconoclasm is evident among the photographs that aren’t taken. Professional norms and legal restrictions explain some of these silences, like prohibitions entering crime scenes, private space, and areas of imminent danger. Interestingly, these may be graphic scenes, which – when they show Western scenes, in Western papers – tend to be underrepresented (Lewis, 2016). But constraints photographing other news scenes, police activities, children, protests, rallies, and public figures suggest the influence of another force: iconoclasm. For instance, ‘protecting’ vulnerable groups from the ‘violence’ (Halberstam, 2013: 96) of the camera might explain blocks against photographing children and Meals on Wheels recipients. Such concerns speak to the ways that photography can (and is) used to demean its subjects, to reduce them to categories, and to people’s awareness of this potential. But anxieties about public visibility may not derive from uniform concerns about visibility. Anxiety about publicly visible images of children may be due to an imagined prurient gaze cast on the child pictured. By contrast, police anxieties about public visibility may reflect concerns about public opinion of law enforcement – particularly when officers harass photographers taking constitutionally protected photos of procedural police work.
Finally, although it may not be surprising that private spaces were among the most frequently blocked sites, this ‘blank spot’ requires further attention given the growing power of corporations, their role in ‘credentialing’ (Bock et al., 2018: 360), and the decline of public space more generally.
Relatedly, several survey participants commented on the internalized power of the private sector. For instance, one photographer commented that she is blocked from human stories about capitalism’s affect [sic] on their life. Example: when a hospital laid off 200 people one day with no warning, we couldn’t get access to do the story. The people who lost their jobs were afraid to talk, afraid they would get a negative reference when looking for a new job.
Another observed blocks from ‘people who do not know what a public space is’. These anecdotes attest to the power that private interests carry into subjects’ minds, the ultimate expression of the Panopticon as a (self) disciplinary mechanism.
This sector’s power becomes more complicated when photographers need local authorities to secure access. As the data attest, photojournalists’ complex relationships with police further trouble such interactions; one interviewee with 20 years of experience explained, ‘In spot news situations you are at the mercy of whatever authority was working on a case’. Police willingness to aid a photographer may be shaped by local conditions; when private interests are especially powerful, as Mitch Epstein experienced while making American Power, the police may not intervene at all.
Implications
As a medium, photography claims to show an objective representation of reality. While much has been written about photography’s subjective and partial representation of the world, silences in visual representation suggest that there is a fair degree of ‘lying’ by omission before photographs reach gatekeepers. For photographers, such findings are troubling regarding the ‘ideology’ of the occupation (Deuze, 2005), their functions as ‘watchdog[s] … in the name of the people’ (Mäenpää, 2014: 93). Constraints on access create silences in visual news that abridge the watchdog capacity in ways the public doesn’t know.
By attending to photographs that are not taken, this study also lays groundwork for building theory about the processes of photographic news production. First, overriding concerns about visibility differentiate the extra-media constraints that shape photography from influences on written reporting. Stories about accidents, air crashes, arrests, protests, public figures, and fires make the news all the time. In fact, these ‘straightforward’ stories are often the stuff of introductory news-writing textbooks. But the processes of visualizing these events are often contested and highly managed. This suggests extending Shoemaker and Reese’s (1996) hierarchy of influences model, as it pertains to visual news, to integrate iconoclasm. Doing so would better explain and predict the genres of images that news photographers do not take, particularly of people or scenes from which they are blocked even when they have secured necessary paperwork.
To integrate iconoclasm into Shoemaker and Reese’s hierarchy of influences, future studies might test if and how gross and subtle iconoclasm shape news content. As the photographers explain, they sometimes take pictures despite interference. But not always. Perhaps when a source responds with ‘gross’ iconoclasm, a move to block an image, the photographer is better able to shoot through the constraint; ‘subtle’ iconoclasm, in which the source provides alternative (‘better’) images, might be more difficult to negotiate, particularly given deadline limitations. It may be, too, that photographers are more likely to encounter ‘gross’ iconoclasm when covering breaking news, when there are few opportunities for substituting other, ‘truer’ photographs.
Second, the findings suggest an interaction among the individual, routine, and extra-media levels of influence that demonstrates the power of the individual. Freelancers face difficulties with credentials, which may hinder access to certain types of news and may also impact the assignments they receive. But freelancers may be better able to capture other scenes, particularly if they do not seem like members of the press, enabling them to evade extra-media pressures on photographs destined for the public gaze.
Such interactions are also evident regarding gender. Sources’ and editors’ expectations about gender can both heighten and diminish photographers’ extra-media obstructions. For instance, women may seem ‘harmless’ which may grant them greater access to some stories, while men may seem predatory, which may increase their constraints. In some cases, this may be due to gender generating different kinds of unease about visibility, perhaps similar to seeming like ‘only’ a member of the public rather than a member of the press.
One’s gender also shapes a photographer’s assignments, which in turn influences the constraints a photographer encounters. A woman consistently assigned human interest stories, for instance, might rarely encounter police, military, or other security personnel. By contrast, men who are assigned ‘dangerous’ stories might see such authorities frequently. And gender-based harassment, regardless of assignment, may require a photographer change how she negotiates the story or may even force her to abandon it altogether. Thus, sexism may shape the photographs taken, their authorship, and those that aren’t taken at all. Future studies that apply Shoemaker and Reese’s hierarchy of influences should include sexism when using gender as a lens to explain and predict written or photographic news content.
The photographs that appear in news are both ‘a manifestation of culture … and a source of culture’ (Shoemaker and Reese, 1996: 57). They have been shaped by legal, cultural, and corporate powers that touch image-making and image-makers. Such images’ publication, in turn, also ‘fee[d] … back’ attitudes about news images ‘to … audience[s]’ (Shoemaker and Reese, 1996: 57). Following this logic, the images that don’t appear ‘manifest’ the culture too. That is, by virtue of their absence – because of influences at the individual, routine, and extra-media levels – they communicate what should not be made visible and help to reinforce the status quo of what appears before the ‘public gaze’ (Frosh, 2001), enshrining boundaries of the silenced and the seen.
Footnotes
Acknowledgements
The author would like to thank the two anonymous reviewers for their insights and recommendations, which greatly improved this article.
Funding
The author(s) disclosed receipt of the following financial support for the research, authorship, and/or publication of this article: The author received support from her University.