Photojournalist as a Newsworker

Abstract

Even though news content is the end result of a complex collective production process that involves a number of newsworkers, writing the history of journalism from the perspective of labour remains a rare approach. In this article, we apply the newswork perspective to photojournalism with a two-fold aim. Firstly, we aim to identify crucial themes around which a history of Slovenian photojournalism from a newswork approach could be articulated. And secondly, we aim to demonstrate that adopting the newswork approach from a historical perspective enables us to identifying certain positions within newswork, where contradictions of journalism and transformations of its practices either more visible or have existed long before they “trickled up” to the more visible echelons of newsworkers. We argue that photojournalists are the professional group where the pressures and transformations of journalism are either more pronounced or have appeared earlier. Through the analysis of semi-structured interviews, documents and archive material, we identified three topics that reveal the contradictions of the history of journalism as reflected in the photojournalist qua worker.