The rules of a middle-brow art: Digital production and cultural consecration in the global field of professional photojournalism

Abstract

Drawing on Bourdieu’s work on photography, field-theory, and recent research on global journalism and digital photography, this paper advances the framework of the “global photojournalistic field”, and empirically focuses on the consecration of a transnational elite of professional photojournalists over the last two decades. It investigates such a process as a prism through which to understand major changes that have been investing the field of professional photojournalism and the wider field of photography since the early 2000s, e.g. the increasingly blurring boundaries between professional and citizen photojournalism, and between news photography and fine-art photography. The paper draws on archive analysis of major international newsmagazines and qualitative interviews with internationally renowned photojournalists, photo-editors, and directors of global news photo agencies. It examines specific news photographs by tracing their aesthetic shapes back to field-dynamics, thus unveiling the “rules of the field” that govern the practices of production and the symbolic struggles for distinction, authorship, boundary-making, and power within global photojournalism. Finally, it advances the thesis of an externally favoured process of reciprocal influence between the consecration of a group of professional photojournalists in the global field and the increasing position of news photography in the hierarchy of cultural legitimacies of late-modern society.