Citizen Photojournalism Research Articles

Enacting Reciprocity and Solidarity: Critical Access as Methodology

ABSTRACT Drawing on the growing field of critical access studies, this article positions critical access as a research methodology that aligns with feminist praxis and disability politics. We begin by mapping our central concept in relation to literature on feminist disability studies, crip methodology, feminist methodology, and critical access. We then demonstrate critical access methodology in practice drawing on our collective research programs. Our first example comes from a workshop exploring citizen photojournalism as part of Stretching Our Stories and takes up non-linear and unverifiable journalistic accounts by disabled people. We follow this with an example from Practicing the Social, a three-day online artistic research and knowledge mobilisation event, which foregrounds the complexity of structuring pace and time. We conclude by suggesting that approaching critical access as methodology makes it possible to embrace moments of friction. Throughout this article, we argue that access, when taken up critically, becomes a transformative process that can contribute to the development of a feminist research methodology that supports research directed towards crip-feminist futurities.

PHOTO-EDITORS AND PARA-PHOTOJOURNALISTS ON TWITTER. THE COMMODIFICATION OF NETWORKED IMAGES

The microblogging service Twitter has gained importance as an exchange platform for news photos that, in collaboration with renowned media, might trigger immediate reactions from photo editors. Twitter conversations among photo editors and photo creators – produsers, citizen photojournalists, para-photojournalists – show that photo editors turn to (amateur)photographers to request permission to use their eyewitness material in journalistic publications. Reviewing the contested space of digital visual journalism between produsers, photo editors, and the commodification of networked images, I present three scenarios which exhibit how terms of use are negotiated online – hence publicly visible – between creators ofTwitpics and editors of newspapers or photo agencies. The paper concludes with five results of the relation between photo editors and para-photojournalists on Twitter: fairness, efficiency, the value of digital images, effects of image sharing practices on visual journalism, and produsers’ daily media practices.

An Ethics of (not) Showing: Citizen Witnessing, Journalism and Visualizations of a Terror Attack

ABSTRACTThis paper explores how news organizations visualize crises in a digital media ecology shaped by citizen witnessing and widespread image circulation on social media. Empirically, the paper draws on the events of 7 April 2017 in Stockholm when a hijacked truck plowed into crowds, killing five and injuring several others. The study is informed by theoretical perspectives and research on citizen photojournalism and witnessing, and examines the function of visual citizen contributions, degrees of explicitness in visual coverage and the impact of proximity on visualizations of crises. Qualitative analyses of visual content and text in digital and print editions of four Swedish newspapers showed both enhancing and featured positioning of visual eyewitness contributions from the public, few examples of explicit imagery, and journalistic commentary foregrounding ethical dimensions of showing and seeing. Based on the findings, the author considers journalism’s civic response as a strategy for staking a claim to credibility and ethics at a moment when the journalistic gatekeeping position is called into question.

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

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.

The crisis of photojournalism: rethinking the profession in a participatory media ecosystem

The economic crisis and the appearance of “citizen photojournalism” are the main challenges the professional practice of photojournalism has faced in recent years. The American Society of News Editors states that photojournalists (and visual journalists) are the professionals most affected by the cuts in the media ecosystem. The digital revolution has converted citizens into potential creators of images of newsworthy events and the media invite audiences to participate by sending in their photographs for publication. Photojournalists no longer have exclusive control of news images. Are they in danger of extinction? Has participatory journalism devalued the job of photojournalist? Are graphic reporters opposed to audience participation? This research tries to discover how Spanish photojournalists are reacting in this participatory media context. To attain this goal, twelve in-depth interviews were held with recognized Spanish photojournalists who develop their activity at the local, regional, national and international levels, featuring, for example, graphic reporters Manu Brabo (Pulitzer Prize, 2013) and Daniel Pozo (National Photojournalism Prize, 2012). All of them argue that quality is expensive and that few citizens can compete with the technical knowledge and work tools of a professional photojournalist. One main conclusion can be drawn from an analysis of their replies: photojournalists do not feel threatened by citizen participation in the media. In fact, they show great generosity by considering that the images contributed by audiences should be economically remunerated. In contrast, they regard media managers as the real enemies

Mini Cameras and Maxi Minds

The recent surge of scholarly interest in citizen photojournalism is part of a wider paradigm shift in journalism studies involving the bringing into the foreground of the hitherto marginal issues of non-corporate media forms and citizen journalism. This paper aims to contribute to current debates about citizen photojournalism by focusing on the still inadequate and often quite problematic conceptualization of the history, role and functions of non-professional photography in the modern public sphere. Following a critical review of some of the most problematic terms and biases found in the current literature about citizen photojournalism, particular attention is given to the implications that the ambiguous cultural status traditionally ascribed to photojournalism has for the still contentious character and significance of citizen photojournalism.

Dear Citizen Photojournalists: Who are you? Studying the motivations and values of citizen photojournalists

The photojournalistic landscape is undergoing dramatic change, and professional photojournalism is increasingly being supplemented with – and in some cases, replaced with – amateur, citizen photojournalistic content. This study undertakes to examine these changes in the visual change in the news environment by looking at the motivations and values of citizen photojournalist through interviews with 19 citizen photojournalists. The findings suggest that citizen photojournalists are savvy to the values and photojournalism, but often reject these normative values in lieu of values that reflect the characteristics of amateur content-creators.

News Images on Instagram

This article examines the extent to which the online photo-sharing service Instagram assists professional and citizen photojournalists in the performative construction of a hyperreality in accordance with Baudrillard’s theory. Based on a visual analysis of the Instagram photo feeds of six citizen photojournalists and six professional photojournalists, this research aims to identify the various simulations and discourses used by professional and citizen photojournalists alike to stage their photographs and to characterise the differences demarcating the professional–amateur divide. It also examines how the interaction between technology, photojournalistic practices and subjectivity stimulates the mediations and negotiations that condition the construction of this hyperreality. The study demonstrates that by producing, uploading, sharing, commenting upon and promoting these altered photo reportages, the Instagram community inadvertently creates a hyperreal depiction of the world that challenges both, the sense of authenticity characteristic of citizen journalism and amateur photography, as well as the realism to which professional photojournalism has historically subscribed. Moreover, it argues that in order to create their images, Instagram photojournalists use a series of aesthetic conventions and performative discourses that correspond to their roles as either amateurs or professionals. Nevertheless, each group tries to simulate the aforementioned conventions and discourses of the other in an attempt to get closer either to the sense of amateurish authenticity or to professional neatness. As a result, this paradoxical interaction has the potential to transform today’s visual imagery by means of a simulated reality that needs further explanation.

Innovation(s) in Photojournalism

This paper examines the place of amateur imagery and citizen photojournalism in Time magazine’s photoblog, Lightbox. If user-generated content has been seen as a threat by professional photojournalists in the last decade, Lightbox offers a paradigmatic example to understand if the visual elite still has a dominant status in the decision-making processes of news production. This paper, therefore, explores how citizen imagery is shaping and challenging a photojournalistic culture still influenced by criteria of excellence, legitimacy, and authority. Managed by professional photo editors, Lightbox has included a variety of sections which emphasize new, original work by professional photographers as well as weekly news reviews that sometimes incorporate amateur photography. Through a visual analysis of amateur imagery in Lightbox’s sections and a textual examination of the editors’ discussions on citizen photojournalism, this paper analyzes how the photoblog is adapting to the shift towards a digital age of innovation and hybridity. The results show that photo editors apply strategies to delimit citizen productions by very rarely selecting them and avoiding specific mention of the amateur nature of such images. Moreover, they underline that hybridity is understood not as multimodal content and co-creative processes between professional and amateur incorporations, but rather as professional and creative practices, for example by highlighting innovative photographers who use cell phone imagery and photo-sharing websites. While this paper interrogates the new careers in photography of amateurs turned professionals, it also shows how digital platforms emphasize the photographers’ personal initiatives over usual gatekeeping processes.

Citizen Photojournalists and Their Professionalizing Logics

This article presents the findings of an exploratory piece of research focusing on contributors to the participatory news photo agency Citizenside (launched in France in 2006 and based on a business-to-business model, equivalent to iReport, Blottr, or Demotix). The authors have studied the viewpoints of contributors themselves, through an online questionnaire and through in-depth interviews. The responses help to identify the profiles, practices, and motivations of so-called citizen photojournalists. Contrary to bloggers or users regularly commenting on online news articles—which research has often scrutinized since the mid-2000s to understand better online areas of participation—the active audiences or publics producing news images are driven by logics which remain poorly known, if not stereotyped. Several features showing the shift from ordinary to organized practices are discussed in the paper, including the minor use of smartphones as well as the importance of the preparatory fieldwork versus the minority of events captured “by chance.” In this respect, the motivations and profiles of Citizenside’s contributors go further than citizenship aspects, as they behave actually as independent eye-witnesses and photographers/videographers, some of whom are even remunerated. Therefore, in the authors’ view, these publics, considered as “amateurs” from afar, are in fact driven by (semi-)professional logics.

Evaluating News Photographs

The paper is based on an empirical study recently conducted in Italy through the photo-elicitation technique, involving 120 young Italians and focusing on two groups of individuals—an experimental and a control group. The two groups were shown images related to global crisis events. The first was told which photos were taken by professionals, which by citizens and which by other people involved in the events (soldiers, victims, perpetrators, etc.), while the second group was not provided with this information. Both groups were asked a battery of questions regarding the themes of trust, value, impact, use and circulation/distribution of the photographs shown, allowing the interviewees to define these concepts in the face of individual images. The principal results indicate that trust in news photographs is inseparable from impact and value for the development of a sense of active citizenship. Trust is revised in light of the awareness that there exists a variety of possible publics, active and passive, with different possibilities of affecting events through their actions. The distinction between citizen and professional photographs does not in itself lead to distinctions in terms of value and trust. Knowing the photographer's role in the event being depicted redefines the terms of the discourse and shifts the moral borderlines that the publics draw between different images and different media for their distribution. Introducing the ethnographic approach, the present study proposes going beyond studies that concentrate only on effects as well as those focused on trust, which prescribe a distinction between citizen and professional photojournalism.

Locating The Journalism in Citizen Photojournalism

The proliferation of cameras on cellphones and access to high-quality digital cameras has increased the ability of average citizens to capture and share photographs and video. The inclusion of user-generated visual content by news organizations, especially at a time of newsroom contraction, has been a source of consternation for professional photojournalists, who have emphasized their professional training and skill. Though scholars have explored the perceptions photojournalists and citizen photographers have of photojournalism and of each other, little attention so far has been directed to the visual content of citizen photojournalism, the extent to which it adheres to established photojournalism conventions, and its incorporation by mainstream news organizations. This research addresses this absence. Drawing on a content analysis of user-generated images, this study finds that in a situation involving coverage of an ongoing story of significant impact in a community, there was little citizen photojournalism presented within the mainstream coverage. Further analysis reveals that while there is some overlap between events captured by professional and citizen photojournalists, the photographs made by citizens do not generally reflect the aesthetic standards expected of professionals. The results begin to provide practical examination of conceptual concerns expressed by photojournalists regarding the use of citizen-generated content.

The “Public Eye” Or “Disaster Tourists”

This article contributes to debates regarding professional–amateur interfaces in photojournalism by reporting on findings from a qualitative study with members of a demographic cohort often described as “millennial” users (that is, people born between 1980 and 1999). A textual analysis of their responses identified five thematics for analysis: (1) respondents’ views regarding the prospective role of bearing witness and what it may entail; (2) the motivations of those engaged in this type of activity; (3) the uses of citizen smartphone imagery by news organisations; (4) presumed distinctions between professional and amateur or citizen photojournalism; and (5) ethical questions of trust where the ensuing imagery was concerned. On this evidential basis, professional photojournalism’s discursive authority is shown to be open to challenge by the alternative ethos of citizen imagery, with respondents’ perceptions raising questions over realness, authenticity and truth-value complicating, and at times destabilising, familiar professional–amateur normative binarisms.

Citizen Photojournalism

In recent years there has been an explosion of citizen-produced content appearing in mainstream media outlets. Terms such as convergent journalism, citizen journalism and user-generated journalism are all widely used in an attempt to define this growing phenomenon. This paper explores the specific genre of citizen photojournalism (CPJ). It is argued this is a definitive genre of its own and has important implications for audience perceptions due to the narrative or “storytelling” role of the visual mage. An “action genre” approach is used to examine how this new photographic genre has been enabled within current technological, cultural, political and economic environments That is to say, that photographic production processes, undertaken by amateur photographers are examined to identify patterns of activity that comprise the genre of CPJ. Through a review of existing literature on how citizens work in the field, and the way the resulting photographs are used in mainstream media, I offer a conceptual structure to delineate recognisable patterns of activity that comprise the genre of CPJ. The strength of this approach is that it allows me to describe CPJ in a way that reveals how external factors and the practice of citizens taking photojournalistic images impact upon the final product published in influential publications including popular press, books, magazines and internet publications.

The Tyranny of the Empty Frame

This study explores the notion of the “tyranny of the empty frame” within the online departments of the two leading Slovenian newspapers, Delo and Dnevnik, where online journalists—newsworkers with little or no training or experience in photojournalism—are required to provide each news item with at least one photograph. By adopting newsroom observation and in-depth interviews with online journalists working for Delo and Dnevnik, we investigate paradoxes associated with this imperative. Despite often being faced with a desperate search for “any image,” online journalists at both institutions are reluctant to use citizen-produced photographs—their use appears to be an aberration rather than a norm. Instead, they frequently resort to using what they refer to as a “symbolic photograph” to overcome the lack of visual material originating from the reported event. This move from indexical–iconic nexus to metaphoric visual communication signals challenges to the dominant paradigm of press photography. At the same time, we suggest that we should not view the phenomena of citizen photojournalism as a radical break with the past but as the latest development in a series of interrelated processes, intellectual projects of modernity, such as ocularcentrism, journalism, capitalism and the nation state.

Taking our Pictures

This qualitative research project explores the specific ways in which 12 traditional television, print and internet news organizations in the United States integrated user-generated visual content into news coverage over the course of an ordinary week, June 8–14, 2014. Framed from a cultural materialist perspective, we found that user-generated visual content constituted a minimal part of the print, broadcast and online news coverage. Based on our research, we suggest that traditional media outlets marginalized the use of citizen photojournalism in an effort to control news production, maintain their influence and power, and to reinforce the reliance on ideological notions of accurate, responsible and relevant journalism.

Blurry and Centered or Clear and Balanced?

Contemporary photojournalists are seeing their fellow photojournalists being laid off, are struggling to defend their professional values, and all the while having their own hard-fought photographs displayed next to blurry and grainy amateur images taken by mere happenstance. Professional photojournalists and citizen photojournalists are performing similar work, but have very differing understandings of photojournalism values and—importantly—of each other. The purpose of this study was to glean an insight into professional photojournalists' and citizen photojournalists' perceptions of photojournalism values through a coorientational framework. The results revealed that professional photojournalists may dislike citizen photojournalists and generally do not understand them accurately, hinting toward a sense of professional threat. Citizen photojournalists, on the other hand, are more accurate and may seek to model themselves on professional photojournalists.

The Role of Non-Government Organisations (NGOS) In Practising Editorial Photography in A Globalised Media Environment

The news media industry has changed dramatically into a global business with ever-increasing attention being devoted to entertainment and celebrity across the last 10–20 years. There has also been a growing reliance on images produced by citizens (citizen photojournalism), by media outlets and publishers. It is widely acknowledged that in tandem these changes have shrunk publication opportunities for professional photographers undertaking editorial projects. As a result, photographers are increasingly relying on non-government organisations (NGOs) to gain access to photographing issues and events in developing countries and to expand their economic and portfolio opportunities. This increase in photographers working for and alongside NGOs has given rise to a new genre of editorial photography which I call NGO Reportage. By way of a case study, an exploration of this new genre reveals important issues for photographers working with NGOs and examines the constructed narratives of images contained within these emerging practices.

Comparing the Ethics of Citizen Photojournalists and Professional Photojournalists: A Coorientational Study

In the digital news environment, amateur images—citizen photojournalism—appear next to professional photojournalists' photos, contributing to a probable tension and sense of professional threat among professional photojournalists. Using the coorientation approach, this study explores the ethical values of citizen photojournalists and professional photojournalists, the extent to which they agree about these values, how accurate they are in assessing each others' values, and how congruent they perceive they are with each other.

If Everyone with a Camera Can Do This, Then What? Professional Photojournalists' Sense of Professional Threat in the Face of Citizen Photojournalism

Today, citizen photojournalists armed with mobile phones can perform many of the tasks of a photojournalist, calling into question whether photojournalists perform a unique and essential service–characteristics of professionals. Photojournalists defend their professionalism through their professional values and skills, but even as they attempt to defend their occupational turf, the resource-poor news organizations for which they work are soliciting and publishing these citizen-shot news images. This study uses a field experiment that manipulates a photo credit line and open-ended responses to assess whether this sense of threatened professionalism exists. Further, this study examines whether citizen photojournalists' assessment of news image quality is impacted by the presence of a professional credit line. This study adds to the current understanding of photojournalism values, citizen-photojournalism values and professional threat