Professional Photojournalists Research Articles

Visual representations of community in scholastic photojournalism: A thematic analysis of award-winning photographs from the national scholastic press association’s photo of the year contest

While journalism awards can enhance social capital and signify quality, they often reinforce a limited, negative perspective of what is newsworthy. This study builds on existing research examining award-winning photojournalism by focusing on the understudied population of student photojournalists. Via a qualitative analysis of 229 photographs from the National Scholastic Press Association’s Photo of the Year Contest, this research analyzes major visual themes and prevalent news values in award-winning scholastic photojournalism. The results from this exploratory study indicate that student journalists visually represent high school as a place for connection, collaboration, and citizenship and present a uniquely positive portrayal of their world. The findings also suggest that conventionalization of topics, tone, and techniques is present in student photojournalism award contests although the themes that are reinforced by this conventionalization are dissimilar to what has been observed in professional photojournalism contests.

Citizen or Professional: Exploring Heroic Moral Choice Motivations in Photojournalism

Photojournalists make serious and often heroic split-second decisions when covering scenes. One of the dilemmas they might encounter is the choice between humanitarianism, which favors the subject in need, versus professionalism, which focuses on telling the story. This exploratory study aims to understand the moral decision-making situations encountered by professional photojournalists and how they process decisions in these situations. We interviewed nine professional photojournalists and surveyed the moral intensity of the situations they encountered. The results identified three types of situations where photojournalists encounter citizen vs. professional moral dilemmas. We found that most participants situationally prioritized the subject’s needs and emotions in line with postconventional moral development, and preferred to act as concerned citizens rather than exclusively acting as committed professionals.

Exploration and Research on Innovative Strategies of Photojournalism Considering Rich Media Perspectives

Exploration and research on innovative strategies of photojournalism considering rich media perspectives is studied. The general advantages of professional photojournalists are strong political awareness and overall concept, strong news sensitivity, diverse expression techniques, and the courage to pioneer and innovate. Therefore, we consider the novel perspectives of the different sources to construct the efficient photojournalism considering rich media perspectives.

‘It’s What I Do’

This close reading of the public persona outlines how high-profile war photojournalist Lynsey Addario articulated ‘it’s what I do’ in her public Instagram account construed as an ongoing digital memoir. Addario’s Instagram profile and her formal journalistic memoir, It’s What I Do: A Photographer’s Life of Love and War (2015), are fluid continuums of different forms and features that support, authenticate, and promote her public work persona, using various visual and literary techniques to articulate ‘it’s what I do’. Through self-life-writing, Addario blurs the distinction between public and private and incorporates her personal life into her work. The strategies common to autobiographical journalism, self-life-writing, and celebrity culture substantiate, authenticate, and promote her brand. Yet, complicating the professional life and persona with personal and intimate performances does not happen without critical concerns such as intimisation and celebritisation of conflict photojournalism. Findings shed light on public persona work in professional photojournalism through personalised, visual, and branded auto/biographical content on Instagram.

A critically methodological approach: reading closely the Instagram profile of a photojournalist

The present study addresses one possible template for exploring the meanings of photojournalistic self-presentation on Instagram. I employ automedial close reading for the data collected from one Instagram user and his profile in the cases of two professional photojournalists: Ed Kashi and Sebastian Rich. I test and develop the process of close reading in the context of Instagram and professional photojournalism. I am founding this practice on an active, sensitive interpretation process, not code identification, by combining qualitative research and autoethnographic personal narrative. The approach implies a theoretical, conceptual, and contextual reflection with and against the texts and subjects of study. This study frames the automedial production on Instagram as readable texts. Instagram-based research into photojournalism as a profession and practice needs theory-based qualitative approaches, such as close reading, based on small datasets. Whilst its focus is on the methodological approach, the paper opens up perspectives on studying the self-presentational identity work of an Instagram author, showing the value of automedial close reading.

On the Boundaries: Professional Photojournalists Navigating Identity in an Age of Technological Democratization

ABSRACTIn the wake of fewer and fewer professionals populating photojournalism, this study utilizes in-depth interviews with 21 professional photojournalists to better understand how they construct their identity. With a framework of social identity theory, this research found photojournalists consider clear role conception, adherence to normative journalism ethics and organizational backing as key components of their in-group. They consider professionalism as service, a lack of professional processes, and advocacy key parts of the out-group. These results are then interpreted for their effects on professionalism.

Blurred Boundaries: Toning Ethics in News Routines

ABSTRACTThis study investigates how United States-based professional photojournalists apply toning ethics in their news routines and whether those ethics vary by organization. Utilizing data collected from in-depth interviews with professional photojournalists and a hierarchy of influences framework, we found that while some ethical decisions are embedded in photojournalists’ news routines, these do vary greatly by organization. These findings illustrate how journalistic norms could be potentially changing and that individual news organizations are applying ethics differently.

Closing the Gap Between Photojournalist Research and Photojournalism Practice: Exploring the Motivations of the Subjects of Sensitive Photo Essays

ABSTRACTThis study is the first to inquire about the factors that influence people’s willingness to allow professional photojournalists to tell their stories through the medium of the photo essay. Guided by Self-Disclosure Theory, in-depth interviews were conducted with the subjects of 15 peer-judged award-winning photo essays. These were drawn from the multiple picture categories of the National Press Photographers Association (NPPA) Monthly Clip Contest, the annual NPPA Best of Photojournalism Contest, and the annual World Press Photo Contest between 2013 and 2017. The topics of the photo essays were sensitive in nature. Analysis reveals support and appreciation amongst photo-essay subjects for the profession of photojournalism. Motivations derived from the sensitivity and professionalism with which each interviewee was initially approached, a need to tell a different side of the story, a desire to inspire others or invoke change, and the memory-keeping and permanence afforded through published professional photojournalism.

The Gender Crisis in Professional Photojournalism

To date, there have been very little research or data available concerning the work patterns and challenges facing women photojournalists. As the digital era places professional photojournalists as a whole under more pressure than ever, this study seeks to unravel the particular challenges facing women photographers. Using data from 545 women photojournalists from 71 countries collected between 2015 and 2016, this article finds that women photojournalists face even more demanding circumstances than their male counterparts, in spite of the fact that they are more likely to have higher education and have more often received a higher level of training in photography. The data, collected in partnership with the World Press Photo Foundation, suggest the historical underrepresentation of women in photography is ongoing. We argue this pattern of underrepresentation will likely continue in the future meaning an even smaller proportion of women photographers presenting visual stories on the world's most pressing issues and the further decline of the female gaze. The focus of this study is to identify trends in the employment of women in the photojournalism industry and to link new and substantial data to theorising around the consequences of this distortion.

Really Social Disaster: An Examination of Photo Sharing on Twitter During the #SCFlood

In the open marketplace of visuals where the most valued photographs “rise to the top” via tweets, likes, and retweets rather than being dictated by professionals, the study of what makes an image go really social is merited. One occurrence during which professional photojournalism and nonprofessional photography truly coexist, intermingle, and blur is that of a natural disaster. A body of research exists that has examined the visual framing of disasters, but none has addressed how these differently framed photos go social online or by whom. In this study, 1,078 Twitter photos shared by professional media outlets and nonprofessional tweeters were examined to see what portrayals of photos are elevated in the network. Established frames and new frames were examined: depictions of people, emotional hierarchy, novelty, victims, ordinary people, uniforms, emergency professionals, valence, pragmatic, human interest, and political. The results add empirical evidence to the different ways that professional members of media and other visual sharers understand, visually communicate, and react to disaster and add to the visual framing literature an element of really social visual framing.

The Impact of Images on the UAE Media: Assessment of Media Experts of the Image Manipulation in the Press

As communication technology broadly expanding awareness the way postmodernists put it, relativity has become a little common among youths in media in the UAE, in addition to middle age people who work in magazines or feature supplements, who deal with postmodernism school as part of their job in treating pictures through the graphics and other methods of picture manipulation. Still, a little older and middle age people in media prefer either to stay modern, or go ahead to after postmodernism, in an attempt to regain human sense of the image, in its original source, though, some would be constrained to the reality of his media organization agenda. Credibility, thus, mainly depends on how the press organization set its agenda and not on the method used to process the picture. Affecting the appearance in media is not affected by those who work or related to the media in anyway more than 10%, preferably not to exceed 5% of alteration, otherwise, the picture will lose its essence and become affected in its credibility. And this is what the results in many forms of research conducted at this study such as focus groups and questionnaire have shown. Minor technical alteration to picture, such as, adding some frills to figures appearing in pictures, or changing colour, or adjusting contrast is highly acceptable among people of different ages in media in the UAE. Digital editing of pictures in media can incorporate unrealistically multiple images into a single image to lose great extent of its credibility, as found by 71% of a questionnaire participants. Professional photojournalists regard pictures edited digitally as fine art and not photography. This is what this study all about.

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 Future of Professional Photojournalism

The work practices of the professional photojournalist are currently undergoing rapid change in the digital era. New technologies, new platforms and new methods of visual storytelling are exerting a range of pressures and influences that require photojournalists to adapt and respond in different ways. The changes provoke a number of questions that are critical to the future of professional photojournalism: What are the new risks being faced by photojournalists? How are the transformations in the media economy affecting photojournalists’ employment? What does this mean for image quality? How do photojournalists think about the manipulation of images or the staging of events? Given the rise of citizen journalism, digital technology and social media, will there even be professional photojournalists in the future? This paper presents some of the results and new analysis from the first international study into the current state and future of professional photojournalism, with a specific focus on risk and on perceptions of risk among photographers. The results indicate a high degree of risk is experienced among professional photographers with a very strong correlation to the country in which they are based.

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.

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.

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.

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.

Toward A New Visual Culture Of The News

This paper argues that the rise of new digital technologies and new amateur/citizen practices of photographic production have constituted a “short-circuit” that has critically destabilized but also productively challenged professional photojournalism. In this context, the paper focuses on the practice of digital post-production (i.e. digitally “retouching” and “enhancing” photographs), as an empirical prism through which to theoretically discuss wider technological, professional, and cultural shifts that have been affecting news photography over the last decade. In particular, drawing on in-depth interviews with international photojournalists, jury members of press photo contests, and directors of digital post-production labs, the paper analyzes a few paradigmatic case studies of post-produced news photographs that have recently won prestigious professional awards, yet have generated considerable controversies. Through the analysis of the case studies, the paper aims to shed light on the contested construction of aesthetic conventions and professional-ethical standards within digital photojournalism, in relation to (1) the shifting professional ideal of visual news “objectivity,” and (2) the shifting symbolic boundaries between professional and non-professional news photo producers. Finally, introducing the notion of “digital cultural capital,” the paper suggests the theoretical relevance of a (post-)Bourdieusian approach to photojournalism, which frames the conflictual implementation of new digital technologies and the diffusion of new social and material practices as a symbolic struggle for professional distinction within the wider visual culture.