The International Photojournalism Industry: Cultural Production and the Making and Selling of News Pictures [1 ed.] 1138897582, 9781138897588

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The International Photojournalism Industry

How are events turned into news pictures that define them for the audience? How do events become commodified into pictures that both capture them and reiterate the values of the agencies that sell them? This book looks at every stage of the production of news photographs as they move to and from the ground and are sold around the world. Based on extensive fieldwork at a leading international news agency that includes participant observation with photographers in the field, at the agency’s local and global ­picture desks in Israel, Singapore, and the UK, in-depth interviews with pictures professionals, and observations and in-depth interviews at The ­Guardian’s picture desk in London, the findings in this book point to a wide cultural production infrastructure hidden from – and yet also nurtured and thus very much determined by – the ­consumer’s eye. Jonathan Ilan is Lecturer at the School of Communication at Bar-Ilan University, Israel.

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The International Photojournalism Industry Cultural Production and the Making and Selling of News Pictures Jonathan Ilan

First published 2019 by Routledge 711 Third Avenue, New York, NY 10017 and by Routledge 2 Park Square, Milton Park, Abingdon, Oxon OX14 4RN Routledge is an imprint of the Taylor & Francis Group, an informa business © 2019 Taylor & Francis The right of Jonathan Ilan to be identified as author of this work has been asserted by him in accordance with sections 77 and 78 of the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988. All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reprinted or reproduced or utilised in any form or by any electronic, mechanical, or other means, now known or hereafter invented, including photocopying and recording, or in any information storage or retrieval system, without permission in writing from the publishers. Trademark notice: Product or corporate names may be trademarks or registered trademarks, and are used only for identification and explanation without intent to infringe. Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data CIP data has been applied for. ISBN: 978-1-138-89758-8 (hbk) ISBN: 978-1-315-17878-3 (ebk) Typeset in Sabon by codeMantra

In memory of my mother, Sarit Ilan

Contents

List of Figures Acknowledgements List of Abbreviations 1 Introduction The Methods 5   Some Limitations 7   Ethnography for Some, a Problem for Others 8 A Political Economy from Below or Cultural Studies from Above? 13 Cultural Production and the Industries of Culture 17 Commercial Photography Production 20 News Production Ethnographies and International News Production 28 Producing Pictures, Making News, and How this Book Works 31

ix xi xiii 1

2 The Production Process I: From Story to Product The Story 42 The Photography 49   The Equipment 51   The Fieldwork 56   A Final Touch before Take-Off 61 The Product 67   The Local Office 70

40

3 The Production Process II: From Product to Story Final Stop (I): The Global Pictures Desk in Singapore and Sales 80   The Global Pictures Desk  84

80

viii Contents   The Magazine Desk 101   The Keyword Team 109   Global Graphics 117   Pictures Administration 122   Sales 123 Final Stop (II): The Client’s End, The Case of The Guardian  128 The International Desk: How Well Did We Do? 142 4 An Analysis of Significant Events and their Coverage First Event: Israeli Artillery Base, November 2005 156   First Event: An Analysis 159 Second Event: Bombing near Tulkarem, December 2005 166   Second Event: An Analysis 168 Third Event: The Funeral of an Israeli officer, December 2005 179   Third Event: An Analysis 180 Fourth Event: Carrots Picking Near Nahal Oz, May 2006 188   Fourth Event: An Analysis 190

155

Conclusion Who’s Dominating the International Photojournalism Industry? 206   New Media, Old (and New) Rivalries 207   Serving News from the Top of the World 210   What Has Changed in the Process 215   A Few Concluding Remarks: A Closure that Offers Some Openings 221

205

Index

229

List of Figures

2.1 Some roads are rough (Israel, 2005) 55 2.2 Photographers at work I (Israel, 2005) 57 2.3 ‘A pack of lonely wolves’ (Reuters, AP & Getty photographers sending pictures together, Israel 2006) 66 2.4 Photographers at work II: In competition with everybody (Israel, 2005) 68 3.1 The agency’s pictures regional network, 2010 81 3.2 The global pictures desk, 2010 82 3.3 The “Japanese phone” 84 3.4 A doctored picture recieved by the desk: So many sheep, which ones are cloned? 88 3.5 More doctored pictures: Two pictures made into one; Perfect lines, but what happened to the soldiers’ shadows? 89 3.6 The agency’s picture templates: Caption correction, Picture kill, and Highlights 93 3.7 Editors at work (Singapore, 2010) 94 3.8 Keywords entry: Protestors in Sweden (Singapore, 2010) 110 3.9 The keywords commandments: From image to text (Singapore, 2010) 115 3.10 From a picture to a graphic design (Singapore, 2010) 119 3.11 Gizmos: Pictures cost money, graphic figures are free 135 3.12 The visual design plan for g2, The Guardian (London, 2010) 138 3.13 The agency’s pictures production cycle: From story to product, from product to story 147 4.1 Israeli soldiers pulling a cleaning rod through a cannon’s barrel ­(Israel, November 3, 2005) 164 4.2 A cannon firing in Nahal Oz (Israel, November 3, 2005) 166 4.3 Israeli soldiers picking up body parts near the city of Tulkarem ­(Israel, December 29, 2006) 170 4.4 Israeli soldiers picking up body parts near the Philadelphi Route (Barkay Wolfson/Maariv, Israel, May 13, 2004) 173 4.5 Text and intertext, nation and profession 174 4.6 Front page, International Herald Tribune, December 30, 2006 177

x  List of Figures 4.7 The funeral of the Israeli officer in the city of Haifa (Israel, December 30, 2006) 184 4.8 Carrot picking near Nahal Oz: In search for some ‘movement’ (Gil Cohen Magen, Israel, May 11, 2006) 194 C.1 Total number of picture images in 2007-monthly 215

Acknowledgements

This project would simply not have been possible were it not for so many people at the news agency who granted me access to their work environments and shared with me their daily routines. I wish to thank the head of the Jerusalem bureau at the time of my observations, who gave me a green light to begin this journey in Israel back in late 2004, when this book was only beginning to form as an idea. I am thankful to the then chief photographer at the Jerusalem bureau, who approved having me around at the pictures department in the years 2005–2006 and allowed me to accompany one of his photographers, and to the London chief who granted me access to the London pictures desk in 2010 as well. The global pictures editor at the time of my observations was very supportive in allowing me to spend some time on the global pictures desk in 2010, as were the head of the global pictures desk and his deputy who were extremely cooperative and shared valuable information in Singapore. I owe a special debt to the agency’s archivist, who, sadly, had passed away not long ago. He opened the door for me to the agency archive in 2011 and was very helpful. And there were others in the agency who also gave me a few ideas over dinners and drinks, helped out with logistical issues associated with interviews, and gave me a hand in gaining access. I am grateful to all the photographers, editors, sub-editors, seniorsub-editors, editors-in-charge, administrators, graphic designers, and chief photographers for their cooperation, willingness to help, and patience. They took the time to answer my endless questions during their working hours and beyond. I also wish to thank Roger Tooth, the former head of photography at The Guardian, who gave me access to the paper’s pictures operations and shared a lot of information, as did Helen Healy, Jonathan Casson, and a few other picture editors for the paper and for the website. In particular, I wish to thank a special photographer, who is now a dear friend of mine (you know who you are), whose rare honesty, clear voice, and open heart sparked my imagination during a conversation at an agency’s party back in 2004, where this project had begun. His ability to speak clearly about his daily job as an agency photographer,

xii Acknowledgements share his passions and frustrations, and invite a stranger to ‘touch’ the hidden cords of his profession made me realize a thing or two about photography and news, facts and stories, and the theory and practice of media ethnography. I came up with some great ideas in Daya Thussu’s “Global media” class. It was Daya who played a key role in bringing the publication process of this book to a successful completion, as did Felisa Salvago-Keyes and Christina Kowalski from Routledge who were very supportive at some of the more difficult moments in the publication process. David Hendy read a few chapters along the way and offered valuable criticism and insights. The late Tamar Liebes made insightful comments at a very early stage of this project. I wish to thank Jean Seaton, who believed in this project and was a careful reader; it was my privilege to be her student. I owe a great deal of gratitude to Paul Frosh for his insight, criticism, effort, and friendship ever since this project was conceived. I also wish to thank the University of Westminster and the Communication and media research institute (CAMRI) for giving me a scholarship that helped my work progress in London, afforded the travel expenses to Singapore, and made my journey go beyond all expectations. My wife, Lee, gave me strength, assisted with access, shared her ideas, and helped me overcome my fears and anxieties, while my kids, Danielle (Duda) and Omer (Frizzie), filled this complicated project to execute with endless joy. Finally, the entire thing would have not been remotely possible if it not for the endless love and support over the years of my beloved mother, Sarit Ilan, who passed away just a few months after we came back to Israel in 2014 and did not get to see this day. This book is dedicated to her. .‫ אמא אהובה‬,‫געגועים‬ Some portions in Chapter 1 were published in “Just when I thought I was in: Gaining access in a new(s) production ethnography.” Journalism Practice, 9(2), 153–167. Some portions in Chapter 3 were published in “News and the word-image problematic: A (key)word on international news pictures production.” Journalism: Theory, Practice and Criticism, 18(8), 977–993. Certain portions in Chapter 4 were published in “Intertextuality and news photography production: International making of a pictorial echo.” International Journal of Communication 8, 2879–2898, and in “Over a dead body: International coverage of grief.” Semiotica, 2015(205), 229–242. And parts in the concluding chapter were published in “The best of both worlds: The story of the Reuters picture service.” Media History 19(1), 74–92.

List of Abbreviations

AFP AP EPA GPO IDF MADA PA UPI YESHA ZAKA

Agence France Presse Associated Press European Pressphoto Agency Government Press Office Israeli Defense Forces Magen David Adom (Israeli Paramedics) The British Press Association United Press International Yehuda, Shomron & Azza Zihui Korbanot Ason (Disaster Victims Identification)

1 Introduction

On August 5, 2006, Reuters, one of the three largest international news agencies in the world, was at the center of public, media, scandal. In a Reuters picture distributed a day before, a neighborhood in the city of Beirut appeared to be engulfed in thick plumes of smoke after it was bombarded during the night by the Israeli Defense Forces (IDF) during the war between the Lebanese Hezbollah and the state of Israel. The p ­ icture was taken by Adnan Hajj, a Lebanese freelance photographer who had worked for Reuters for 10 years. Its caption said that it was a picture of smoke coming out of burning buildings in a Beirut suburb after the attack, during which several buildings had been destroyed ­(Lappin and Bodoni, 2006). Hajj’s picture was just one among thousands distributed by Reuters during the war in Lebanon. It was certainly not one of those memorable ones engraved as part of some collective memory had it not been for Charles Johnson’s suspicious eye. Johnson’s Little Green Footballs blog had been operated for some time. The thick smoke in the picture seemed too thick for Johnson, who published his suspicions in his blog after a short inquiry. “This Reuters photograph shows blatant evidence of ­manipulation” said Johnson, Notice the repeating patterns in the smoke; this is almost certainly caused by using the Photoshop ‘clone’ tool to add more smoke to the image […] smoke simply does not contain repeating symmetrical patterns like this, and you can see the repetition in both plumes of smoke. There’s really no question about it. (Johnson, 2006) A picture which Johnson said was the unaltered original was published in his blog. The same buildings appeared, this time under a thinner pall of smoke. The original picture, suggested Johnson, was in fact taken by a photographer named Ben Curtis working for AP, the American ­International news agency and Reuters’ rival, on the 26th of July, two weeks before Hajj’s picture was even published (Johnson, 2006). Not only that, but Johnson, now fully convinced of his hunch, pointed to additional alterations spotted in the picture in the form of cloned buildings as well.

2 Introduction Soon enough, different websites taking Johnson’s side had emerged, claiming to have proof of other manipulated pictures distributed by ­Reuters from the past. Particular doubts were also raised about previous Hajj pictures, and he was accused for having a political agenda.1 A ­Reuters photographer saw Johnson’s blog, and the next morning Reuters sent an urgent message to all of its clients advising them to stop using Hajj’s picture and that it should be removed immediately from the archives, as there was reason to believe the picture had been altered using a graphic editing software during its editing process. In addition, Reuters said it would sack Hajj and that all of his pictures stored within the company’s archive (920) would be removed immediately. Hajj had tried to save his skin by claiming that he was “[…] merely trying to remove a speck of dust and fix the lighting in the photos […]”, but Reuters’ heavy machinery of crisis control was already in motion (Seelye and Bosman, 2006). “On Saturday, we published 2,000 photos” said Paul Holmes, a senior Reuters editor responsible for the agency’s standards and ethics at the time. “It was handled by someone on a very busy day at a more junior level than we would wish for in ideal circumstances” he said, adding that it was probably the result of some “human error” rather than malicious intent (Holmes cited in Seelye and Bosman, 2006). And later Reuters global pictures editor at the time, Tom Szlukovenyi, said: There is no graver breach of Reuters standards for our photographers than the deliberate manipulation of an image. Reuters has zero tolerance for any doctoring of pictures and constantly reminds its photographers – both staff and freelance – of this strict and ­unalterable policy. (Szlukovenyi cited in BBC News, 2006, August 6) A thorough internal investigation was launched, fearing that Hajj’s ­ ictures were just the ‘tip of the iceberg’, and several editors along the p chain of command were questioned (including a top Reuters photo editor for the Middle East who was advised to take a leave of absence. See Lang, 2007). Hajj, on the other hand, had gone underground and was nowhere to be found. The investigation, however, was of comfort to ­Reuters; it revealed no further doctored pictures. “We are fully satisfied, as we conclude our extensive investigation that it was unfortunate human ­ hotographs” error that led to the inadvertent publication of two rogue p wrote David Schlesinger, Reuters editor-in-chief at the time, in the ­Reuters blog, referring to Hajj’s doctored pictures (Schlesinger, 2007). “There was absolutely no intention on Reuters part to mislead the ­public […] we were not satisfied with the degree of oversight that we had that allowed these two images to slip through” continued Schlesinger; “we have tightened procedures, taken appropriate disciplinary action and appointed one of our most experienced editors to supervise photo

Introduction  3 operations in the Middle East” (Schlesinger, 2007). What is more, a set of detailed guidelines for an acceptable use of Adobe’s Photoshop software was posted, and the Reuters photo-editing ­process was restructured with greater supervision and additional training, using the help of outside experts on digital work environments. Reuters also began to consider technical solutions to recognize doctored pictures in the future. Finally, senior editors were said to deal with “[…] all potentially controversial photographs, and we [Reuters] have ensured that shift leaders are focusing solely on quality issues instead of doing editing themselves” (Schlesinger, 2007). The Hajj’s controversy became a news event in itself, sparking the imagination of those fascinated with the complex relationship between the ‘real world’ and its various forms of visual representation. Indeed, the technical capacity to doctor pictures and manipulate photographs so as to deceive had long been acknowledged (see e.g., Ritchin, 1999). In fact, it was even discussed by the agency’s pictures managers themselves in the early 1990s with the emergence of Photoshop and its misuse ­potential. Yet this example seemed to have struck at the core of what was still considered by some (mainly from the news community) as an undisputable form of signification – the news picture. However, the Hujj’s controversy is, in fact, also fascinating from a rather different point of view, as it provides a glimpse inside the institutions who maintain news pictures, their systems, their production processes. One way of looking at the picture’s history, then, is from the moment it was conceived as an idea and up to its final form as a new born news picture. But then if we also take into consideration its ‘career’ as a successful Reuters picture at first (hence distributed by Reuters to its worldwide clients) and later as a Reuters failure (now in the form of a doctored picture), it then becomes a rare document raising a number of questions: How is a news picture produced? What lies within that mysterious process of production hidden from the spectator’s eye? What are those different moments and sites through which it is transferred until it is stamped as a valid cultural product, branded? Who are those position holders responsible for its transformation from an idea into a product, and what are the different forces governing their daily routines? What are the economic and cultural powers making it so natural to us until we are willing to consider it as the highest form of representation (a picture that is also a news document), trustworthy? These are the main questions addressed in this book, in the hope that it would shed some light on the international photojournalism industry at large. This is done by way of exploring a rather unique international news organization – a leading international news agency – and its news photos’ systems of manufacturing. Surprisingly, it appears that these queries concerning this powerful news organization and its international competitors were very much ignored in research and their

4 Introduction processes of production almost entirely overlooked (more on this later in this c­ hapter). Indeed, with the specific case of the agency that is explored in this book, such lacuna is a surprise in particular, for within the international news flow arena it is perhaps one of the most intriguing and significant players: (1) It is an international news agency and consequently focused on its clients – various news outlets – unlike local news providers that are committed to their audiences. As a result, it is, to an extent, located ‘further up’ the international news information flow. (2) It is a private company which has to make profit, an information industry, and perhaps the most profitable international news agency within the international news market; at its heart it is concentrated on selling information to non-media clients worldwide, and its news products are thus of great cultural importance. (3) Its products are aimed at the international market and are thus designed so as to have an international appeal. At the same time, however, they have also to be tailored to national markets and different domestic demands. They are, put simply, glocal products, much like their processes of production, and both might tell us more about the production processes of international media products. News pictures are one of the most popular ‘lines’ of products in the agency’s media (apart from its TV products). They hold unique features given their universal and particular characteristics: products designed for a universal meaning (pictures that are also news information), which are also required to widen the company’s circle of clients. And they are meaningful cultural artifacts as well – extraordinary forms of representation taken daily as the ‘true’ mediators of reality, highly trustworthy, and are thus important to the understanding of the meaning of culture. More specifically, this research focus, therefore, is on the making of distinct pictures observed as products at the end (or the starting point) of an exceptional news production process – the production of news pictures in an international news agency. This research, however, is not about the very ontology of news pictures. Rather, it is focused on the routines of their making whereby they become ‘unordinary’, arresting, forcing their spectators not to look away. 2 Their unusual status, I would argue, results of a wide cultural production infrastructure hidden from – and yet also nurtured by – the consumer’s eye: from the camera’s lens to the daily work of the photographer; the editor; the producer; the chief of the department; administrators; graphic designers; sales and marketing; the international news agency; the different news outlets; different media and other organizations; and their audiences, who are all responsible for the representation of one reality and the production of another (Carey, 1989). In the following chapters I will analyze the complex international production process of news pictures, in the hope to shed some light on the overall production of newsworthiness. I hope to demonstrate that by entering into what Lutz and Collins (1993) described as “The Great

Introduction  5 Machinery of Desire”, we might have a better understanding of the meaning of news pictures as cultural products and the reasons for their privileged status (as opposed other forms of signification) in our everyday lives. By exploring news pictures’ processes of production, we might have a better understanding of how we put a cultural economy into work and how it works on us.

The Methods I mostly used ethnographic research methods: I tried to understand the process, its particular characteristics, and get as close as I could to the social world of the pictures professionals whose work routine I had ­followed – to ‘go native’. I divided this project in two central stages carried out along two different periods of time and spread over a number of countries, a process that very much resembles what Hannerz (2003, 2004) described as a multisite ethnography: 1 In the first stage, I conducted participant observations taking place from the end of 2005 during a period of almost a year in two steps: I Observing one of the agency’s most experienced Israeli staff photographers at the time, located in Israel. In my observations I managed to take part in a variety of more than 30 different news events (sometimes in several different events in a single day) that were observed – on and off – for almost a year. II Conducting approximately 20 observations of the daily work of the pictures department of the agency’s local bureau located in Jerusalem for three weeks. 2 In the second stage, I conducted participant observations during the first months of 2010 in different locations and in three steps: I Observing the daily work of several pictures editors in the ­pictures department of the agency’s local bureau located in ­London for one week. II Conducting extensive observations of the daily work of several subeditors, senior editors, and editors-in-charge in the agency’s global pictures desk, which was located in Singapore, for two weeks. I II Conducting several observations of the pictures operation of the British newspaper The Guardian, located in London, for two days.3 In addition to participant observations, I had about 30 in-depth ­interviews with key figures along the production processes of news pictures at the agency and at The Guardian, cultural mediators, conducted

6 Introduction as followed: (1) A number of extensive interviews were conducted with the agency’s staff Israeli photographer and two pictures editors working in the Jerusalem local bureau. (2) In-depth interviews were conducted with a senior editor and a senior editor-in-charge working in the pictures department of the agency’s international desk located in London, and with the agency’s head of pictures sales of Europe, the Middle East, and Africa. (3) Interviews were conducted with several subeditors, senior ­editors, editors-in-charge, and the deputy editor of the agency’s global pictures desk, with editors and editors-in-charge from the magazine desk and keyword team and the desk’s administrator; they were all working at the agency’s global pictures desk in Singapore. (4) In-depth interviews were conducted with a graphic journalist working at the agency’s global graphics desk in Singapore; with the assistant manager of the agency’s pictures service; and with the head of its Brussels’ picture desk, both had worked in the agency’s pictures service in 1985. (5) Several interviews were conducted with The Guardian’s head of photography; the website’s senior pictures editor; the feature pictures editor; an assistant picture editor; and with the head of its subeditors. Furthermore, an interpretive analysis of four different events covered by the agency’s photographer, which took place between the end of 2005 and during 2006 in Israel, was also conducted. However, and as somewhat of an unorthodox research method, the analysis was focused on the biography of the pictures taken within those events. This unique method of analysis was used for two main reasons: First, since the production of news pictures, as I hope to make clear in the following chapters, begins way before the pictures are taken by a photographer in the field. Therefore, I came to realize the analysis of the events whereby the pictures were conceived (even though not all pictures are the outcome of ‘real occurrences’ as well) are highly significant, thereby adding ­additional meanings to news photos before they turn into photographic news texts in their ‘final’ form. Second, the entire process of production, as I demonstrate later on, is analyzed in this project not as a simple linear process maintained in a closed field of production and operated only by the privileged ‘producers’ (e.g., photographers, editors, managers etc.). Rather, it is an open system in which the audience plays a pivotal role at key moments and sites along the production routine, having both the pictures’ ‘producers’ and their ‘audiences’ taken here in their complete experience, which therefore exceeds way beyond organizational duties; it is a constant dialogue between worlds of production. A semiotic analysis of several pictures taken by the photographer from these particular events, that were then sent away for distribution (whether to the local bureau in Jerusalem first or directly to the agency’s global pictures desk in Singapore and then to clients), was also conducted.4 Combining the analysis of the pictures themselves and of the events in which they were taken, I was hoping to demonstrate the circularity of

Introduction  7 the process: from the moment the pictures were conceived as an idea and up to their form as cultural products for (and as an example of how they are published by) the agency’s clients. Finally, I was able to see the agency’s archive in London and go over all the documents related to the agency’s pictures service from the day it was established – from minutes of meetings to company brochures, from historical guiding books to personal memos. 5 Combining several research methods, this research was an attempt to examine (1) What is news in its photographic form, and (2) In what ways the production processes of news pictures in the international news agency illustrate the overall production of newsworthiness. Some Limitations This research is of a specific time frame, since, much like institutions and their technologies, production processes are also subjects to historical change. Thus, this is not an attempt to identify a universal set of production processes. Rather, it is the story of a particular process taking place from the end of 2005 for nearly one year and throughout 2010. As it happened, this research ended up covering two extremely important points in the agency’s time: before and after it had gone through a significant reorganization. Although not planned in advance, the two different time frames in which this project eventually took place may provide a comparative angle and contribute to the overall process and its financial backwind – p ­ articularly at the agency, but also to serve as a platform in order to understand better similar processes in international media organizations at large. This project does not include an analysis of how news pictures are read by the audience. Nonetheless, the audience of the agency’s pictures is fully acknowledged at different steps along this journey. In fact, as I argue later, those who operate the production of news pictures at the agency are themselves cultural consumers who quite often ‘bring’ their consumer baggage to work; consumer culture plays a substantial part at meaningful sites and particular moments of production throughout the entire process of decision-making and daily routines. Moreover, since the audience appears in the following chapters to be playing a ­pivotal role along the different sites of production at the agency, and so is found equally accountable to their final output (this will be particularly demonstrated in the analysis of selected events in Chapter 4), and since the process in question has a rather circular structure (but not just), the audience is treated in this project not simply in the form of an ‘end’ consumer, but rather a crucial element for a complete understanding of cultural production and its cycles in full. While the entire production process of news pictures along its key moments and sites is spread over a number of distant places and operated in different countries (my observations only took place in Israel, the UK,

8 Introduction and Singapore), the process itself is remarkably short in time. Thus, a picture taken in, say, Israel; then sent from the field to the local bureau in Jerusalem (or sometimes directly to Singapore); then sent to the agency’s global pictures desk in Singapore; and then to clients; is published in what can sometimes be a matter of minutes. Since I have only myself to blame for what follows, I was obviously unable to track a single picture along the entire process in real time. As a result, the parts in this project whereby the entire production cycle is covered (i.e., Chapters 2 and 3) are based on the daily norms and operational routines at the different sites of production as a way of reflecting on the actual process as it takes place in real time. It is also worth mentioning that certain bits of information concerning the production process in its different stages appear in several places in various chapters (although at different variations and contexts). This is clearly the result of a unique relationship that takes place between process and structure in organizations, and therefore one which requires several points of view in the study of media organizations and cultural institutions. Finally, while the visual texts produced in the agency are often ­addressed in research as photographs or images, they were nonetheless termed “pictures” by the agency’s picture professionals (Pictures, or Pix in short, was also the title that was given to the division by its personnel, and the term was (and still is) used to title different departments in the division, such as the global pictures desk, as well). Since work is mainly at the focus of this project rather than text (although certainly not just), that is also the term that I have decided to use in my analyses hereafter. Ethnography for Some, a Problem for Others In this journey I learned a great deal about the elusive nature of news pictures and their production. I also experienced the slippery position of a researcher conducting participant observation – those different ­delicate games of ‘changing identities’ from connected participant to independent excluded observer that the fieldwork required. It is because of those characteristics of methodology that I had to go through many obstacles along the way, which would perhaps be easier to start explaining with a story. In one occasion I was notified by the photographer of an explosion which had resulted in casualties that took place near the city of TulKarem in Israel. Being a closed military area, civilians were not allowed to continue any further, although a few journalists had been allowed to it. Soon enough a great number of reporters, photographers, and TV crews arrived as well in order to cover the event. A soldier presented himself as part of the IDF spokesperson unit. Since Israel is a small country, journalists are often familiar with one another, as they are to the IDF

Introduction  9 spokespersons, and since I was a ‘new face in town’ he kindly asked about why I was there and explained in a suspiciously nice way that I did not look familiar to him. Without thinking twice, I replied that I was from the agency (“Hmm, Text?” asked the soldier, as he noticed the notebook in my hand. I nodded) and pointed my finger to the agency photographer I accompanied. Surprisingly, it appeared as if he was satisfied for the time being and went his way. Time passed, and I was deeply involved in my observation when the same soldier approached me once again, only this time he was not as kind as before, and notified me that in a few minutes the region’s Colonel would give a briefing to all the reporters at the scene and that I better not go too far. Clearly the soldier ‘meant business’, I said to myself, realizing that this briefing could have major consequences for my observation: The scene of events was relatively big and divided into three sub-scenes, and in order to observe the photographer from up close I had to move around between the three. If I attended the briefing, I was probably not able to observe the photographer as it was needed, and he could even get entirely out of my sight. On the other hand, if I decided not to attend the briefing, my cover could be blown and I would be forced to leave the scene, or worse. At the end, I decided to stick to the original plan and attend the briefing as if I was an agency reporter, while, at the same time, trying to observe the photographer’s work from a far. Quite similar, I realized early on that it would be impossible for me to attend events without being noticed by the photographer and his colleagues. In fact, I could not get to the scenes without the photographer’s help. We met at the scenes quite often, and as time went by I got to know his fellow photographers from competing agencies. In many cases we drove together to the different events, and at times I felt as if I had lost the ‘naturalness’ of his surroundings, having ‘contaminated’ it with my presence. Yet early on, the car where we both spent hours of driving together from one scene to another slowly turned into the perfect setting to discuss the photographer’s daily work and the organization he was working for, and hours of waiting became my ticket into the thin cords of his world that would remain in the shadows if I chose a different path for my work. Quite often, I found myself caught in the middle of an ­essential crossing along the local department’s internal exchange of information flow: The photographer received updates from the editor in the office and sometimes from the chief photographer as well while we were both driving to and from the scenes of events. The photographer did not feel comfortable saying I was in the car, and thanks to a speaker phone I often overheard valuable bits of information in real time. Needless to say, these were all important lessons, allowing me to continue with my journey with a clear conscience and a sense of a valid project. The nature of a working environment is comprised of numerous layers; yet some are only revealed when others are hidden.

10 Introduction But observing a photographer in the field is one thing and observing editors in an office is another. In the field it is often easier to blend in; sitting in an office immediately turns an outside observer into an intruder whose presence often makes people feel uncomfortable. ­Moreover, since most picture editing is now done on computers, one can never fully comprehend the position of an editor without asking questions, and one soon discovers that there is a very thin line between what is seen as pure curiosity and an irritating presence. Quite often, observing ethnographers are perceived by the observed as ‘unemployed’ or ‘weird’ (and often being asked “so what are you going to do with this?”, or, my personal favorite: “so what do you do?”). I was usually welcomed. Many of my subjects did not really understand what it was that I was doing (or did not care). In some cases (e.g., in the global pictures desk) I felt that my presence was enthusiastically welcomed. Did this compromise my position? Was my independence at risk? However, I came to realize that the warmth of my reception was because editors on the global pictures desk work extremely hard around the clock, yet even though their position is crucial in the overall process, they remain anonymous and their work is publicly unrecognized, while photographers win prizes, become famous, or at least get a credit. An outside observer can easily become a credit for editors, and I was fortunate to be there at the right time. My work at The Guardian’s picture desk showed up similarities and differences. At the agency my prayers (and emails) were answered ­immediately, and I was given official permission rather easily (e.g., it only took a brief meeting with the global pictures editor to be able to conduct my observations in Singapore). With The Guardian, however, I had to chase its head of photography (virtually speaking) using all the connections I could think of for quite some time. In fact, if it was not for some strings pulled by my PhD supervisor at the time, and ‘a little help from her friends’, I would probably have been left with no reply at all. But I was suddenly invited to meet The Guardian’s head of photography in person, and he granted the access I needed. Access, it appears, works in mysterious ways and quite often it is a matter of trade. Sometimes you have to give something (e.g., a possible credit in the case of the Singapore desk) and can then expect something in return. Yet in most cases an outside observer has little to offer in exchange (what do I possess that The Guardian’s head of photography can possibly want?). But sometimes, if one is really fortunate, you happen to know someone who knows someone who owes someone a favor, and then all of a sudden you are in. When I did manage to ‘sneak’ inside The Guardian’s realm, I soon realized that things were similar to my Singapore experience. For, even at The Guardian, photography personnel felt slightly neglected and less like journalists. Picture editors felt that pictures are there to help text, that their work was to grab the readers’ attention so that journalists

Introduction  11 (the  term still overwhelmingly refers to writing reporters) could get ­attention for the ‘real work’ of writing. Such frustration is a great opportunity for an external observer, since it is at times such as these that one can ‘squeeze the juicy stuff’ out of interviewees just by pushing the right buttons; having your interviews conducted in a closed and isolated room is also highly recommended, and some say that a beer or two in a pub might do the same trick as well. I was not always a welcome presence. During a sensitive crisis, on several occasions, and when I was at the agency’s local bureau in Jerusalem, I was asked to leave the room. There appeared to be tension between the photographer who I accompanied and the chief photographer of the local bureau, who knew about my research, and this made my observations in the office uncomfortable. I was first asked by the head of the local bureau in Jerusalem to sign a form, stating that I agreed not to connect any conclusions in my research to the agency (or even use its name), and I felt that I should be extra cautious in order not to jeopardize the entire project, but since these were busy times for a news organization in Israel, the form was forgotten and so I didn’t have to sign anything.6 A few years later I approached the agency once again to have its ­formal approval to publish a book based on the findings of my research and use the data that I had gathered from my interviews. My request, I was told, was delivered to the agency’s legal team. After a few weeks I received an email from the agency’s PR manager: “Thank you for getting in touch and for your continued interest in XXX” it said, As you know when we agreed to provide access to XXX employees, we understood that the resulting interviews would be made available only for use in your PHD thesis. There was no suggestion at the time that the interviews would be published externally in any other way. I hope you will therefore understand that we must consider your request to publish the results of the interviews in a book as a fresh and separate request, especially given the time which has passed since the original interview requests were approved – and that unfortunately on this basis we must decline your request for our participation in the project. And just like that, when I already thought I was in, they threw me back out. This was certainly a frustrating moment to ponder about: On what grounds did they “understand” that I was not going to publish my results externally? Why is it that the request to publish my findings in a book had to be considered separately? And what difference does it make that time has passed since the original interview requests were ­approved? This entire thing seemed rather odd to me; after all, they already granted me the access at the time! It was clear to me there was nothing I could do about it (well, except, of course, being able to write

12 Introduction about it). If there is a lesson here to be learned, it is that it is becoming extremely difficult to gain access inside media institutions nowadays, and things, I’m afraid, are only going to get worse to the media production researchers of tomorrow, who would have to come up with creative solutions to gain access and to be even more creative so as to be able to publish their findings. And so, in order to fulfil my right to publish my work (and, at the same time, avoid the risk of facing any legal actions) I had to swipe out any ‘clues’ as to the specific organization that is at the heart of this book, which will be referred to as “the agency” henceforth, and summarize all the quotes of the agency’s personnel whom I had interviewed in my own words. More generally, even though journalists’ profession is not unlike the act of ethnographers (they observe and they intervene), it is no secret that they often do not like being observed themselves; they become suspicious and unwilling to cooperate. In my experience (and perhaps as part of the agency’s policy at the time, although this proved to be the case at The Guardian as well, at least up to the point when I was ‘kicked out’) this was not the case. Early on, the journalists I met were very cooperative, and I was taken more and more seriously as the project evolved. In some cases, however, I was asked to keep certain bits of information off-the-record. Unlike, to a certain extent, the way things are done in journalism, it is exactly what is left off-the-record (but certainly not just) that ethnography is very much interested in; the work of journalists is one thing, while an ethnographic research on journalism is another. Even though this book deals with the international photojournalism industry, at its heart lies a process that begins in Israel – clearly, a very particular news story. This is because early parts of the project are based on the making of pictures in Israel, while I am originally from Israel and was also living in Israel at that time. As an Israeli it was easier for me to get to events. But it also meant that I was conversant with, and sensitive to, local cultural codes and nuances. Moreover, even though the production process in question, as I hope to make clear in the following chapters, has no clear beginning, middle, and end, research is clearly rather different and eventually has to start somewhere. My starting point was Israel. This, however, was only to illustrate the overall process in full, having Israel serving as a meaningful case study of the ‘local’ stages of production. Finally, my wife has been working as a TV producer for the agency long before I had started this journey. In many ways, this project was inspired by her personal experiences, and her stories sparked my imagination. As time went by, we often argued (we still do) on the particular characteristics of her profession as an agency journalist in Jerusalem. Thus, after gathering a great deal of information on the agency and its pictures service and ‘bragging’ with my agency knowledge, she would often break my theory to pieces, making me realize that by observing

Introduction  13 from the outside one can never fully grasp what is within. And while having a ‘not-so-bad’ sense of the process as a whole, she was willing to agree that an outside observer is as good as any. Thanks to her, I found myself in various agency events, memorizing quotes from heads of desks, administrators, photographers, TV crews, and others, and was familiar with some fascinating agency’s inside stories. Thanks to her, I know now what it means (and what it takes) to examine an international news organization from up-close. Some might find this slightly problematic. The way I see it, it is as ethnographic as one can get.

A Political Economy from Below or Cultural Studies from Above? The conceptualization of the political economy of culture (see W ­ illiams, 1981) represented an important recognition gained by the supporters of both ­cultural studies and the political economy of communication, with the emergence of ‘the cultural turn’ in the 1970s and 1980s ­(Wittle, 2004). But what could be recognized as Williams’ ‘warm ­hospitality’ would turn into a theoretical turmoil, pitching political economy against cultural studies. It is on the borders of the two, and at the heat (or ­boredom) of such debate, that the following project begins ­(Grossberg, 1995). Capturing a wide range of approaches, political economy was recently defined as “[…] the study of control and survival in social life” (Mosco, 2009, p. 3. Italics in origin). Political economy of communication was divided by Mosco (2009) into three main streams of thought, ­stemming from three different regions: the North American Schiller-Smythe ­tradition, the European Garnham, Murdock, and Golding tradition, and a third stemming from what is known as the Developing world (see Murdock and Golding, 1973; Schiller, 1976; Garnham, 1979, 1990; Mattelart, 1986; Mie’ge, 1989; Herman and McChesney, 2001). The emergence of the political economy of communication approach, as is its international resonance, can be attributed to Smythe and ­Schiller. Yet its European representatives managed to establish a more careful, and less deterministic, approach to the political economy of communication, focusing on the study of communication, the mass media, and ­cultural practices (Hesmondhalgh, 2013). Communications was perceived by the Europeans to be well organized and strongly situated within a wider capitalist system; it was found essential to the understanding of production and reproduction, recognized as “[…] industrial and commercial ­organizations which produce and distribute commodities” (Murdock and Golding, 1973, pp. 205–206; Mosco, 2009). Cultural production and the cultural industries, at the same time, were considered complex and uncertain by the Europeans (although having the same concern with the industries’ expanding power as did their

14 Introduction North American colleagues) who realized their ambivalence and considered the flaws within a one-sided approach, as Garnham (1979) put it: […] The real weakness of the Frankfurt School’s original position was not their failure to realize the importance of the base of the ­economic, but insufficiently to take account of the economically contradictory nature of the process they observed and thus to see the industrialization of culture as unproblematic and irresistible. (p. 131) But the relationship between cultural production and the valorization of capital was conceived with contradictions, and as the setting for constant tensions between capitalist and noncapitalist social formations. Similarly, social class relations were also considered to be essential to the political economy analysis – whether in the form of media owners; with those who take part in the labor process; or between cultural commodities and their reception by their audiences. But these were all considered a set of complex and contradictory processes that are not at all governed by a dominant ideology (Mosco, 2009).7 Questioning issues of power, ethics, and private businesses often circulated under a capitalistic cover while challenging the extent to which powerful businesses serve the interests of the powerful, cultural ­production certainly has a ‘warm spot’ in political economy, especially within the borders of its critical incarnation. Unlike rather conservative approaches to economics, a critical political economy manifested by Garnham and others is considered more holistic, capturing those crucial elements that will be demonstrated in my process analysis in the ­following chapters: It takes into consideration a particular sociohistorical context; sees the relationship between the free market and the public as complex rather than one-sided; and goes “[...]beyond technical issues of efficiency to engage with basic moral questions of justice, equity and the public good” (Golding and Murdock, 2005, p. 61). From a different angle, cultural studies were taken in the beginning of the decade 2000–2009 as […] the distinctive approach to culture that results when we stop thinking about culture as particular valued texts and think about it as a broader process in which each person has an equal right to be heard, and each person’s voice and reflections about culture are valuable. (Couldry, 2000, p. 2) What troubled Garnham and others in regard to private businesses and the articulation of cultural products under capitalism was, in fact, that which bothered the supporters of cultural studies, although observed from a different perspective; they considered culture “[…] in a non-­ dominative way […] as a space of multiple voices and forces” (p. 4).

Introduction  15 Much like critical political economy approaches, culture can thus be seen from a rather materialistic scope – whether in the form of Marx’s inability to escape the “[...] cycle of social production and ­exchange”, within a certain economic umbrella (Marx cited in Couldry, 2000, p. 12). Or, that cultural production processes are, by definition, material ­processes, although not only maintained within the constraints of an economic system of production, for they are “[…] not simply derived from an ­otherwise constituted social order but are themselves ­major elements in its constitution” (Williams, 1981, p. 12. Thus, ­culture cannot simply be grasped at the economic level, while, similarly, the materiality of culture cannot be escaped (Couldry, 2000). ­Celebrating the everyday and having one of its core foundations as ­culture’s ordinariness, it involves us all and therefore its texts “[…] should never be seen as isolated entities but always as part of a shared practice of making meanings involving everyone in a particular culture” (Couldry, 2000, p. 24). Put simply, we all contribute to the production of culture and are responsible to its organization, as active producers of meanings (Williams, 1961). During the 1980s and 1990s, such universal notions of culture (as with the term itself) were criticized as well (most notably its ­‘Britishness’): Treating culture as a dominant force repressing other formations of culture rather than the form of the ‘ultimate democracy’, its ordinariness was then addressed as a matter of local complexity rather than one joined terrain (see e.g., Ngugi Wa’s explanation of the ‘cultural bomb’ in Ngugi Wa, 1986). One of cultural studies’ main challenges in relation to social power was thus mainly focused on the issue of authority: to those who speak and those who listen; to those centered and those marginalized. It became the common setting to discuss the politics of social identity; questions of class, gender, ethnicity, race, and sexuality and their articulation in the form of cultural identity. Cultural studies, put more generally, became a secured site to consider differences and struggles (Hesmondhalgh, 2013). The supporters of cultural studies believe that culture matters and that people are by no means ‘cultural dupes’ manipulated by some dominant ­ etween structure; they consider the complexities and contradictions b culture, power, and people while paying attention to the influence of economic structures, and that there are other forms of power than class, with varying degrees of autonomy. Moreover, they see problems of gender, nationality, and identity as equally important (Grossberg, 1995). By contrast, classic political economy argues for a dominant structure of which waged labor and the exchange of commodities is essential to creating the conditions of existence and the very conditions whereby cultural studies operate as well. It argues that gender, race, or nationality are themselves, as manifested by the supporters of cultural studies, systems of domination, but ones that can never ‘survive’ on their own outside a capitalist class system of domination, and their struggles and

16 Introduction conflicts can only be measured when placed within a political economic context in which those are constituted by specific cultural practices (Garnham, 1995). When both approaches are ‘melted’ together, they can be seen as making substantial contributions to each other’s ‘black holes’ while facing a similar challenge: Works within cultural studies emphasize the subjective and social constitution of knowledge, and that culture is produced by all social actors and not only by the privileged; they propel the importance of everyday life, seeing cultural identity as increasingly affected by gender, race, or nationality, as well as class. However, at the same time, these can now be considered in particular sociohistoric contexts whereby culture is produced and struggled over. The supporters of political economy, on the other hand, can maintain now that its substance is eventually the lives of ordinary people along their daily confrontations with different institutions and world representations. And its terrain should now become more appealing than ever for ‘culturists’, attracting cultural studies to address the processes of labor and its institutions, production, and consumption and their high value to the construction of meanings. In the following chapters, both approaches, whether ‘divorced’ or ‘reconciled’ (Garnham, 1995), resonate: Indeed, the agency’s pictures ­service is part of a powerful private organization with a well-known profit orientation. In fact, with most of its revenues coming from non-media clients from the supply of financial information worldwide (Boyd-Barrett and Rantanen, 2004; Boyd-Barrett, 2008), and with reports at the beginning of the 1990s that half of all international financial information was flowing through the agency’s technology daily, this leaves little room for mistakes: The agency is not only a pivotal player in the business of making money. It is, in many ways, making money what it is worth. At the same time, however, its news pictures are rather unique. Of course, they are part of the agency’s line of products and are thus ­produced and distributed to agency clients to enhance profit. But they also belong to an extraordinary system of visual representation – cultural artifacts, signs belonging to the symbolic world that are thus loaded with meanings absorbed in the different sites of their production and consumption. Those meanings circulate in a complex system – a ‘circuit of meaning’ maintaining the construction of social practice, enabling us to ‘make sense’ of the world (Du Gay, Hall, Janes, Mackay and Negus, 1997). To that end, their producers are not simply part of an organized force of the agency’s labor, but are also males or females, Israelis or Palestinians, religious or secular, etc.; those might come across as conflicting dimensions of cultural identities at different sites of the pictures’ production, serving also as the foot prints of different ways of lives. Drawing from the two approaches, the analysis in the following chapters may be of some contribution to the overlooked ground of ­cultural production, particularly its manufacturing processes, in cultural

Introduction  17 studies (as opposed to a vast amount of scholarship focusing on cultural texts and their reception). But also to the subjective complexities affecting media institutions and their industries from within – a perspective that is often ignored in the study of private media organizations in the political economy of communications, that too easily are taken as dominated and repressed systems of production whereby power is often attributed to ownership. Explored from a certain interdisciplinary point of departure, the analysis of the particular process that is at the focus of this book would hopefully suggest that a dominant structure is always operated and produced from below, while there is “[…] no view from above, from nowhere” (Harraway in Couldry, 2000, p. 14; Wittle, 2004). More ­generally, I am in the hope that this research would eventually demonstrate how theories are not enough on their own right and that their borders should be questioned and challenged time and time again, for “[…] the only theory worth having is that which you have to fight off, not that which you speak with profound fluency” (Hall, 1992, p. 280).

Cultural Production and the Industries of Culture In the late 1970s it was the American Peterson who laid out a ­production-of-culture doctrine in the attempt to shift the attention “[…] from the global corpus of habitual culture” to the “processes by which ­elements of culture are fabricated in those milieus where symbol-­system production is most self-consciously the center of activity” (Peterson, 1976, p. 10. See also Dimaggio and Hirsch, 1976; Kadushin, 1976). ­Peterson’s point of departure, however, was rather limited, mainly by the dominant sociological perspective of its time whereby cultural texts are determined by organizational factors (see Frosh’s observation in Frosh, 2003). Thus, identifies Hesmondhalgh (2013), such perspectives in organizational studies seem to come in the form of “isolated systems” that are “cut-off from political and sociocultural conflict” (p. 48); these should be synthesized into a far more comprehensive vision of the ways in which the production of culture and cultural consumption fit into economic political and cultural contexts that are wider. That is to say, it requires focus on the cultural institutions, their role as part of giant corporate industries, and the industrialization aspects of cultural production. In fact, the debate over the industrial aspects of culture and production can be traced back to the canonical work of Adorno and Horkheimer’s ‘Culture industry’. In a critical Marxist analysis, they addressed the industrialization of culture – once in its highest form as art and as the means of liberation from the constraints of the real world, which have become commoditized, lost its ‘authenticity’, and have thus become industrialized (Adorno and Horkheimer, 1977/1944; see also Negus, 1997).

18 Introduction In the 1960s and the late 1970s, however, the term was converted into ‘cultural industries’ (or industries culturelles).8 New approaches had emerged, opposing Adorno and Horkheimer’s ‘unified field’ of culture industrialization, thereby offering a more uncertain notion of cultural production, with different logics in play (see, e.g., Mie’ge and G ­ arnham, 1979; Mie’ge1987, 1989): how, for example, various types of cultural production are performed in different cultural industries (Mie’ge, 1987; Hesmondhalgh, 2013); how the consumption of different cultural commodities is highly selective (Mie’ge and Garnham, 1979); or how ­cultural labor can be productive (under capitalist cultural production) or unproductive (under noncapitalist production of cultural products), while production can be divided into reproducible or semi-reproducible products, or when the involvement of cultural workers is not always necessary in their production (ibid). More specifically, it was mostly Adorno and Horkheimer’s pessimism that was questioned, since they did not consider the use of new technologies and innovations and their role as part of the articulation of cultural products (particularly within the arts); the industrialization of art as a process of capital valorization adapting to new fields with specific conditions; how the industrialization process can, and does, come across oppositional and resisting voices; and how the cultural process of production coexists with other forms of production (Mie’ge, 1989). Finally, pointed Mie’ge (1989), there are clear disadvantages in a single approach to the study of cultural manufacturing, since “[…] the capitalization of cultural production is a complex, many-sided and even contradictory process”, and that it “[…] cannot be analyzed in simple or unilateral terms” (p. 12). Cultural industries are operated by personnel in various positions at different sites of production (see, e.g., Negus, 1992). But these personnel are also part of different, and often contested, occupational communities in particular organizations (Gregory, 1983). Similarly, organizational divisions can also be seen as the result of constant classification struggles, thereby turning the organizing unit into an arena whereby different departments/divisions/sections, or personnel at different ­positions, struggle over social power and control ­(Bourdieu, 1986). Cultural industries are propelled from the outside, but also ­ nderstand, have influential internal pressures, and so we need to u as ­Williams put it, “[…] right inside the productive process how these ­d ifficult modes of address and forms are actually constructed” ­( Williams in Heath and Skirrow, 1986, p. 14). From such micro point of departure, cultural production is therefore a key moment in the ­production of meaning within a great ‘circuit of culture’ (Du Gay, 1997; Du Gay et al., 1997), whereby the economy and culture perform as hybrid categories in the overall circulation of cultural products; a cultural economy where,

Introduction  19 ‘Economic’ processes and practices – in all their plurality […] ­depend on meaning for their effects and have particular cultural ‘conditions of existence’. Meaning is produced at ‘economic’ sites (at work, in shops) and circulated through economic processes and practices (through economists’ models of how ‘economies’ or ­‘organizations’ work, through adverts, marketing materials and the very design of products) no less than in other domains of existence in modern societies. (Du Gay, 1997, p. 4) Organizations and industries are in the ‘business’ of manufacturing cultural products (although these are often put under strong pressures by certain cultural intermediary occupations, e.g., advertising, design, or marketing, that are accountable to tightening the relationship between production and consumption. See Du Gay et al., 1997). But these ­institutions are also significant sites that are essential to the construction (and reconstruction) and managing of the organizational culture and the formation of identity. The cultural process of production, put simply, is both an economic process and a cultural phenomenon – a formation of the production of culture and cultures of production (Negus, 1997). This shift into the delicate micro formations propelling the industries from within – as complex sites of production – pointed to the recognition in the ‘human factor’; to those structures that are “[…] produced through particular human actions”; and to how “[…] economic ­relationships simultaneously involve the production of cultural meanings” (Negus, 1997, p. 84). In so doing, it also allowed for a more holistic conceptualization of the cultural audiences and their desires – ­extraordinary ‘sites’ of consumption that also play a key role in the ­circulation of cultural production (see, e.g., Gendron, 1986). To that end, cultures of ­production can therefore be seen as ‘cultural worlds’, and the sites of cultural production as the setting whereby a complex set of collective practices, interpretations, and experiences are interwoven together ­( Jensen, 1984). Thus, pointed Negus (1997), It is important to consider the culture of production not only within the organization in terms of particular occupational cultures but in terms of how these connect with broader social divisions and how these are given specific cultural meanings within the production process. (Negus, 1997, p. 102) Consequentially, it may perhaps be more cautious to address the form of cultural production not simply as a ‘brick’ in the ‘circuit of ­c ulture’ (see Du Gay et al., 1997), but rather a complex circular structure in itself.

20 Introduction

Commercial Photography Production Inspired by semiotic, psychoanalytical, and Marxist approaches, ­photography has been at the center of attention with regard to its different cultural contexts and to the ideological reality it represents (see  Lutz and Collins, 1993; Tagg, 1988; Hardt and Brennen, 1999; Wells, 2004). A cultural point of departure provided an exceptional perspective whereby the unique relationship between photography and reality can be explored. This allowed, for example, for an examination of the various reading practices of photography, as well as the ways it influences different aspects of the reader’s daily routine. It was that cultural prism that also helped in shifting the focus inside industrial photography’s production apparatuses that are intrinsic to the photograph’s meaning, thus serving as a footprint leading towards the maintenance of the cultural industries and the industrial production of cultural goods. But while the field of photography is perhaps overloaded with scholarship focusing on the analysis of the photographic text, or on its reception practices, there is, unfortunately, far too little scholarship on industrial photography’s work, with a particularly alarming neglect on the photojournalism industry (see more recent scholarship on visual news-making in Bock, 2008; Mäenpää, 2014; Pogliano, 2015; Pantii and Sirén, 2015). This scholarly lacuna was addressed, for example, by the emergence of rather materialistic approaches to the photographic meaning traced back in the 1970s – a call for an inspection of different social institutions that need to be taken into account together with semiotic approaches, questioning the photographic meaning (Burgin, 1982). But apart from several reminders to the importance of the production processes of commercial photography and its institutions during the following years (see,  e.g., Ritchin, 1999), the field was barely touched. Hall’s determinations of news photographs back in the 1970s (1973) is concerned mostly with the ideological determinants of news pictures; he found that in the case of news photographs “[…] the rhetoric of connotation saturates the world of events with ideological meanings […]”, and at the same time, “[…] distinguishes or displaces this connection” (Hall, 1973, p. 187). Media representation in the form of news pictures, put simply, is never naïve but rather highly intentional, systematic, and ideological. However, assuming some sort of a ‘­dominant – ­meaning patterns’ system in the form of some dominant ideology based on the social knowledge of media audiences and media producers seems “too simple”, as Schudson put it; it makes “[…] of human beliefs and ­attitudes a more unified, intentional and functional system than they are” ­(Schudson, 1989, p. 277). When the process of news pictures’ ­production is in question, such a distinction is crucial: It stands, for ex­ istinguishes between Hall’s newspapers as a unified ample, as to what d

Introduction  21 system of production to the newsrooms that are discussed in the following chapters – the setting of endless struggles and conflicts over different variations of social power and control. Rosenblum (1978a) used ethnographic research methods to demonstrate how work organization affects style. She connected the types of social structure with photographic styles and addressed the stylistic differences between news, advertising, and fine arts photography so as to explain “[…] why each photographic style looks the way it does” ­(Rosenblum, 1978a, p. 5). Yet her research is inadequate, having some of its flaws to appear early on in the research methods section. To begin, ­although dealing explicitly with specific patterns of style and their differences (e.g., matters of light and lines, content and form, space and place), or addressing the ways these might be read and accepted by spectators, Rosenblum fails to support her conclusions with either textual or audience reception analysis. Apart from the inevitable connection between photography production, the photographic text, and its consumption practices, these might have also contributed to a better understanding of the complex relations between the three styles of photography that were independently analyzed by Rosenblum.9 As a result of such absence, Rosenblum’s analysis seems a little flat and thus reveals the inadequacy of her research (e.g., how she describes the ways we read news pictures [do we all read news pictures the same way?]; or, in her too general assertions about the particular stylistic features of news, advertising, or fine arts pictures).10 Second, there is also the decision to make a distinction between the styles of photography. This appears in the book’s form (three different chapters dealing with newspaper photography, advertising, and fine arts), but is far more disturbing in content, as Rosenblum specifically states that she treats “[…] one particular style of photography as a ­totality” and each style’s socioeconomic system “[…] as a totality of patterns” (Rosenblum, 1978a, p. 9). In fact, Rosenblum acknowledges that there is probably some borrowing and exchange between the different styles (although, for some reason, she sees news photography as the least penetrable of the three); one possible explanation for this, to her view, is the mobility of photographers between the various worlds of photography. While such strict borders between genres could easily be challenged in terms of style, this total separation is simply misleading in terms of their production systems. Some photojournalists, for example, see themselves as artists, and news organizations are now strongly affected by stock, suggesting that these worlds are not simply separated. Rather, they are maintained in a complex ecosystem of photography genres (see the following chapters for a broader discussion on these issues). In fact, the analysis later in this book will be very much based on Rosenblum’s second diffusion explanation as to why these borrowings might occur, when she points to the possibility that “[…] the stylistic conventions

22 Introduction become part of the larger culture […]” (Rosenblum, 1978a, p. 9. See also her discussion on separation between style and content in p. 112). Yet unlike Rosenblum’s offer that seems too little and appears far too late in her book (p. 112), it is this ‘larger culture’ that will be addressed from a holistic point of view in the following chapters at key moments and particular sites of news pictures’ production. More specifically, Rosenblum sees news photography’s style as the sole outcome of the work organization, ignoring the “[…] historical or cultural explication of the styles and their development, the insensitivity to nuance and complexity […]” (Frosh, 2003, p. 53). While many news pictures are indeed produced by different news organizations (but not just) and are thus the outcome of a certain ‘closed’ commercial system of production, the analysis of the process in the following chapters will in fact illustrate an open system of production maintained at different crossings in a relation of cause and effect by various ‘producers’ (e.g., how news pictures are also contributed by the end-users, from the ­bottom up). Finally, it is precisely Rosenblum’s idea of newsworthiness, taken as a natural given (e.g., when some events tend to be simply ­“newsworthy”, p. 13), that is unpacked in what follows. To that end, the ­professionals whose daily work routine is examined in this book are not seen as simply maintaining a certain “news mood” (p. 14), and news is not treated simply as “real life events” (p. 55). Rather, it results of a complex system of c­ ultural production shared daily by news organizations, their operators, their products, their clients, and their audiences, putting the production of a cultural economy in motion, but that are also propelled by it.11 In Lutz and Collins’ “Reading national geographic” (1993) pictures are taken as complex documents which might “[...] reinforce or challenge shared understandings of cultural difference” (p. 2). Focusing on N ­ ational Geographic’s pictures, their processes of production, and practices of reception, the authors examine NG’s (National Geographic) contribution to the promulgation of images of the world outside the US, with the ­formation of identity taken as one drawing from images of others. “Cultural products”, observe Lutz and Collins, “have complex ­production sites; they often code ambiguity; they are rarely accepted at face value but are read in complicated and often unanticipated ways” (p. 11). Placing NG’s images in specific historical and cultural contexts through which a unique insight into the process where those images are formed, selected and controlled, purveyed and read is acquired, Lutz and ­Collins operate a tripartite methodological approach: examining practices of production; analyzing a sample of images; and observing the practices through which they are read. Especially interesting is their examination of the production process inside “the great machinery of desire”, taking NG’s photographs not as a “[…] standardized product of an omniscient industry”, but rather “[…] generated through a series of complex, and at times contestatory, production practices” (Lutz and Collins, 1993, p. 48).

Introduction  23 Lutz and Collins’ research is useful, as they attempt to consider the industrial production processes of pictures. The processes of execution, for instance, are no longer completely caged in a closed and total ­Rosenblumian system of production (“[…] it is not journalism, it is not an art magazine”, as stated by a NG editor, “it is story telling”, p. 56). While most of NG’s photographers had previously been photojournalists, and with its images packaged and distributed to readers as ‘truth found in the field’, photography in NG is placed by Lutz and Collins between art photography and photojournalism. At the same time, its system of production is constrained and captured by an environment maintained by advertising photography and thus must often “[…] respond to trends that advertising sets” (Lutz and Collins, 1993, p. 84). However, their analysis, as Frosh (2003) argues, does give a sense of linearity – as if the process itself begins with the pictures’ conception as an idea, which then turns into text and ends with reading. Even though a commercial production process of pictures does encounter certain moments of linearity (e.g., an editor having the final say in the photo selection process), it is, in fact, more of a circular structure. For example, pictures received with ‘good reviews’ are injected back to the system of production as the seeds for future projects. Moreover, in some cases (e.g., in the agency’s pictures service), data regarding the success or failure of pictures as opposed to its competitors is gathered by specific personnel daily and is then analyzed to improve future processes. What is more, the constraints dictated by the international market and how it affects the daily production process of NG’s images is absent from their analysis – how it is, put simply, that a single picture appeals to diverse local audiences.12 Finally, their analysis of marketing is relatively brief and insufficient as well; it ignores important questions such as the type of NG’s clients, the diversity of products and markets, or the entire process of distribution whereby the pictures acquire additional meanings. Evans’ “Pictures on a page” (1997) addresses the practical business of news photography, pointing to the complexities inside the daily routine of photojournalism combined with his own interpretation of ‘do’s and not do’s’. He explains the ‘process of the news story’ and the ­importance of catching the ‘story telling moment’, and also considers the different technical difficulties the photographer faces (e.g., photo-angles and lenses, composition, setting up the scene and the risk of polluting it). Here the work of the art director, graphic designer, and especially the editor is acknowledged, as all are seen accountable, together with the photographer, to the articulation of the news picture from conception to print; collaborate daily at the different sites of production; and are equally capable of injecting the same news photograph with different meanings. Evans (1997) points, for example, to the differences between a simple cropping and a creative one; between the decisive moment, the

24 Introduction news or the visual one; the possibilities of enhancing, reducing, or manipulating the photographic message by, say, juxtaposition in layout or the meaning of captions; and how these might contribute or interfere with the visual message.13 Evans provides a magnificent glimpse into the heart of the photojournalism industry, perhaps one not at all possible if it not for the eye of an insider. Nonetheless, his work could easily be seen as sharing a common view (especially from the news milieu) of which reality maintains some universal truth that needs to be found, reported, and documented in the ‘right’ way (why is it, for example, that “[…] the close up is economical and it is newsy” [p. 154]?). In addition, his work is mainly concerned with the photograph as a document and its limitations and less with the actual work organization of news photography. Although such absence seems today to be taken more seriously, when not long ago was photography described as “[...] ingrained in so many processes that a scholar of photography must also be highly informed about industries and institutions that traditionally have had little to do with the study of photography” (Rubinstein and Sluis, 2008, p. 9). Frosh (2003) provides insight on the production of stock images – “[…] the making of ordinary, mass-produced, photographic images” (p. 1) – within the visual content industry, trying to illustrate their “[…] production of photographic meaning and the meaning of photographic production” (p. 8). Taking a somewhat unorthodox approach in the analysis of stock photography’s production procedures, considering photography both as a consumed product and as form of representation, Frosh focuses on two separate, yet interrelated, objects of analysis: stock photographic production procedures and categories of ­stock-­photography images. Frosh illuminates a number of key terms emerging from the stock industry: success, creativity, meaning, genre, concept, and catalogue. In so doing, he aims to “[…] distinguish ‘moments’ in the circuit of culture without stripping them of their multiple practical and discursive interconnections, putting into play the dual (sociological and semiotic) focus on stock photography’s ‘cultural economy’ and its ‘mode of signification’” (Frosh, 2003, p. 57). In his work, Frosh manages to bridge the gaps in photography theory between the approaches of the ‘sociology of culture’ (photography as forms of representation and signification) and of the political economy of communication (photography as products and commodities), and thereby to render visible the connection between industrial photography, material processes, and practices of cultural production. However, the data on photographic practices in the visual content industry in Frosh’s exploration were not gleaned from observations (data  was based on three sources: Interviews with professionals connected to the stock photography industry; attending the 1998 Photo Expo East conference; and various industry publications). Such lacuna

Introduction  25 does, to a certain extent, make sense in this case, as Frosh focused primarily on an amorphous industry, thereby struggling, for example, to gain access (and in many cases was denied one) from some of the larger stock agencies.14 Still, the lack of such observation data means that he was not able to witness the actual labor that is invested in the very making of stock photography, nor could he analyze the various production sites (e.g., in the field, or in the office, etc.) nor the photographic events themselves, whereby the stock image acquires other layers of meaning and serves also as the “material of labor” (p. 8). Unlike Frosh’s case, I was able to conduct extensive participant observation at different production moments and sites since I was given the privilege of accessing the daily production process of news pictures at the news agency; I was ‘there’ (and there, and there. See Hannerz, 2003). Even though, in many ways, this was very hard to execute logistically, it proved to be extremely useful; while gaining access inside a concrete powerful international organization, I was thus able to support my arguments with substantial evidence from the field and circle the entire international production process of news pictures. In his book, Frosh also seems, to my view, to be making a slightly problematic distinction between the distribution and circulation of stock images (which, to his view, are mostly handled by cultural intermediaries, namely those particular workers in stock agencies and their clients in advertising, marketing, and design) and their initial production (which is, for example, the work of photographers who are therefore considered by Frosh as primary-symbol creators. See Frosh, 2003, footnote 8). But while Frosh is rather cautious in making such a distinction (as it is one that is “not always easy to make”, Ibid.), I would like to take this notion even further. Let me spell this out: what I hope to make clear in the following chapters is that the production of commercial news photography is in fact performed by the entire arsenal of picture professionals (whether they are involved in the distribution or circulation of pictures, or, as Frosh put it, in their “initial production”, although certainly not just). And they are all serving as key players in the making of news ­pictures within the boundaries of their particular organizational duties, both at the agency and at the client’s end – photographers, editors, producers, graphic designers, archivists, administrators, etc. To that end, I would argue, production not only performs as a distinct moment in the circuit of culture (Du Gay et al., 1997) like distribution and circulation, but is rather a circuit of culture in itself. Finally, it is Frosh’s view on how production is in fact ‘privileged’ that I would also like to address here. Production is privileged, suggests Frosh, since it “marks that point at which cultural forms acquire their ostensive fixity with respect to their ultimate audience […] at which they achieve a ‘closure’ that is produced systematically, at which they are sealed much as an envelope is sealed or an object granted a seal of approval” (p. 12).

26 Introduction As a result, the audience of consumers must therefore receive and act upon these forms, however it is free to resist, interpret, or alter them. Such fixity, continues Frosh, is not a natural outcome, but rather the result of sanctioned practices (culturally, socially, ­economically, and ­legally) granting key players at particular sites “the authority and power to seal cultural products” (p. 12). Now, as much as such fixity will indeed reveal itself in what follows, what I also hope to make clear later on is that the audience of consumers in fact plays a pivotal role in the very making processes of ‘professional’ news pictures at key moments and sites. But also that consuming practices are strongly felt in ‘production’ – how, for example, picture professionals are putting their ‘visual consuming baggage’ to work, which also affects their decision making (editors, see Chapter 3) and ways of execution (photographers, see Chapter 2). So, Frosh is absolutely right to consider the inevitable connection between production and consumption in his theoretical introduction and research limitations (where he describes the lack of image reception analysis, for instance, as being the book’s principal limitation). But his argument over the privileged complexity of cultural production, however cautious it may be so as not to be making a clear production/consumption divide (nor to point in any way to the supremacy of ­production), suggests in fact that, to his view, such a distinction does exist. What I hope to demonstrate later is that production is not simply influenced by reception, as it is, to an extent, taken by Frosh, but rather the latter is serving as a significant producing force and one that propels the making of news pictures from within. Focusing an anthropological eye, Gürsel (2016) explores the networks through which international news images move, addressing news images as formative fictions, as “[…] constructed representations that reflect current events yet simultaneously shape ways of imagining the world and political possibilities within it”. News images, says Gürsel (2016), are complex cultural products, circulating as “[…] representations of ­reality” that are also “aesthetic representations and commodities” (p. 11). Examined during a two-year fieldwork in “key nodal points” (p. 3) of production, distribution, and circulation in New York and Paris, data on the labor invested in the brokering of international news images was gathered by Gürsel from several sites: the newsroom of a large corporate visual content provider; the Paris headquarters of AFP (the French international news agency); the editorial offices of two mainstream US newsmagazines; and several key photography events such as Barnstorm, Visa Pour l’Image, and a few events organized by World Press Photo. These sites are then discussed in an attempt to explain how news images are produced and what else is produced in the production of news images. Gürsel’s work provides valuable insight on the production of news ­images – “the processes by which international news images are constructed as cultural texts” (2016, p. 12) – as she explores the daily routine

Introduction  27 of various pictures’ departments and the moments of brokering of news images. Such is the case, for example, when Gürsel sees f­ uturepast images as images containing ‘moments’ from the past, yet ones chosen to be relevant for the future in terms of their saleability. As news pictures also have to be sold and thus require specific characteristics in their moments of execution in order to become available for future sales, Gürsel also points to the circularity of the production process of news images, for [...] the tremendous challenge facing image-brokers as they make decisions today is accurately imagining themselves into the future and making sure that what the world will want to see tomorrow has been anticipated and captured visually today […] Image brokers need to ensure not only that they have covered the here and now, but that they will also have covered the futurepast. (p. 22, italics in origin) Gürsel’s analysis does not involve audience reception and has very little textual/semiotic analysis to support her arguments. A book on news images’ professionals and their daily routine would have certainly benefited from substantial visual analysis given the inevitable connection between work and text (Gürsel does regret this in her research limitations). Such contribution, for example, would certainly have supported how “framing mechanisms are always at work” in the coverage of war or of ­atrocities (p. 7), which Gürsel was hoping to render visible, and demonstrate the various ways through which news images are complex cultural products serving both as representations of reality and as commodities. At the same time, there was certainly a place to consider the different roles played by the audience of consumers – if not following their reception practices, then at least discuss in-depth the visual consuming practices that are in play in the daily brokering processes and decision-making routines of news images. In other words, image brokers make decisions about what audiences see (p. 11), but the ways audiences see also affect the decision-making processes of image brokers ­(Gürsel does, for instance, mention how the “future” will look like, that is “based on news images that have already circulated and created expectations”, as the ways “formative fictions structure future frames” [2016, p. 123]. And later that “it is complicated to delineate the lines between media production and reception” [p. 124]. Yet these matters deserve more attention and could perhaps have been better explored with the support of some visual evidence). Gürsel’s photo-production analysis is too often insufficient and perhaps not as thick as promised: While focusing mainly on moments within the daily routine in the offices of various pictures departments (with an unfortunately highly general view on their actual daily production infrastructures and routines), her work ignores almost entirely

28 Introduction the photographers’ work routine in the field who play a key role in the overall process of news image production – those highly significant image brokers who also “move images or restrict their movement” (p. 2. Or, as pointed by one of GVI’s editors, “the photographer is the first editor. We’re the second editor”, p. 111). And while her analysis of image brokers seems to be focusing solely on the daily work of photo editors in general (for example, in the chapter focusing on GVI she describes how she “observed the workings of the newsroom” while moving “between the desks of the main editors” [p. 116]), she often ignores the varying picture labor particularities and contributions of specific editors serving in various positions, but also other significant picture professionals as part of the networks through which news images move (e.g., administrators, graphic designers, technical teams, etc.). Gürsel also fails to tackle one of the most extraordinary ‘qualities’ of those news images that are produced by international news organizations acting as “mediators for views of the world” (p. 2). Namely, that they require an international appeal and yet at the same time they are tailored to specific local demands. Such extraordinary requirements are highly significant in the making of international news photos and affect their overall production, circulation, distribution, and selling operations, yet these are hardly dealt with in Gürsel’s analysis. With such absence, her idea of international news images seems insufficient: Indeed, she describes photojournalism as a “form of worldmaking” (p. 26) and briefly discusses the concept of “world news” (e.g., in pp. 160–162, 166, 170 in her analysis of Newsworld). But what exactly those international, or world, news images are and the ways these are different from other news images in their processes of production, circulation, and ways of brokering are important dilemmas to consider when international news services (or sections) are in question, which is missing in her work.

News Production Ethnographies and International News Production The academic interest in ethnographic methods in media in the 1970s saw similar approaches emerge in the study of news production. Thus, the “first wave” of news production ethnography paved the way in the 1970s and 1980s with a few highly influential studies (Epstein, 1973; Tuchman, 1978; Gans, 1979; Schlesinger, 1987; Fishman, 1980 – to name a few; see Cottle, 2000a). In the last few decades, however, news production has changed dramatically: Digital technology has led to fast-paced production routines, and the news ecology is now differentiated and fast-changing (Cottle, 2000b); fewer, more powerful news conglomerates emerged, focusing their efforts on multimedia news businesses (Murdock, 1990; Thussu, 1998); journalists are required to produce news packages

Introduction  29 under strict formats; and students in journalism schools acquire skills of ‘one-man/woman bands’, where they learn how to identify news stories, write news scripts and shoot, edit, and compile video news segments on their own, since journalists are now required to be multiskilled (Bromley, 1997). These new(s) times, therefore, “demand a ‘second-wave’ of ethnographic studies that deliberately set out to theoretically map and empirically ­explore the rapidly changing field of news production and today’s differentiated ecology of news provision” (Cottle, 2000a, p. 21). News production ethnography has again drawn attention in recent years (Cottle, 2000a, 2003. See, e.g., Hannerz, 2004; Boczkowski, 2010; Ryfe, 2012; Boyer, 2013; Usher, 2014). Cottle (2007) suggested that such methods in the study of news production help to reveal the constraints, contingencies and complexities ‘at work’ and, in so doing, provide the means for a more adequate theorization of the operations of the news media and the production of the discourses ‘at play’ within news media representations. (Cottle 2007, p. 2) Willig (2013) pointed to how newsroom ethnographies have enabled researchers to go “straight to the heart of news organizations” and reveal the daily routines of journalists (p. 373). And in their edited collection about the making of online news, Paterson and Domingo (2008) declared that ethnographic methodologies are the only ones that come close to describing in detail the culture and practice of media production and the mind-sets of media producers. However, in order for innovative news ethnographies to be of substantial contribution to news production’s field of inquiry, suggests Willig (2013), the focus of attention requires shifting from the rather predominant, and highly popular, theoretical framework of organizational studies of the first generation of newsroom studies to a more complex analytical framework – one that also addresses questions of power, politics, economy, and culture, since ethnographic methods in the study of news are “[…] less sensitive to macro level structural forces which also guide everyday journalism” (p. 381). What is more, a more holistic study of news production ethnography was said to require the consideration of both the news ‘text’ and its production ‘contexts’ as interpenetrating and mutually constitutive, allowing the examination of the cultural practices of news workers (Cottle, 2003). This shift in approach can thus help to bridge the theoretical divide between political economy and organizational and cultural studies in the exploration of news production. Finally, there is also a need to explore distinct forms of news, so as to focus, for example, on the ways “[…] news producers visualize their ‘imagined audience’ and inscribe this into their news selections and inflections and characteristic forms of news presentations […]” (p. 19).

30 Introduction From a microlevel and construction perspective to the study of international news production, research was focused on the ways different social institutions influence the form, content, and volume of foreign news (Hjarvard, 2002). However, since the mid-1980s, which signaled the emergence of new power structures in international politics, international news scholarship had shifted to different fields of inquiry; news media in the global era were thus seen as “[…] not only part of a distinct political geography (typically within the national political framework)”, but that also “play a role in creating and rearticulating boundaries of the spaces in which social communities are organized” (Hjarvard, 2002, p. 95). The new paradigm in international news studies had, for example, generated substantial work on what is known as the processes of the domestication of foreign news, namely the ways that different events are “[…] composed and presented in a manner that suits home viewers by making the stories more relevant to them” (Cohen, 2013, p. xx. See also Gurevitch, Levy and Roeh, 1991; Cohen, Levy, Roeh and Gurevitch, 1996; Clausen, 2003, 2004; Alasuutari, Qadir and Creutz 2013; Curran, Esser, Hallin, Hayashi and Lee 2017). International news agencies – the wholesale providers of news, the “agents of globalization” (Boyd-Barrett and Rantanen, 1998, p. 1) – have been playing an important part in the international news flow arena. Yet ever since their establishment, and although they were acknowledged by many as being prominent, these extraordinary organizations have only been studied by very few, mainly during the 1970s and the early 1980s (see, e.g., Boyd-Barrett, 1980; Fenby, 1986). They drew academic attention back in the 1990s due to the collapse of communism and the institutional changes and reorganizations that took place within and between the agencies. It was also the result of the emergence of global television news and of vast technological changes, especially the internet, satellites, and digital technologies (Boyd-Barrett and Thussu, 1992; Boyd-Barrett and Rantanen, 1998; Volkmer, 1999; Boyd-Barrett, 2000; Thussu, 2000; Rantanen, 2002; Paterson and Sreberny, 2004). Unfortunately, most of the scholarship on international news agencies to this day is focused mainly on the agencies’ organizational structures and the changes that they have undergone over the years, and has very little relationship to their systems of production and manufacturing (see Paterson, 2006, 2011; Paterson and Domingo, 2008; Gürsel, 2012, 2016; Silberstein-Loeb, 2014; Ilan, 2013, 2014, 2015, 2017, for some of the few and more recent works on the news agencies’ production processes). The extensive analysis in what follows is an international news production ethnography that covers both the macro- and micro-structures and operations of a distinct process, namely the international making and selling of news pictures. In doing so, I hope it contributes to the second wave of news production ethnography and provides fresh insight to the study of international news production – from the inside out.

Introduction  31

Producing Pictures, Making News, and How this Book Works News pictures are produced, categorized, packaged, marketed, and ­distributed in complex ways that render them natural, authentic, a ­reflection of things as they truly are. These extraordinary pictures, essentially aimed at daily consumption, acquire their prestigious value as the visual signs of daily ‘unordinary’ news events way back in their processes of production whereby they have been circulated at critical stages, particular moments, and sites – from the moment of their conception and up to their ‘final’ form (see, e.g., Frosh, 2003, 2013). They have been approved by a large, often invisible, number of ‘professionals’ (i.e., pictures laborers at the international news agency, at the client’s end, or sometimes simply initiated by the ‘end’ users themselves, serving as prodnewsers. See e.g., the discussion on produsage in Bruns, 2008) in the process of their making. Those ‘professionals’, performing as key nodal points in the worldwide circulation of news pictures, take part in a larger cultural industry and play a significant role in a greater culture of production, one that is intermeshed with a demanding economic structure. News pictures are unique cultural products. They have a significant role in the formation of cultural identity, in symbolizing social status, delivering certain symbols and myths, and legitimizing social forces (Kellner, 1995). At the same time, however, they are mostly circulated by news organizations (local and/or international) so as to increase their profits. And they also serve as the by-product of powerful cultural industries, propelling those organizations, but that are also pressed by economic and cultural forces putting the industries and the organizational bodies in motion (Hesmondhalgh, 2013). What comes next is the extensive analysis of news pictures’ international process of production that illustrates a full circle: It connects at various moments and sites between culture and economy, between production and consumption, between photography and news, and runs through the vertical and horizontal levels, and on the macro- and ­micro-formations, of production. To that end, for example, the laborers whose work is mostly explored in this book play significant roles in this extraordinary production routine. But they also ‘bring’ their circles of identity to work, whereby tension results in the crossing between identities at times (e.g., an Israeli photographer working for an international news agency while covering stories mostly related to the Israeli-­Palestinian conflict). What is more, this extraordinary circular process of production is constantly in motion, with no beginning, middle, or end points in time, as I hope to make clear in the following chapters.15 It is governed by ‘professional’ conventions of photography and news, just as much as these are coerced to its daily demands – a chaotic

32 Introduction routine constantly shifting between various battling dimensions of operations. It is, in other words, a production process of culture, reflecting the ­different cultures of its production (Negus, 1997). In a way, what this book aims to achieve is shifting the gaze inside the contemporary industrial ‘dark rooms’ of news pictures: Instead of settling with their documenting powers that we so often take for granted, crowning them as one of the most reliable truth forms of representation as we know it (as news and as photographs), this is an attempt to make way to those hidden moments where news pictures are produced and acquire other additional meanings – a journey inside the regime of truth (Foucault, 1980). This regime expresses dominant practices of news and photography alike, pointing to the complex ways news pictures are produced by news organizations and to the ways those news organizations render a larger cultural industry in a constant complex relationship with parallel industries. This regime propels the cultural industries in a cultural economy, whereby news pictures are circulated under dominant systems of discourse. It is a regime of signification (Lash, 1988). The next two chapters cover the ways in which the agency’s pictures are made and are sold: Chapter 2 deals with the process at its ‘local’ stages through the daily work routines of the pictures’ department at the agency’s bureau in Jerusalem. Chapter 3 traces the process through all of the possible ‘international’ stages through which a news picture might travel – the agency’s global pictures desk, the magazine desk and the keyword team, the global graphics desk and the administration (all ­located in Singapore), and sales. Finally, as the entire process comes full circle, it looks at what an agency news picture faces when it is sold to a client – The Guardian – and is then picked again as data for analysis by the agency’s international desk. Chapter 4 summarizes the main themes of the book, with an interpretive analysis of four events as they were covered by the agency’s Israeli photographer: the firing of Israeli cannons from an IDF artillery base near Kibbutz Nahal Oz; the scene after the attack of a suicide bomber near the city of Tulkarem; the funeral of an Israeli officer in the city of Haifa; and carrot picking near the Israeli border close to the city of Gaza. In addition, it includes a semiotic analysis of four particular pictures that were selected by the photographer from the great arsenal of pictures taken at these events and sent to the local bureau in Jerusalem (all but the picture of the Israeli cannons, which was sent directly to the agency’s global pictures desk in Singapore), and of the front page of The Herald Tribune, where one of the pictures was published. In the final chapter, I conclude with a discussion on the main organizations who are dominating todays’ international photojournalism industry. In my discussion I focus primarily on the challenges that these powerful organizations are facing in the era of the internet, which has generated new rivals in a global market that was already bubbling with

Introduction  33 old rivalries. Finally, I also suggest several paths for future inquiry in the still overwhelmingly under-researched field of photojournalism production.

Notes 1 On August 6, 2006 Hajj was accused of doctoring a picture of an Israeli F-16 dropping a defensive flare to seem as if it was firing several missiles at the city of Nabatiyeh in Lebanon (as it was suggested in the caption. See ­Shuckleford, 2006; Lappin, 2006). 2 Frosh (2013) describes a similar challenge, to an extent, for stock photographers and agencies so as to make every stock image one that “[…] cries out for attention”, but that, at the same time, “[…] threatens to become ‘noise’, distracting the viewer from neighboring images” (p. 144). 3 My observations at The Guardian were deliberately stopped by the paper’s head of photography at the time, who decided to end our relationship in a sudden move and refused to answer my requests (more on this in this chapter. The paper’s pictures operations are discussed in depth in ­C hapter 3). 4 One of the pictures was left on the ‘editing room’s floor’ in a decision taken by the agency’s local chief photographer in Jerusalem at the time of my observations. A semiotic analysis of one picture as it was published on the front page of The Herald Tribune was also conducted. 5 I was given free access to all the documents related to the agency’s pictures service from when it was established and up to year 2000. 6 Burns (1977) describes a similar incident – a case of “corporate paranoia” (p. xv. although the phrase seemed to him as too simple of a definition) – in his work on the organizational practices of the BBC. 7 Murdock and Golding criticized Adorno for not considering the “[…] concrete activities of the people who actually make the products the culture industry sells” (cited in Mosco, 2009, p. 96). 8 And later in UNESCO’s ‘culture industries’ (see UNESCO, 1982; Negus, 1997). 9 A textual analysis could, for example, reveal certain similarities between stylistic conventions. The semiotic analysis of the picture taken in the first event in Chapter 4, for example, could easily challenge Rosenblum’s distinction (e.g., between space sensibility, described as one of the key features in fine arts photography, as opposed to place sensibility that is often found in news and advertising. See Rosenblum, 1978b). 10 See, e.g., her description of news pictures style and their reception in page 14. In fact, she implies of such absence in work on production herself when she mentions that “[…] an analysis of production done in isolation cannot take into account the social limitations that are generated by the distribution system”. Or, that “[…] an analysis which seeks to understand the look of an object by focusing exclusively on market or audience demands, is also an incomplete analysis” (Rosenblum, 1978a, p. 121). 11 See also Frosh’s criticism (2003, pp. 50–54). 12 “We’re not in the business of offending people” said one from the captioning department while describing the process of verification (p. 81). But how it is that such careful conceptualization is embedded within the daily process itself is an important question to consider, particularly when processes of production are maintained by international institutions such as NG, and one which unfortunately is absent from their analysis.

34 Introduction 13 Indeed, some of these matters were already addressed under Barthes’ connotation procedures, but above all see his contribution to the relationship between the text and the press photo (Barthes, 1977). 14 What he describes under the limitations of his project as the result of “[…] secrecy, verging on paranoia, of many in the industry itself” (p. 23). 15 Although, as I will demonstrate later on, there are certainly various linear micro-structures in the ‘timeline’ of production at particular moments and sites (e.g., a chief photographer having the final say on assignments given to his photographers).

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Introduction  37 Jensen, J. (1984). An interpretive approach to cultural production. In W. ­Rowland & B. Watkins (Eds.), Interpreting television (pp. 98–119). ­London: Sage. Johnson, C. (2006, August 5). Reuters doctoring photos from Beirut? Little Green footballs [web blog]. Retrieved from http://littlegreenfootballs.com/ weblog/?entry=21956_Reuters_Doctoring_Photos_from_Beirut&only. Kadushin, C. (1976). Networks and circles in the production of culture. In R. A. Peterson (Ed.), The production of culture (pp. 107–123). Beverly Hills, CA/London: Sage Publications. Kellner, D. (1995). Cultural studies, multiculturalism and media culture. In G.  Dines & J. M. Humez (Eds.), Gender, race and class in media: A textreader (pp. 5–17). London: Sage. Lang, D. (2007, January 18). Reuters investigation leads to dismissal of editor. PDN. Retrieved from www.pdnonline.com/pdn/esearch/article_display. jsp?vnu_content_id=1003534746. Lappin, Y. & Bodoni, R. (2006, August 6). Reuters admits: The picture was “doctored” with the help of a graphic software design. World. Ynet. Retrieved from www.ynet.co.il/articles/0,7340,L-3287145,00.html [Hebrew]. Lappin, Y. (2006, July 8). Reuters admits to more image manipulation. News. Ynet. Retrieved from www.ynetnews.com/articles/0,7340,L-3287774,00. html. Lash, S. (1988) Discourse or figure? Postmodernism as a regime of signification. Theory, Culture and Society, 5(2), 311–336. Lutz, C. A. & Collins, J. L. (1993). Reading national geographic. Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press. Mäenpää, J. (2014). Rethinking photojournalism: The changing work practices and professionalism of photojournalists in the digital age. Nordicom Review, 35(2), 91–104. Mattelart, A. (1986). Communicating in popular Nicaragua. New York: ­I nternational general. Mie’ge, B. (1989). The capitalization of cultural production. New York: ­I nternational general. Mie’ge, B. (1987). The logics at work in the new cultural industries. Media, Culture & Society, 9(3), 273–289. Mie’ge, B. & Garnham, N. (1979). The cultural commodity. Media, Culture and Society, 1(3), 297–311. Mosco, V. (2009). The political economy of communication. London: Sage. Murdock, G. (1990). Redrawing the map of the communications industries: Concentration and ownership in the era of privatization. In M. Ferguson (Ed.), Public communication: The new imperatives (pp. 1–16). London: Sage. Murdock, G. & Golding, P. (1973). For a political economy of mass communications. In R. Miliband & J. Saville (Eds.), Socialist register (pp. 205–234). London: Merlin Press. Negus, K. (1997). The production of culture. In P. Du Gay (Ed.), Production of culture/cultures of production (pp. 67–118). London: Sage. Negus, K. (1992). Producing pop: Culture and conflict in the popular music industry. London: Edward Arnold. Ngugi Wa, T. (1986). Decolonising the mind. London: James Curry. Pantii, M. and Sirén, S. (2015). The fragility of photo-truth: Verification of amateur images in Finnish newsrooms. Digital Journalism, 3(4), 495–512.

38 Introduction Paterson, C. (2011). The international television news agencies. New York: ­Peter Lang. Paterson, C. & Domingo, D. (2008). Making on-line news: The ethnography of new media production. New York: Peter Lang. Paterson, C. (2006). News agency dominance in international news on the internet. Papers in International and global communication, 1(6), 1–24. http:// ics.leeds.ac.uk/papers/cicr/exhibits/42/cicrpaterson.pdf. Paterson, C. A. & Sreberny, A. (Eds.). (2004). International news in the 21st century. Luton: University Luton Press. Peterson, R. A. (1976). The production of culture. Beverly Hills, CA/London: Sage Publications. Pogliano, A. (2015). Iconic photographs in the newsroom: An ethnography of visual news-making in Italy and France. Sociologica, 1(2015), 1–49. Rantanen, T. (2002). The global and the national: Media and communications in post-communist Russia. Boulder, CO: Rowman & Littlefield. Ritchin, F. (1999). In our own image. New York: Aperture. Rosenblum, B. (1978a). Photographers at work: A sociology of photographic styles. New York/London: Holmes & Meier Publishers Inc. Rosenblum, B. (1978b). Style as social process. American Sociological Review, 43(3), 422–438. Rubinstein, D. & Sluis, K. (2008). A life more photographic: Mapping the ­networked image. Photographies, 1(1), 9–28. Ryfe, D. M. (2012). Can journalism survive? An inside look at American ­newsrooms. Cambridge: Polity Press. Schiller, H. (1976). Communication and cultural domination. New York: Sharpe. Schlesinger, D. (2007, January 18). Report on Reuters actions after publishing altered photographs. Blogs dashboard [Web blog]. Reuters. Retrieved from http://blogs.reuters.com/blog/archives/4322. Schlesinger, P. (1987). Putting ‘reality’ together: BBC news. London: Methuen. Schudson, M. (1989). The sociology of news production. Media, Culture & Society, 11(3), 263–282. Seelye, K. Q. & Bosman, J. (2006, August 9). Bloggers drive inquiry on how alter­ed images saw print. Technology. The New York Times. Retrieved from www.­nytimes.com/2006/08/09/technology/09photo.html?_r=1&scp=1&sq= bloggers%20drive%20inquiry%20on%20how%20altered%20images%20 saw%20print&st=cse. ­ ebanon. Shuckleford, R. (2006, August 6). Another fake Reuters photo from L My Pet Jawa [web blog]. Retrieved from http://mypetjawa.mu.nu/­archives/ 184206.php. Silberstein-Loeb, J. (2014). The international distribution of news. Cambridge: Cambridge Books. Tagg, J. (1988). The burden of representation: Essays on photographies and histories. Amherst: University of Massachusetts Press. Thussu, D. K. (2000). International communication: Continuity and change. London: Arnold. Thussu, D. K. (1998). Electronic empires: Global media and local resistance. London: Arnold.

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2 The Production Process I From Story to Product

“The context of a photograph’s production”, pointed Bock (2008), “is intrinsic to its meaning. There is a limit to what can be said of a ­photograph […] without learning of its inception” (p. 170). News pictures’ production process at the agency is very much linear and ­one-sided – an idea turned into a photograph and finally packaged as a product that is distributed to clients. Such an idea would have to pass via critical gates in the production process (e.g., a chief photographer allowing a photographer to send a picture straight to the global pictures desk, or deciding to spike a picture; a photographer making editorial decisions in the field; an editor making editing choices in the office; or a client that was left unsatisfied with certain pictures taken by its request and therefore decides not to have them published). Different mediators and decision makers along the production process therefore operate as particular nodes of power (individuals, departments, organizations) ­performed at numerous crossings of conflict – fighting over status assets, acting as points-of-no-return along the entire process (Bourdieu, 1986). In fact, it is in those very conflictual crossings that status, both vertically and horizontally, is eventually established: individuals (an experienced local photographer opposing a new foreign chief photographer); departments (pictures vs. TV); bureaus (the agency’s local bureau in Jerusalem that is perceived to be more valuable to the organization than perhaps other bureaus); organizations (the agency as opposed to its clients); and industries. It is, in other words, an ongoing struggle between different power fields – within the organization and beyond – over the assets of cultural capital. Yet while focusing on the linear characteristics of such process, one fails to acknowledge an entire range of significant, often extremely ­delicate, bidirectional connections. An idea for a potential news picture, for instance, can be delivered from the chief photographer to his ­photographers. But it may also be ordered by the agency’s clients, initiated by an editor, by competing photographers, or even simply generated from the field itself. And a picture can be conceived from an idea the same way an idea can be conceived from a picture already taken by other public organizations and distributed to the agency in the past. Similarly,

The Production Process I  41 the agency’s clients may bring influence to bear on the process of production by using the agency’s picture or, on the contrary, choosing not to go through with an agency’s picture at all. In such eventualities, the tiny boost or publicity given to the agency, when a particular picture is selected (or to any other agency when some of its clients decide to use the pictures taken at a certain event by a different agency), may have a direct impact on future processes of production. Such considerations are expressed in different forms along the process (e.g., decisions over a line of stories to cover; procedures for future coverage to make; perhaps even a particular photographer who would be encouraged to improve his skills in the future). So, a more accurate way to discuss the agency’s news pictures process of production would therefore encompass both its circular and linear delicate structures of operations – one combining circles and lines connected and separated from each other, heading in various directions, both horizontally and vertically. Each of these circular/linear structures have various departure, middle, and end points in time that are chaotically maintained by the different position holders along the entire process and all are interwoven with parallel processes of production operating similar circular/linear formations. Such unique apparatuses maintain the footprints of additional circles of meaning; they express the complete articulation of cultural processes of production (Frosh, 2003). This apparently chaotic process, however, operates under a strict set of rules. Its operators, throughout their daily routines, are responsible for the making of extraordinary visual documents – news pictures – that are ‘begging’ to be observed. Their existence is so natural to the spectator, until their extraordinary significance (as visual evidence, as news information) compared, to an extent, to other ‘ordinary’ pictures, ironically becomes unimportant, taken for granted. It is precisely that routine, I would argue, that forces us to examine the dynamics in which this process is socialized, that allows news pictures to become inseparable from the daily experience of the reader. Put simply, this chapter and the following one are therefore an attempt to unpack the complex nature of pictures and news in their various manifestations as signs and products, and the international work environment in which they are ­performed – both as a perfect reflection of reality and as a production of one (Carey, 1989). I have decided to break the entire process in two. This chapter deals with the process at the ‘local’ stages of production: the daily work routines of the pictures department at the agency’s local bureau in ­Jerusalem. It is focused on the work of an agency’s Israeli photographer in the field and that of the picture editors in the office. The following chapter traces all the possible ‘international’ stages in the process where a news picture might travel: the agency’s global pictures desk; the magazine desk and keyword team; the global graphics desk and administration located in

42  The Production Process I Singapore; and sales. Finally, it looks at what the agency’s news picture faces when it is sold to a client – in this case the British newspaper The Guardian – and then picked again as data for analysis by the international desk. Two final notes before we begin. Writing about process is a complicated task, and so I have decided to put it into three main blocs: The Story, The Photography, The Product. My analysis is based on all three blocs of inquiry as part of a linear process, yet each also serves as a complete circle of production on its own that simultaneously is fed by the other blocs. The analysis of each expresses the bidirectional connections maintained inseparably at the vertical and horizontal levels of operations and demonstrates the power relationships performed at its linear stages. It is, put simply, a journey inside the making of cultural products that also serve as unique forms of signification.1 Finally, the language I use implies the process was operated mostly by men. This just reflects the reality, not a linguistic bias. During my ­observations in the field with the agency photographer, most of the photographers (both the agency’s and of its rivals in the field) were men. In fact, apart from two local papers’ female photographers (and the agency’s staff originally from Colombia, who was temporarily based in Jerusalem for backup at the time) who I rarely came across, all the photographers were male. This very much resembles the findings in the recent global annual report on the state of photojournalistic practice whereby news photography was found to be dominated by men (85%. Hadland, Campbell and Lambert, 2015). In the Jerusalem bureau, however, all the editors were female, and in the global pictures desk in ­Singapore the numbers seemed equal. Managers, chief photographers, and heads of departments were all male at the time of my observations, and I was told more than once by some of my interviewees that, for some reason, it appears women are not considered good enough to become heads of the agency’s picture departments. Time will tell.

The Story2 Like all good stories, this one has all the elements of conflict: life and death, flesh and blood; it burns from desire and is covered (or cloned) with smoke. An idea for an agency’s picture story has various possible points of departure: the photographer or chief photographer; the local editor; the head of the bureau; or the editors from the global pictures desk. Sometimes an idea would come from government offices or ­public organizations, who alert the agency about future events (e.g., press conferences, official visits, or government meetings). At others, a good story would be initiated from an unexpected occurrence, in which case the photographer would have to drive to the event using the information provided to him in his pager device from different messaging groups he

The Production Process I  43 is subscribed to, using scraps of information exchanged with competing photographers he would meet at scenes of events, from figures he knows in person (representatives, paramedics, police officers, or TV crews) and from the agency’s TV crews working close to photographers daily. In rare occasions, the photographer may unintentionally find himself present at the scene of an event. An agency story is therefore initiated at different points horizontally (within the agency, by clients, or from the field) and vertically (by the photographer, the chief photographer, head of the bureau, etc.). Stories are not fixed, they often change dramatically, and the connection between events may be entirely coincidental. On the day of the Israeli elections in 2006, for instance, the photographer accompanied Amir Peretz, the head of the Israeli Labor party at the time, on his visit to his hometown, Sderot, in the morning. At noon, and while working on sending his morning pictures, the photographer was suddenly called to drive to a road crossing near Yad Mordechai, a kibbutz nearby, where two civilians had been killed in a Qassam (the term used by the state of Israel to describe homemade rockets made by Hamas) attack. From there he went on to the beach in the southern city of Ashdod to take pictures of Israelis having a swim during Election Day. After a short break, he then continued to the city of Beit Shemesh (a 45-minute drive away) to cover a religious ceremony taking place in one of the orthodox synagogues in the area, and at the end of his day, late at night, he arrived at the Labor party’s headquarters in Tel Aviv to take some pictures just when the election results were published. On a boring day, however, a photographer may find himself spending an entire day working on a single developing story, and frequently he may arrive at the scene of an event only to find that there is no event to cover. At times he would not make it on time; at others, simply nothing would happen. Then he may decide to give up the shooting altogether, but would often prefer to wait for a better moment or just take atmosphere pictures (more on these later in this chapter. See also Chapter 4, first event). Events covered by the agency’s pictures division are thus similar to rather classical notions of news events (Galtung and Ruge, 1965; Gans, 1979), even though these are often marginal; they are not always dependent on actual occurrences in the real world, but rather, sometimes, on the reconstruction of one in the process of their making (Seaton’s “Pseudo-events” explains this well. See Curran and Seaton, 2003, pp. 336–337; Harcup and O’neill, 2001; Boyer, 2013 on deciding news value and the selection of Thema at AP-DD). Editorially, a story may be rejected simply because it is not ‘interesting’: Sometimes the chief photographer may find a certain story ‘boring’. At times it is the photographer himself who would dismiss a story for not being ‘interesting enough’; or not the agency’s kind of story; or one that was already covered in different variations by competing agencies;

44  The Production Process I or even by the agency itself in the past. The decision to reject a story may be made at the local office or even by the photographer himself at the scene of events, where he would then decide whether an event is worth a picture or simply has ‘no story’ in it. In one occasion, as I was told by the agency photographer during an interview, he was sent to cover a demonstration. When he arrived at the scene, he noticed there was no story behind it, even though, at the agency, they thought it would be a more dominant story, more serious. Sometimes, he continued, things could also turn the other way around: He would arrive at the scene and think there is ‘nothing’ there, when all of a sudden something happens. He then described another example in detail: One time there was a demonstration of Druzes [a unique ethnic minority among Israeli Arab citizens] in front of the Prime Minister’s office and no one was there to cover the event, perhaps only a single photographer; during protests such as this, nothing important usually happens except, perhaps, people shouting every once and a while, so no one really bothers to take any pictures. Suddenly there was a huge mess going on. Within minutes the protestors started to fight with the police, and all of a sudden, the entire occasion had turned into a huge event attracting lots of photographers. Thus, explained the photographer, things could really go both ways: At times events suddenly occur out of nothing, while at others what seemed at first like events with some potential turn into nothing; he arrives at a scene of events but the event does not develop into a story worth a coverage and therefore does not generate a picture to tell a story. The ‘intent’ of a news story also changes according to the decisions made by various position holders. It is the principle source of conflict in the daily work at the agency’s local pictures department, and one that demonstrates the effect the agency as a news organization has on its photographers and practitioners during the process of weaving the different stories to cover (see Tuchman, 1973; Gans, 1979. See also Lutz and Collins [1993] and their idea of intentionality as the motive that affects the selection process of stories to cover in National Geographic). The interest in one story or another may also point to a direct connection between production and consumption: Selling the pictures to clients would eventually lead to their inevitable recontextualization (as they would be used by different clients and published over varying platforms) based on the anticipations of local audiences’ taste and requirements. In other words, these would be pictures containing ‘moments’ from the past, yet ones chosen to be relevant for the future in terms of their sale ability (see Gürsel, 2016). The agency’s capacity to identify the ‘right’ story for their clients would result in the purchase and use of its pictures by the company’s clients, read by their audiences, and would eventually return as feedback to the agency via its clients (e.g., requesting the agency to cover neighboring ‘successful’ stories in the future). A circular structure is formed again – bidirectional connections between production and

The Production Process I  45 consumption, between the consumer and the agency’s clients, and eventually between the consumer and the agency with the mediating help of its clients is in play. Choosing a story to cover at the agency is thus an essential crossing whereby production and consumption are entwined (Frosh, 2003). An agency story may also get chosen for coverage simply because others would buy it, and the agency was often described to me by many of its picture professionals, first and foremost, as a “provider of service”. Consequentially, certain stories that the photographer and the editors initially dismiss as not being interesting enough might eventually turn out to be commercially feasible for the agency. Then, the presumably ‘non-interesting’ image becomes worthy of attention, for they operate in an image market and have to learn from it. Some events are still important, even though they are deemed less newsworthy than others; in ­Pictures, as I was once told by a picture editor, it is known that newspapers have many pages in them and that there is always the front page but also the one at the back. Photographers are also sent to make magazine feature stories, which are different from the daily hard news coverage. Thus, a photographer may find himself dedicating more time and energy to make a feature coverage than he would for a hard news shoot and would often end up with many more pictures from a feature story. The decision to work on a feature may be initiated by the chief photographer; by a client’s specific request (that may also request a particular photographer for the task); by the editor; or even sometimes by the photographer himself. Features are clearly a response to the stock agency Getty Images, one of the agency’s pictures’ biggest competitors (more on Getty in my concluding chapter). Getty, which is focused on stock but also sells news pictures, is thus forcing the agency and other global news pictures providers to reorganize. More and more international agency photographers and heads of departments had already moved to Getty, and so the international news agencies were thus forced to grow their market of clients and diversify their line of products. Features at the agency are clearly an example of such diversification, as they are essentially aimed at different magazines worldwide and are designed so as to attract non-news clients as well (Defoore, 2005. See also a broader discussion on the agency’s competition with Getty in Chapter 4, fourth event). Features are also intriguing since they demonstrate a clear distinction between hard news pictures that are often taken under pressing time conditions, and feature pictures that are often softer and less time sensitive, as both represent two different forms of the international news photographic story: on the one hand the ‘here and now’ story, often based on a real occurrence, and is thus used to reflect a reality; on the other, a story that has to be produced, to come-up with, a construction of reality. A dialectic is clearly in play here. However, at the agency, this

46  The Production Process I is settled with the distinct production procedures of feature and hard news picture stories at different moments and sites, and the different clients they are targeted at (Lehman-Wilzig and Seletzky [2010] provide a useful discussion on the hard/soft news divide along with their additional idea of general news. I provide a broader discussion on features in Chapter 4, fourth event). A photographer may be present at a non-news event and yet recognize a photo opportunity. These events may seem to him to be ‘visually captivating’, for example, but are less ideal in terms of the agency’s news standards. Here is an interesting example the photographer shared with me during an interview: At one time, he was sent to cover an ongoing demonstration at Highway 6 [a cross-Israeli highway]. Suddenly about 20 religious Orthodox Jews came by and started to interfere with the bulldozers and their work. Then the police arrived and they all started fighting. Even though there was nothing about this in the news, said the photographer, this was all rather extraordinary visually – a whole big mess that no one seemed interested in, but great pictures nonetheless. Apparently, continued the photographer, a similar thing often occurs at certain locations near the Israeli West Bank barrier, where people are fighting daily – left wing activists vs. soldiers, etc. And yet, again, almost no news is reported (and if no one was injured, there are no reports at all), simply because these kinds of events happen daily. Yet these events would often generate great pictures – fighting, a great mess, tear gas, etc., and many photographers would come and shoot on a daily basis. ‘Great’ pictures point to an inner conflict between the photographer, his artistic eye, and the news organization he is working for. Clearly, a ‘successful’ agency picture means it is eventually published by a great number of its clients, which, in turn, provides the agency with greater publicity and thus increases the chances of broadening its circle of ­clients in the future. However, sometimes certain events may be considered worth covering to the photographer but less so for the agency. Here is the paradox of creativity as it is reflected daily in the pictures department: When the photographer’s creative perception meets the organization’s, it becomes formulated, part of a broader cultural creative perception, that which maintains art as an excuse to making profit (Bourdieu, 1993). Sometimes events are deemed important not because of their news value, but rather since often photographers from competing agencies are simply present. In such cases, the photographer may be sent to a ‘minor’ event or even a ‘non-agency news’ event and would then have to use his journalistic judgment. An experienced photographer would probably not be tempted to cover an event simply because competing photographers are at the scene. Yet an inexperienced photographer, however, may want to cover the event despite its newsworthy inferiority, and both may be forced to cover an event by their chief photographer, even when it does not coincide with their own judgment. In one occasion, for example, the

The Production Process I  47 photographer and I were present at a ceremony in the memory of the former Israeli Prime Minister, Yitzhak Rabin, during the opening of the Rabin center in Tel Aviv next to other agencies’ photographers. The event was short, and an AFP photographer arrived late. In that eventuality, pointed the agency photographer, AFP would have to purchase pictures of the event since other agency photographers were present as well. Competing agencies have a great impact on the agency’s daily process and often affect particular moments of production; external circles of production are often connected to the internal one. The decision whether to send one photographer or another to cover a story is based on the photographers’ experience, location at a given moment, and on the perceived significance of the different events. The regional allocation of photographers in Israel at the agency means, for example, that a photographer that covers events at the center and north of Israel, based on the department’s allocation, would probably not be sent to Jerusalem and vice versa. Nonetheless, when major stories erupt, photographers would be sent to locations on the basis of their experience, not their usual location, although they are all trained to cover all kinds of events, large or small. The estimate of the photographers’ experience is part of the department’s inside politics, and in that sense both the pictures department and the agency itself can be seen as political clubs (Tuchman, 1991). When there is a dispute over the importance of one event or another, a veteran photographer may oppose his chief’s opinion and even convince the latter that a certain event is either crucial or not worth covering at all. An inexperienced photographer, however, would probably follow the orders given to him. Conflicts between photographers and their line managers, the department’s editors, or between fellow photographers influence coverage and might contribute in forming the agency’s reputation, for better or worse. A photographer in dispute with his chief, for instance, may be sent to cover smaller, ‘non-significant’ events and might even end up spending a day’s work at a scene, waiting for an event to occur. During my observations, for example, I was caught in a long dispute between the photographer I accompanied and the chief of the department at the time; the photographer complained the chief was not doing his job properly. The conflict between them led to the grounding of the photographer during the Disengagement in 2005, even though he was the department’s most experienced photographer at the time.3 The dispute resulted in constant tension between the photographer and the chief. Proper work relations may improve the overall workflow of the department, as pointed by the photographer, just as bad relationships may interfere with the daily routine. The importance of relationships between employees in the department to the work in the field kept coming back in various contexts during my observations and was particularly strong when the work routine of the

48  The Production Process I photographer and his chiefs was discussed. During an interview with the agency photographer, for example, he pointed out to me once as to how, to his view, consultations must be made at all times in the news and that news professionals cannot simply be ordered around. Thus, when a photographer is, say, in bad terms with his chief, who, for some reason, does not recognize the photographer’s skills, this would eventually lead to a situation in which the photographer would not want to have his chief’s advice at all. In the agency, continued the photographer, these matters are even more meaningful, since the chief of the department usually has to be of foreign origin (mostly to keep a balanced coverage between his Palestinian and Israeli photographers that are covering stories related to the Israeli-Palestinian conflict. More on this later); he is therefore not familiar with the local terrain and culture, as are his local photographers. As a result, the chief may find a certain event to be of some importance when, in fact, it is not, simply because he is not from ‘here’. The photographer continued with a personal experience of his: At one time, an event had occurred in the north Israeli town of Tel Hai. If the chief would have asked for his opinion, he, the photographer, would have said there was nothing there. Instead, the photographer was not consulted at all and was ordered to drive up north. With the former chief, said the photographer, things were done differently. Even though the former chief did not consult with the photographer in person, he did give the editor at the local office and him the liberty they required so as to do what they knew best. So they would consult with each other, and so the chief would rarely interfere unless it was something he felt he ­really needed to be a part of. Consultations, continued the photographer, are required at all times. There was, for example, this event in Kenya, he remembered, whereby terrorists had tried to take down an Israeli El-AL plane a few years ago. The same day there was also an explosion in a guesthouse full of Israelis in Kenya and three were killed; both were extremely huge stories. The former chief called him up and asked him about the events. The photographer told him that someone had tried to take down the plane and that there was also an explosion in Nairobi and several Israelis were killed. The chief consulted with him and eventually told the photographer to do what he thought was best. Some of the more crucial elements for the daily work of the agency’s photographers is clearly expressed in these stories. To begin, the photographer describes the delicate relationship between him and his boss, which has considerable impact on the work in the field. An embittered photographer would lack motivation in the field, unlike a photographer with higher moral, who is satisfied with how he is treated in the department and may therefore perform better. An inner circle in the ­production routine with bidirectional connections is expressed here: The chief gives his instructions on which stories to cover to his photographers and editors, and confronts their pictures – these are injected back into the

The Production Process I  49 system – whether these are successful or not. An interesting relationship of belonging and alienation at the agency is also illustrated here: a chief who does not understand the work done by the photographer in the field (he belongs to a different occupational community within the department [Gregory, 1983]; a manager who is not a photographer, as he was described to me). At the same time, he is also of foreign origin and is therefore not a member of the national community. When the tension between the different position holders rises, the photographers turn to patriotism (since the chief is not from ‘here’ and therefore does not know how things are done locally), transforming a unified department into a collection of conflicting national communities (local vs. foreign) and professions (managers vs. field workers, photographers). Whenever the working relationships at the department are in good order, however, national borders dissolve, making the pictures department work as a well-orchestrated system of production. Such struggles also resemble the problem of journalists and the communities they belong to – both ­professional and national – and the particular eventualities whereby they are unable to operate within the boundaries of both simultaneously (see, e.g., Liebes, 1992; Nossek, 2004; Zandberg and Neiger, 2005).

The Photography In 2005, the agency’s pictures department in Jerusalem included 15 ­photographers: nine Palestinians, four Israelis (one Arab Israeli), and two foreigners. Thirteen photographers had contracts. Two were staff. One photographer was female. During major events, the department would be reinforced with additional staff photographers and sometimes with an additional chief photographer to help out as well. Most of the photographers were photojournalists in the past, and many worked freelance before joining the agency. Photographers’ allocation was decided by the chief photographer and designed to cover three major regions: Israel, the West Bank, and Gaza. One photographer covered the events in the north and central Israel and five were always positioned in Jerusalem (three Israelis and two foreigners, among which was the chief photographer himself). Five ­photographers were placed in the West Bank (in Ramallah, Nablus, Hebron, Kalkilia, and Jenin); three photographers were positioned in Gaza.4 Whenever an event erupted and there were either no agency photographers nearby or all of them were busy, the agency would then use the services of freelance photographers; these were usually photographers known to the department’s editors from the past, who would often offer their pictures to the department. 5 At the time of my observations, a freelance photographer would usually receive the equivalent of $75 per picture, although in very special occasions, when extremely rare pictures were taken, the fee may rise up to hundreds of dollars per picture.

50  The Production Process I In certain eventualities, the agency would also purchase pictures from citizens who happened to be present at a certain event and took some pictures, and some of the photographers pointed to me as to how, when they arrive at a scene, they would first try to locate someone who happened to be at the spot and perhaps took some pictures, and only then would they start working on their own shoot. Apparently, this was sometimes successful, as it is demonstrated from the following story that I was told by the agency photographer: One day, he said, he was sent to the neighborhood of Kiryat Yovel in Jerusalem shortly after a suicide bomber had attacked at the entrance of a supermarket. When he arrived at the scene, a guy immediately approached him saying that his 12-year-old son had just come out of a photography store nearby only seconds after the explosion had occurred. He took some pictures with his pocket camera that he owned and was wondering whether the agency was interested in purchasing his pictures. The photographer had the film developed in the office, and it turned out the child had taken this ‘extraordinary’ picture – a long shot of bodies lying around near the entrance of the supermarket. After some negotiation, the agency decided to purchase the picture for the sum of $250. Clearly, agency photographers believe the agency can in fact benefit from amateur photography, and this resembles how many photojournalists perceive citizen photographers to be a positive development in the field (Hadland et al., 2015). Here, too, the consumer plays a significant role in the process of production and can sometimes even initiate it altogether, in which case a change of hats is in play: the consumer becomes the producer of news pictures, and the photographer (serving as the agency’s representative) becomes the consumer. In certain moments, consumer practices are injected straight into the heart of the production routine whereby a circular structure is performed (see, e.g., Jarvis, 2006; Bruns, 2008 on produsers and the network of journalism). Allocation arrangements of photographers are also an essential ­regional task, particularly due the unique geopolitical circumstances in Israel, the West Bank, and Gaza. On the most basic level, in order to cover the entire area, and since photographers with Israeli nationality cannot enter the West Bank or Gaza (and vice versa), the agency employs both Israeli and Palestinian photographers. But the division in the department is also necessary so that the agency can demonstrate a balanced coverage by employing photographers from both sides of the Israeli-Palestinian conflict (see, e.g., Goodman and Boudana, 2016); this also explains the rule that the chief photographer and all other agency heads of departments in Israel were required to be foreigners at the time of my observations. Clearly, the aspiration for a balanced coverage is crucial along the processes of decision-making in a news organization, and it is one that is also dictated by the organizational structure itself (Gans, 1979). Finally, this also comes to show how the agency is subject

The Production Process I  51 to several codes of ‘objectivity’, whether representing itself as a balanced news organization free from any external interests dedicated to uncover the ‘true’ nature of events (having facts conceived as aspects of the world itself); operating under a dominant and thus validated view of news (and is thus submitted to a neutral representation of both sides of the c­ onflict); or is strictly dependent on market forces and thus makes its news products acceptable to all clients (see, e.g., Schudson, 1978; Zandberg and Neiger, 2005. See also Goodman and Boudana, 2016). From the minute information is received about a story, the photographer would go after the picture of the event; that picture was described to me as that which tells the story, without reading any articles or having a background attached to it, one that ‘speaks’ for itself. The search for that rare moment would guide the photographer at the scene of events and would thus govern the entire photographic process. It is that unique combination of time and space he is after – a cosmic moment captured in the camera’s lens, making an extraordinary tripartite connection of the present (the event has just occurred), the past (the picture has now become historic evidence), and the future (the aspiration for the pictures’ eternity). It is a memory of an event in reality that happened and will thus never happen again (Bazin, 1967; Sontag, 1979; Barthes, 1984). Once a decision to cover an event was taken, the photographer would focus on the particular requirements for the event (e.g., planning the best route to take in order to arrive on time; thinking of special documents if required or specific lenses to grab from the office; timetables, etc.). He would ask for the advice of photographers and other contacts about the importance of the event and possible ways to cover it. The photographer therefore belongs to a broader occupational community whose members are helping each other at times of need (e.g., competing photographers) and is also helped by members of other occupational communities (e.g., security personnel) to achieve his goal (Gregory, 1983). The Equipment At the time of my observations, the photographer used basic gear that was with him at all times; additional accessories were occasionally added since these were required for the coverage of particular events. Usually, the photographer carried two digital cameras (Canon es 1 d mark 2): one with a wide lens 16×35 for close-ups, facial expressions, and posters. The second had a long 80×200 lens, which he used for better focus and portraits; to get a closer look at particular details; and to get a more ‘closed’ shot. Another reason why the photographer carried two cameras was in case the memory card in one of the cameras was full (in which case he would quickly switch to the other camera) or whenever one camera all of a sudden malfunctioned (apparently this would often happen).

52  The Production Process I The agency’s photographers have been using Canon cameras for some time, although other options were occasionally examined as well (such as a new Nikon camera). Whenever a business possibility such as this emerges, various competing factors need to be taken into account. For the agency is a huge and powerful international organization enjoying the success of a well-known and a prestigious brand, and there will be major implications to both companies in the future once these kinds of deals go through. The agency wants the best equipment at the lowest cost. Signing a deal with, say, Nikon would probably allow the agency to enjoy a substantial discount from Nikon, as the agency’s photographers worldwide would switch to Nikon, and thus the company would have to purchase a great deal of equipment in advance. Nikon, on its side, will supply its equipment to the agency at a lower cost than it would if it were for a smaller and unknown company. Then Nikon will be able to ride on the agency’s name, which may very well increase its sales in the future. However, there are also certain risks on both sides: Should the Nikon equipment prove less resilient than promised, the agency will lose out to its competitors until its frontline photographers are supplied with alternative cameras. Nikon will then probably have to face legal implications, but, more importantly, a direct hit at its own brand and one which might take quite some time to recover from. The agency, therefore, may hold the key for the success or failure of secondary industries offering their services to an additional circle of non-news clients daily (e.g., Nikon, which also offers its equipment to the masses). However, these may have a huge impact on the agency’s daily routine and possibly on its name in the future. Apart from the cameras, the photographer also carried additional photo accessories (e.g., flash, a pair of batteries, and extra memory cards); his Mirs device; his own private mobile phone; and a pager device that was subscribed to a number of messaging groups.6 Most of the time, he trusted the information provided by MADA (Israeli paramedics), the Israeli police, ZAKA (Israeli Disaster Victim Identification), the IDF (Israeli Defense Forces) spokespersons, and others, if necessary. An agency photographer would also carry his most up-to-date press card at all times; in Israel, these are given to agencies’ photographers working in Israel by the GPO (Israeli Government Press Office), once their journalistic practice is proven, and permit a free entrance to privileged locations, such as military bases and government offices. Nonetheless, the GPO is run by the Israeli government and thus encapsulates that very conflict the international news agency encounters daily in countries where geopolitical circumstances are complex: According to the Israeli GPO’s “Rules regarding cards for foreign media journalists, press technicians and media assistants” document, for example, Palestinian journalists are not considered “employees of foreign media” by the state of Israel, as they are not employed in Israel, and some are also banned

The Production Process I  53 for ‘security’ reasons. This, of course, is a highly significant matter that may face an international news agency with some difficulties, as it has to employ both Israeli and Palestinian photographers in order to cover the news from the region on both sides of the conflict, and that is also guided by the highest codes of journalistic objectivity and neutrality (see, e.g., Goodman and Boudana, 2016).7 At the agency, however, creative solutions were found to cope with such conditions. At the time of my observations, for instance, pager devices used by journalists were often subscribed to the messaging services of various groups that were supplied daily by different public organizations. A legal journalist, for that matter, would subscribe to the information services of the main legal institution’s messaging group, and a crime reporter working in Jerusalem would probably subscribe to the services of the Jerusalem police’s messaging group. Some messaging groups did not require particular authorization procedures from subscribers to join them. For the messaging services of the Yesha messaging group [Hebrew initials for Yehuda, Shomron, and Aza (Gaza), which are the blocs of settlements behind what is known as the Green Line border between the state of Israel and the occupied territories] for instance, one was simply required to have a written letter from the pager company in his/her possession.8 Given the volatile geopolitical circumstances in Israel, however, some groups did have special requirements at the time of my observations, and their subscribers were carefully selected. To join the Israeli police or the paramedics messaging groups, for example, a reporter had to supply proof that he/she was an experienced journalist from a wellknown news organization and had to pass certain security procedures. In some eventualities, as certain bits of information provided by some messaging groups were considered highly classified by the state of Israel (and were therefore only available to those with high security clearance), these were not provided to all subscribers automatically (a reporter subscribed to the information services of, say, the Israeli police was not classified as highly as, say, the chief of police, even though both were fed by the information provided by the police). Still, the process was not very well organized in Israel, leaving plenty of room for personal relationships and string-pulling: A well-connected reporter, for example, could easily get clearance for some of the more classified messaging groups, even when the information received from such groups was not at all required for his/her particular duty. On the other hand, many Arab journalists working in Israel were not authorized to receive the information provided by the police and paramedics’ messaging groups (these were considered the most useful by Israeli ­journalists) due to ‘security issues’. Since the agency has to employ ­Israeli, Palestinian, and foreign journalists in order to cover the entire region and supply a balanced coverage, the agency’s Arab journalists therefore found it extremely difficult to subscribe to the services of such

54  The Production Process I groups, and since many of the agency’s employees are sharing the same office at the Jerusalem bureau daily, this also affected the agency’s Israeli and foreign journalists. As a result, at the time of my observations, there were only a few pager devices subscribed to these classified services and held by the pictures department in Jerusalem, and this matter was kept in the dark for obvious reasons. The agency photographer shared with me during an interview an interesting story as to how this was settled at the local office: before ­joining the agency, while working as a freelance photographer in ­Jerusalem, he bought a pager device. After a while, he gained some popularity which, in turn, allowed him to subscribe to the services of some of the more important messaging groups. He remembered how, when he tried to join the Jerusalem police messaging group, they made things difficult for him, and he was only cleared after going through security procedures and after gaining even more popularity. In Israel, continued the photographer, such cases were pretty rare, and often the police did not clear new members to their messaging group so easily. Then, when he just started working for the agency, he asked the former chief photographer of the pictures department what to do with his pager device, ­assuming he should be getting one from the agency. He was told to hold on to his device and use it, and that the agency would cover the expenses. After a while he realized that his personal pager device was one of the only devices at the local bureau that was subscribed to the police ­information services. This, as he pointed to me, was simply because the Israeli police were not letting the agency join its messaging groups at the time, for obvious reasons.9 Where local conditions in ‘volatile’ regions make it difficult for the agency’s personnel to receive information on events, glocal mechanisms are in play (Robertson, 1995).10 Here, it is an ­‘unauthorized’ pager device providing valuable bits of information from local authorities, helping the agency’s local employees to cover news events for the international market. Photographers usually drive a normal domestic car that cannot cope with rough terrain or unmarked roads, and when a story breaks that requires driving on such roads, a photographer might find himself in trouble. During one of our field trips, for example, we arrived at an army base in the north to cover the firing of Israeli cannons at Lebanon after a confrontation had occurred between IDF and Hezbollah soldiers near the border the day before. The cannons were positioned deep in a field covered with mud, and it was impossible to get any nearer with the photographer’s car. Eventually, we were forced to wait for an AFP photographer driving a jeep to drive us through. Whether an event gets covered or not may simply be the result of technical limitations dictated by the organization (e.g., driving a private car instead of a jeep), and a potentially successful coverage can easily turn into a missed opportunity (Figure 2.1).

The Production Process I  55

Figure 2.1  S ome roads are rough (Israel, 2005).

The agency photographer usually carried an extra flash, additional lenses (28×70, a 300, and a 14), a monopod (used to stabilize the camera), a first aid kit, a bulletproof vest, a negative camera, and a bag with an extra set of clothes (in case he would find himself having to spend the night away from home). He also carried a yarmulke and a hat that was required while shooting in religious events and funerals, and a set of ‘unobtrusive’ cloths. Whenever particular shooting scenes are known in advance (e.g., religious neighborhoods, particular religious ceremonies) he may even put on a costume or wear black clothes so as to minimize his “presentation of self” (Rosenblum, 1978, p. 23); he could then blend in the crowd more easily (see also my analysis in Chapter 4, third event). News photographers quite often face a number of risks in their daily work (Hadland et al., 2015) and these may affect the choice of gear they are carrying. Given such eventualities, the photographer therefore also carried a computer backpack with a laptop and a few accessories (e.g., a fast internet surfing card [3G]; an electric divider with several electrical outlets; and a sun shield, whenever the natural lighting might affect his work on the computer) apart from his regular gear. In many cases he would leave his computer in the car, but whenever the pictures are needed quickly, or when a violent event occurs that requires shifting from one spot to another, he would only carry the computer on his

56  The Production Process I back and additional accessories that are necessary for the shoot. During v­ iolent events, as I was pointed by the photographer, he would carry as little gear as possible, since in these particular events he would often run from one spot to the other and hide so he would not get hurt. This, as I was told by the photographer during an interview, is what they call ‘traveling light’ – carrying nothing but two lenses, two cameras, an extra battery, and a bulletproof vest. The Fieldwork When arriving at a scene, the agency photographer would join his competing colleague photographers and other key practitioners that may also have valuable bits of information. Most of the photographers were already familiar to him from past events, and some even shared a friendship relationship on their time off, notwithstanding working for competing agencies (although, on rare occasions, a photographer might easily be misled by a colleague photographer as well). In the same way, the photographer might find himself at a setting familiar to him from the past, in which case he would already know certain practitioners (e.g.,  body guards). These relationships might come in handy, since acquaintance may, for example, ease security checks. It might also lead to some valuable pieces of information about how to get to an event or how it would run and thus save the photographer valuable time at his work. A bad impression left in the past, however, might lead to an opposite reaction, and a photographer who found himself in a personal dispute would probably have to find his own way in without receiving any help from others at the scene of events. Once arriving at a scene, the photographer would focus on how to address the shoot, and in some cases, when it is a prearranged photo opportunity (e.g., two political leaders shaking hands, a photo op), he would be guided in advance. Frequently, the photographer would find himself at events similar to ones covered by him in the past, whereby he would spend some time thinking about his shoot already on his way to the scene. These would often generate a spontaneous reaction, natural, a trivial set of well-ingrained production procedures, as I was told by the photographer, since in such eventualities he already knows what he needs: focusing on facial expressions or on placards, for example, if covering a demonstration. The photographer therefore anticipates that social behavior he intends to document based on his experience from similar events in the past (Rosenblum, 1978). Such anticipation in advance, however, might also point to a pre-based format of news pictures, since the photographer searches certain conceptual formulas; those basic elements that are required for that which makes a picture ‘successful’ (e.g., an expression or placards in a demonstration; expressions of grief; tears, a coffin, or bodies in a funeral. See my analysis in Chapter 4, third event). These elements are attributed to particular conceptual patterns

The Production Process I  57 of newsworthy events (e.g., a demonstration) that are eventually also performed as part of a broader meta-pattern of creativity. It is a conceptual formula in the head of the creative photographer, executing the organization’s standard for a creative shoot (Ryan, 1992). Once at the scene, the photographer would focus on the actual shoot, try to get the best position available in order to get the right angle ­(sometimes this is done before the photographic event), and may sometimes find himself fighting over a spot with other photographers. The photographer would not ‘intervene’ in an event given his professional code. However, he would not hesitate to shoot an event that was ­‘altered’ by another photographer; an event is thus taken by the photographer as somewhat ‘pure’, untouched, just as long as he himself did not interfere with its natural occurrence. To the eyes of the photographer, an event is the true nature of occurrences, and its successful coverage is only possible if the scene of events is not contaminated. For only then the perfection of the photograph’s analogy is kept intact (Barthes, 1977). The agency photographer therefore appears to be operating under rather classical notions of journalistic objectivity: To his view, journalists have no external interests in their line of work, and they are dedicated to uncover the true nature of events, while the act of photography itself is an act of nonintervention (Figure 2.2) (Schudson, 1978; Sontag, 1979; Schwartz, 1999; Zandberg and Neiger, 2005).11

Figure 2.2  Photographers at work I (Israel, 2005).

58  The Production Process I Whenever the photographer arrived at a scene and decided, together with competing photographers, that there was not enough room for all to share, a pool option was then examined. If the photographers decided to go through with a pool, the shoot was then executed by one of the largest agencies’ photographers (Reuters, AP, AFP, or EPA, depending on their spot in a predecided rotation between agency photographers whenever a pool option had arisen), and the pictures were sent to all other three agency photographers straight away. In most cases, the decision to go through with a pool was taken in the office by editors and chief photographers and was then delivered to photographers on the ground. At times, the lack of space at a scene was known in advance. At others, the decision to go through with a pool would come from the bottom-up, decided upon between the photographers in the field, and only then was it delivered to the office. The decision to go through with a pool clearly has certain implications to the overall process, primarily since all agencies receive the same pictures from an event. However, whenever a pool decision came from the field, things were even more complicated, as this required full cooperation from all the photographers involved. If only one photographer ­decided not to go through, he might leave his colleagues without a picture. At the day of the Israeli elections, for example, we arrived at the Israeli town of Sderot when the photographer prepared to shoot Amir Peretz, the head of the Israeli Labor party at the time, while placing his vote. When we arrived at the scene, the room where Peretz was meant to place his vote was tiny and could only contain one photographer and a single TV crew. The photographers who were present at the scene argued about their options, until a decision was made to go through with a pool. The decision was mutual, both for pictures and TV, but even after a decision was already made, the photographers were not satisfied and were left at the entrance of the room just in case the pool would not go through and they would have to fight for a good spot. Eventually, the picture was taken by an AFP photographer and was sent to all the other agencies. Competition is strongly felt at all times in the production routine and has major effects in the field; nobody wants to be left without pictures. During the photographic process, the photographer would be alert to the event and fully aware of his colleagues’ motion at all times, as they would be with his (especially the less experienced photographers). At times, he may find his angles are imitated, if only for the fear of missing the picture of the event. At others, he would receive help despite the highly competitive conditions. Quite often, the photographer collaborated with the agency’s own TV crews; occasionally they arrived together at a scene and helped each other to get a good spot. Sometimes, however, TV crews might get in the way of pictures (e.g., placing a microphone in the frame; extra personnel struggling on a tight spot; or even a certain change in the lighting). During an event, the photographer must therefore

The Production Process I  59 give some thought to his memory cards (are they full or not?); to his camera (is  it in good condition?); or to the right lenses, and have the agency’s ­clients in mind at all times. Thus, the photographer pointed out during an ­interview how, for example, if something happens in morning time (like the elections), it would be easy for him to deliver the pictures because it is morning everywhere (e.g., in Singapore it is six hours ahead, and in Australia it is eight hours ahead) and so there is enough time to make the papers deadlines. However, he continued, if he was shooting something at 16:00 in the afternoon, then this was right on the borderline, thereby affecting the shoot, especially in terms of speed. In such cases, he would have to be quick in taking his pictures and ­sending them to the office, and this would clearly affect his work in the field. So, if in Israel, for instance, it is 16:00, then in Singapore it is 22:00, and they are already closing the papers there, and while the US is seven hours back, Europe is two hours ahead. Thus, if he was shooting something at 20:00, then the computer would be with him at all times, on his back. Clearly, there are particular requirements from international agency photographers to excel in their position: Since the agency tailors its products to an international circle of clients, the photographer must take into account the working hours, deadlines of clients abroad, and time differences in the different regions on his way to, and during, the events he would cover. A late shoot results in a strict time frame: The photographer must make sure his pictures are sent before the papers are closed abroad. In such cases, he may even have to leave the event early and miss a picture or two in order to send his pictures in on time, and he would therefore carry his laptop on his back to save time. Accordingly, whenever the photographer has a scheduled shoot in the morning in Israel, this would leave him enough time for the sending process, since deadline of most newspapers abroad are only later during the day in Israel time. Thus, the photographer explained to me how he was fully aware whenever newspapers around the world were just about to close – how this was constantly on his mind and how he was working fast whenever he was under a pressing time frame due to the papers abroad. Then, as soon as he already had something, two to three pictures, he would send them straight away. He then demonstrated this with a story: A few years ago, a suicide explosion occurred in the Israeli town of Pardes Hanna, a two-hour drive from where he was staying at the time, and it was clear to him that he was not going to make it. As it happened, a Channel 1 TV camera guy was quick to arrive at the scene, as he lived nearby, in the Israeli town of Karkur, and so managed to upload his video materials quickly to Channel 1, which provided its materials to the agency’s local TV department. As a result, they, in pictures, simply grabbed one frame from TV and so managed to send a single picture from the event until the rest arrived later on. The next day, the grabbed picture made an international play and was published on various front

60  The Production Process I pages worldwide. Since the agency is committed to its international clients and since the time frame was tight, explained the photographer, they had managed to send one picture right away. This, apparently, was the right decision, since most of the newspapers were in fact waiting for that single picture before closing the paper. What is more, the photographer described to me how this also demonstrates the difference between the agency’s photographers and local photographers working for, say, Maariv or Yedioth [two major Israeli newspapers]; while, after their pictures are taken, they can rest and relax, international agencies’ photographers are sometimes required to send their stuff straight from the car. The local agency photographer therefore tailors his working routine to the requirements of an international market – a glocal process in motion. Thus, deadlines around the world are carefully thought of at all times by the local agency photographer, who also needs to decide what pictures to send (to choose the right ones from his own or decide whether it is better to grab a frame from TV and send it as a picture); when to send them (given the deadlines abroad); and where and how to use his gear accordingly. In many ways, the photographer would also have to determine the event’s level of newsworthiness. In such eventualities, the photographer is faced with one of the most important, and perhaps difficult, moments during his daily routine – deciding when the job is done. Different events come to different endings: At times it is that moment when the peak of an event had passed; sometimes it is formally declared (e.g., a press conference or a meeting between politicians); and sometimes the event’s level of newsworthiness had simply dropped. This was also explained in detail by the photographer during an interview: Sometimes, he said, events end up by themselves. Sometimes there is a peak; the event starts slow, there is nothing to shoot, and suddenly something happens. At one point, he remembered, he accompanied Amir Peretz (the head of the Israeli labor party at the time) in the Israeli town of Sderot. At first it was all nice and pleasant, and people only wanted to shake his hand. Then all of a sudden, a group of old people jumped over Peretz and started kissing him, and as a result he fell on the floor. The photographer realized right away that this was the peak of the event and that he would not have anything like this later on. He then stayed for a couple more minutes and then went his way. At that point, he said, he already knew that he had the picture he was looking for, at which point the rest of his pictures from the event could be trivial. On the other hand, said the photographer, he may also find himself in a demonstration where nothing happens, and he would only take one or two pictures. Or, sometimes, it would be a heated demonstration, in which case he would have some great pictures, yet the event did not come to an end. He would then decide to leave the scene on his own. Of course, there is always a chance that something would happen after he left, but he also needs to

The Production Process I  61 think about sending his pictures to the editors at the office. In time, he concluded, he became more and more experienced in knowing exactly what to look for in an event and when one comes to an end. In major events, there would often be few of the agency’s photographers present, and the work would then be shared between the photographers in order to get the widest coverage. Then, the more experienced one would usually run the shoot and share the workload with his colleagues (More on photographers’ cooperation in Chapter 4, second event). A Final Touch before Take-Off An ending of an event usually marked the beginning of the pictures’ sending process. The photographer would then move to a more convenient location nearby (e.g., a coffeehouse). Sometimes, a new sending location was selected right after a single event had ended, while at others it was selected at the end of the day after covering a number of events; in both cases, the decision was often based on the importance of the events and the speed in which the pictures were needed in the office. Occasionally, the competing photographers at a scene decided together where to send their pictures from and preferred places with a Wi-Fi service, although the photographer also carried the necessary accessories in case wireless facilities were not available. Since the sending process took time and laptops’ batteries are limited, it was often best to have lots of electric sockets available at the chosen spot as well. And during important events with little time at hand, the photographer often preferred not to use his battery at all, for the sending process might be extremely sensitive at times when speed was of the essence, and a computer crash could be a catastrophe. In the beginning of the sending process, the photographer usually copied all the pictures shot in an event, or during the day, into his computer. Covering ‘regular events’, an agency photographer usually shot approximately 100–300 pictures (depending on the different events, how they developed, and how important they seemed to the photographer in terms of potential clients). Using his fast card reader, the pictures were then quickly copied and the photographer began filtering the pictures with his AcDsee software, whereby all pictures appeared as thumbnails and from which 5–20 were eventually selected and sliced again, so the best ones were eventually selected for distribution. When sending time was crucial, the photographer usually looked for the picture of the event first and immediately started working on it, so it would be the first to send over; the rest of the pictures were atmosphere pictures.12 In many cases, the photographer would ask for the advice of a stranger in order to select the best pictures from a covered event. Help provided by an ‘external’ pair of eyes during the sending process is intriguing in itself, demonstrating what, to an extent, Berkowitz (2000) referred to

62  The Production Process I as paradigm repair, whereby the news photographer is caught between two conflicting codes of ethics: He is a journalist and therefore committed to the value of objective reporting given his profession. And at the same time, he is bound to operate within the constraints dictated by the photograph during the act of photography. To the photographer’s view, the eye of a so called naïve spectator is not affected by the camera’s lens and is therefore seen as objective by the photographer, pure and uncontaminated, allowing the photographer to make the best choice available. Incorporating a stranger’s reading into the delicate process of ­professional pictures’ selection demonstrates how the act of news photography is taken by the photographer as limited and castrated, and one that is somewhat ‘stained’ by its very nature. The truthfulness of the news picture is very much taken here by the photographer to be subjective (Mäenpää, 2014). The use of an ‘external eye’ expresses yet another moment in which production and consumption are entwined, only this time the consumer plays a number of roles: For a moment, the photographer is helped with the advice of an outsider in an attempt to identify how the picture is received by the audience (e.g., generating certain reactions such as “wow, this is a great picture!” or “this is a hideous picture, don’t choose this one”). Then, the external spectator also performs as an external editor (he/she may influence the photographer to send a specific picture or spike another). And he/she is also the consumer, exposed now to the final product in its ‘rough cut’ at a very early stage of production. Once the best set of pictures is selected, the photographer would then begin editing the pictures using Adobe’s Photoshop software. The editing process varied from picture to picture, but often the photographer used a similar set of specific editing tools: cropping the original picture; adjusting the contrast of its colors; saturation; color leveling; and removing unnecessary ‘stains’ (which, to the eyes of the photographer, were in the camera’s lens and were not part of the picture ­itself, in which case, he explained, he was not allowed to follow such a ­procedure). A few years ago, the agency issued a brochure with specific instructions on how to edit pictures on Photoshop (“A brief guide to the values and standards […]”). The brochure was distributed to all of the agency’s pictures departments worldwide in order to substantially limit photographers’ own judgment in the field.13 In the set of instructions, for instance, were precise levels of colors a photographer was allowed to change; particular cropping angles; or saturation percentages, among other things. What is more, at the time of my observations, Adobe also launched a new History option under Photoshop’s settings, whereby editors could go over the entire editing process of a single picture before it was sent away by a photographer in the field, and the agency’s photographers were notified to enable the History option in the software’s preferences at all times.

The Production Process I  63 The digital editing process invites a number of theoretical perspectives focusing on the photograph’s ontology, whether containing traces of reality in its analogue form or released from the constraints of reality in its digital form (Sontag, 1979; Barthes, 1984; Mitchell, 1992). The endless possibilities in digital editing allow the photographer to govern his photograph and offer complete domination of its visual elements, having the opportunity to transform the photograph into a ‘new’ ­document ­(Robins, 1995; Ritchin, 1999. See also Mäenpää, 2014; Hadland et al., 2015 and their discussions over the professional ethics of photojournalism in the digital era). Yet, here, the agency photographer uses the digital editing tools and ‘intervenes’ with the photograph’s visual elements, not to ‘push’ the picture away from reality (as, to an extent, in the case with stock images); rather, ironically, they are used to bring it ‘closer’. Put simply, the digital editing tools, in this case, are the means of empowering the photographic document’s objectivity – as a photograph and as a news document.14 During the editing process, the computer would be connected to the internet. Connection options vary from time to time, and the photographer was prepared for a number of unexpected situations: Whenever a wireless connection was available, surfing was often faster. However, sometimes such networks are secured and are not always available, and these might accidentally crash from time to time as well. Therefore, the photographer also carried a 3G card and one for backup, with which he could quickly connect to the internet and surf faster with minor interruptions using only a basic network (such networks are usually easy to find in most cities). Sending pictures over the internet clearly saved time and gave the photographer fewer worries to deal with in the field. This means that he could cover several events per day without wasting precious time sending his materials to the office. Nonetheless, special attention was still given during the sending process, for the photographer alone is there to decide, unlike in the past when digital technologies were not available and more personnel were involved in the process. During an interview with the agency photographer, he described, for example, how things were done in the old days: At the time of the fall of the Berlin wall, r­ emembered the photographer, his former chief told him how he was sent to take pictures. Although everyone knew this was a huge story, it took him a number of hours until he got to the office, and several more until his pictures of the falling wall were published at all. Today, continued the photographer, it is, of course, completely different: Sometimes he would cover an event, send his pictures, and after 30 minutes he would already see these published in various news websites. This clearly makes the whole process much faster, but it also forces him to be extra cautious and make no mistakes, as it is extremely difficult to fix them later on. Clearly, the  use of online technology in the sending process of news

64  The Production Process I pictures at the agency allows for the traffic of content through means of transportation at maximum speed and minimum cost, defining new temporal and spatial boundaries. Once the editing process was complete, the photographer wrote the captions. Browsing through the agency’s website, he usually tried to locate a story already written on the event by the text department and then copy the relevant details in order to keep his writing as succinct as possible. When there was no story available to take details from, the photographer had to write the entire captions on his own. An internal agency software was then used to write captions in and catalogue pictures, as was the spelling website Babylon so as to avoid spelling mistakes (since, as the photographer explained to me, it did not seem ‘appropriate’ if he made some spelling mistakes in the captions). The agency photographer has to speak ‘universally’; his picture must speak the language of all people, with his captions written in ‘perfect’ English (some of the bureau’s photographers apparently had ‘poor’ ­English skills, in which cases the caption was written by the editor in the office). Writing captions for pictures illustrates an interesting shift between several levels of representation that are in play: First, captions are seen as a verbal description of the photographer’s experience (he was at the scene), whereby an epistemological gap between the photographer’s experience and its verbal representation is in play (Peters, 2001).15 ­Second, there is the verbal transition from Hebrew to English. This shift, therefore, is first performed from private to public and then from a­ ­‘local’ public to a ‘global’ one. For the verbal description of the experience is public (Peters, 2001), and the Western public, where many of the agency’s most powerful clients are located, usually speaks English.16 This is an example of mechanisms activated in the captions’ writing process by the photographer in order to tailor the agency’s pictorial products to an international market, having the strong Western markets in mind: Working on his captions, ‘perfect’ English writing skills are therefore required from the local photographer (who therefore uses Babylon since it is not ‘appropriate’ to make spelling mistakes). And that is why local editors usually wrote the captions whenever a photographer’s English skills were found ‘poor’. When a picture was edited and its caption was complete, it was then sent via an internal network. If sent directly to the Singapore global pictures desk, the photographer would chat with one of the desk’s editors online. The two would then consult on specific visual elements in a picture; certain details in a caption; or just to have an update on which pictures were sent and their numbers. At times, the photographers might be asked to rewrite a caption, and sometimes an argument regarding the editing of a certain picture had occurred, for the editor in Singapore could reedit the pictures if he wished to do so, although this rarely happened. At one point, remembered the photographer, he sent a couple

The Production Process I  65 of pictures from a certain event with his captions attached. For some reason, someone in Singapore insisted that he should change the captions. He refused, and this resulted in the editor in Singapore calling up the ­editor-in-charge, who immediately solved this in the photographer’s favor, as he was at the scene of event and not the distant editor. A possible conflict between a photographer and an editor from the global pictures desk in Singapore expresses an interesting moment whereby the picture and the referent are struggled over (Berger, 1972; Sontag, 1979). In this case, there is a complex relationship between the photographer, the referent, and the act of photography, and between different personnel (the photographer and a distant editor) working on the ‘local’ and the ‘international’ levels of operations: To the photographer, the eye of a stranger (e.g., a local waiter in a coffeehouse where he sends his pictures from) is considered ‘closer’ to the scene of events than that of a Singaporean editor. He would then fight to ‘own’ his picture (as well as the overall act of photography), have the advice of a stranger, and ignore the opinion given by a distanced and foreign editor. To him, it is his testimony that matters the most, for he was present, both in time and in place (he was there, and his testimony is therefore the most representational of all). Then comes an anonymous spectator in the local sphere (he was not present at the scene but ‘belongs’ to this particular place, given his local nationality). Finally, the editor in Singapore is part of a distanced sphere (he is not from ‘here’) and is therefore found the least relevant. When captions were complete, the pictures were sent away one after the other according to their level of importance (additional pictures from the same event were often allocated the same caption as the first). All pictures were either sent directly to the global pictures desk in ­Singapore or to the office at the local bureaus. At the time of my observations, the decision whether a photographer would send his pictures directly to Singapore or to the local bureau first was a political one made by the chief photographer, while often the most experienced photographers were approved to send directly to Singapore as a show of appreciation and respect. An order given to a photographer to send his pictures to the local office first would signify his relatively low status amongst other photographers in the bureau. For this means his pictures would be observed and filtered one last time before they were sent directly to ­Singapore. Such a decision is also a good example of the department’s internal policy that changes by the chief photographer in position, given his view of things, and might indicate internal conflicts over organizational power and control in the department. Of course, a decision such as this may heat an ongoing dispute or settle another and might have a huge impact on the daily routine of the department in general. At a certain point throughout my observations, for example, the chief photographer decided that all pictures must go through the local office first, regardless

66  The Production Process I of the photographers’ expertise. The photographer I accompanied was the most experienced in the department and used to send his pictures directly to Singapore for some time, and so was deeply offended, stating how such a decision might affect his work on a daily basis.17 Nonetheless, since the Jerusalem bureau is considered a rather volatile one given the unique geopolitical circumstances in the region, and although, at the time of my observations, some of the more experienced photographers were still allowed to send their pictures directly to Singapore, pictures were usually first sent to Jerusalem. The decision to have all the pictures sent to Jerusalem first is also applicable today because of fast distribution technology; with the file transmission speed that is available today, a picture is quickly sent to Jerusalem from a photographer in the field and may be received in Singapore in only a few minutes, and thus has little effect on the overall distribution speed as well (Figure 2.3). After the sending process was complete, the photographer checked to see whether his pictures have already returned: a term used to describe a picture that was sent to clients, which was later published on their platforms; the picture was sent first by the photographer who now witnesses his picture as a spectator and a consumer in its published form. Usually, he would go through central news and pictures websites (e.g.,  ­Yahoo News) to see whether his pictures were selected and published by certain

Figure 2.3  ‘A pack of lonely wolves’ (Reuters, AP & Getty photographers sending pictures together, Israel 2006).

The Production Process I  67 clients on the account of his colleagues, and if so at what time. ­Having pictures returned, a circular structure is performed once again: The pictures were sent to the local office by the photographer; then to ­Singapore; then to worldwide clients; and were finally published for public view. When the photographer faces his published pictures, his visual consumer practices are revealed as well: He is an agency photographer, who is, at the same time, a news photography consumer. A returned picture is thus injected straight back into the heart of production (it also affects future coverage) after it was distributed to its clients and then published for the eyes of an international audience. An idea has turned into a photograph, a photograph into a product.

The Product At the time of my observations, the agency’s Jerusalem bureau was divided between two main office spaces: The first was the main hub where Text and TV personnel were set in a cubical structure and were able to keep eye contact at all times. The second was a separate room where the pictures department was located. This unique allocation of space has an interesting connection to the bureau’s daily routine: Sharing the  same office space, both Text and TV’s personnel were able to easily exchange valuable information on daily events. Both teams maintained eye contact at all times, and whenever information on a story was received on the desk, TV crews were usually notified on the spot and were able to take off quickly. However, information was often received too late at Pictures, or sometimes it was not received at all, as Pictures’ personnel were placed in a separate room. This strange allocation of space in the local bureau also fueled an ongoing inside competition between departments. Thus, despite the feeling of mutual collaboration and organizational solidarity, several Pictures employees pointed out to me what, to their view, was an unhealthy competition that existed between Pictures and TV. This, I was told, was the result of news websites who also run video news segments on their platforms. As a result, in events when exclusivity is top priority, web clients often prefer to upload videos over pictures. On the one hand, this competition urges the different TV crews and photographers to be the first to arrive at the scenes of events; this works rather well for the agency. On the other, however, it also causes an unhealthy tension between the d ­ epartments, and so, in extreme situations, for example, TV practitioners might not share important information with Pictures on purpose, and this might affect the department badly. The photographer described to me during an interview, for example, how this had occurred in several occasions when something happened and no one from ­Pictures knew anything about it. Then, when they started to receive the information on the different events via their pager devices and prepared to take

68  The Production Process I off, he often noticed there was already no one from TV in the office. He also remembered how he once mentioned this to the former chief photographer, who simply explained to him they [Pictures] are in competition with everybody (Figure 2.4).18 A competitive environment also exists in the pictures department itself. Even though photographers usually work on their own and rarely come across fellow photographers from the office, they are fully aware of their colleagues’ skills, accomplishments, and relationships in the ­department. Often photographers show their appreciation whenever a colleague’s picture receives good reviews, and they offer comfort whenever a shoot did not go as planned. Moreover, during my observations, in order to provide an incentive, the Magazine desk published The best in the last 24 hours and The best of the month pictures on the agency’s pictures’ website, and a photographer whose pictures had earned such respect was immediately embraced by his colleagues. In a sense, these organizational incentives also demonstrate the agency’s forms of success performed on a number of levels: A published picture on the agency’s website is a motivation boost for the local photographer and evidence for having executed an ‘excellent’ agency picture. Then these successful published pictures from the work at the bureau are fed straight back into the heart of production. For a photographer

Figure 2.4  P  hotographers at work II: In competition with everybody (Israel, 2005).

The Production Process I  69 whose pictures were never published as part of the agency’s ‘best of the 24/month’ would aspire to take his future pictures in a ‘similar’ way (e.g., aesthetically, or perhaps covering a neighboring story with an international appeal) so as to increase his chances for such publication and thus gain political power in the department. Finally, incentives also keep the department and its photographers highly motivated as the means of serving the agency’s goals: a photographer fulfilling the goals of the local department (in news and in photography); a local bureau fulfilling the agency’s goals for success on international scale (how many pictures published as The best of 24/month from photographers working in a particular bureau); and eventually as an international organization fulfilling the goals of success internationally as opposed to competing global news providers and local organizations. These are then incorporated into a more general form of financial success that is eventually fulfilled by broadening the agency’s circle of clients, by gaining wider publicity with local clients as cultural mediators, and eventually from a global audience of consumers (Frosh, 2003). At the time of my observations, there were five computer stations placed in the office: the chief photographer’s (whenever he was not shooting); the editor’s; and three that were used by the different photographers in case they wished to edit their pictures in the office.19 An additional computer was located next to the editor’s station, which was operating 24/7, having the FTP World constantly running on it (an internal network available to access from all the agency’s bureaus worldwide); using FTP World, an editor could browse through pictures distributed by the agency worldwide daily (including the ones from Israel), as these appeared in their final form the way they were received by the agency’s clients. A National FTP was running as well on the editor’s station (this could be viewed only at the local bureau), whereby the editor could browse through all the pictures flowing in from the local photographers daily. Using the National FTP, the editor could either upload or download pictures based on the department’s daily needs. In addition, there were two TV sets in the room: One was constantly screening the agency’s feeds worldwide so that editors could get updated with the recent news events covered internationally; CNN was running on the other. 20 The editor was thus constantly updated with ‘local’ events (with the help of telephone sets and her pager device) and was also in tune with ‘international’ events (watching CNN and the agency’s feeds). Here is a circular process of information exchange from the agency to local and international news channels (CNN, which feeds on a similar circular process), and from such channels back to the agency. Above the editor’s station, a board was hung on the wall covered with essential documents required for her daily routine: the editors’ weekly shifts and schedule; a list of useful telephone numbers (e.g., technical support, the international desk); a note with the pool rotation (“1. AFP 2. AP

70  The Production Process I 3. EPA 4. Getty 5. Reuters”); and a name list of all the new ministers in the Israeli government (English and Hebrew). There was also a list of all the stringer photographers from different regions in Israel the department was working with regularly (about 100), having the names of the local papers they were working for attached to each name. Stringers are photographers that are fully committed to their employing organizations, (and are therefore required to send all of their pictures to them, unless they were authorized to sell their pictures to other ­organizations by their employers). Stringers are usually paid per working days (some stringers’ payment is based on a fixed number of working days per month, a guarantee); they receive various social benefits from their employing organizations, who also provide the stringer photographers with the necessary gear for their daily routine. Stringers are of great use to the picture editor, as she may often purchase their pictures from events that were not covered by the agency or send them to cover certain events whenever there was no agency photographer available. Whenever pictures were received from a stringer, he/she would sometimes request to ‘Israel Out’ his/her pictures, in which case the pictures were eventually sent to the agency’s clients worldwide with the exception of the Israeli clients, and there was a perfectly good reason for this: A stringer working for Yedioth Ahronoth, for example, who often sold his pictures to the agency as well, did not wish to see his pictures published by, say, Israel Today (both are popular Israeli newspapers). However, local clients were fully aware of such an arrangement with the agencies, and it was described to me more than once as a somewhat circle of ­silence (even though the desk could also receive requests to ‘Israel Out’ a picture from certain public organizations, such as the government press office [GPO] and others). 21 The Local Office At the time of my observations, there were two pictures editors at the local office sharing a morning shift (8:30–14:00) and an evening shift (14:30–20:00). The morning editor was in charge of dealing with events occurring during the early morning hours and the evening editor for those occurring late at night (the editors could also work from home, where each had an agency computer at her disposal). Both editors would carry pagers and Mirs devices and were constantly updated with the recent events. They would share information on the events of the day and on those planned for the next one when handing their shift to their fellow editor. And during major events, or whenever there was a lot of work to be done in a single shift, they would both be present at the office and help each other. On her way to work and in the office, the editor would listen to the news flashes on the radio (in Israel, those are aired by the hour), browse

The Production Process I  71 through various news websites, and go over the morning papers (e.g., the local Haaretz, Maariv, and Yedioth Ahronoth, the Herald Tribune, and The Jerusalem Post) during her shift. Throughout the day, she would also peek at the TV diary, in case there were unfamiliar events planned for the day, and notify TV on pictures received from public organizations (e.g., the GPO). The different news events were uploaded on to the department’s computerized diary, where they were only mentioned schematically. In addition, the events of the day were described in the agency’s World Diary (operated as a website), where the events were presented in more detail, and both diaries were regularly browsed whenever an editor started her shift. The agency’s World Diary was received by the international desk in London, where information on all the daily events covered by the agency’s pictures operations worldwide was processed daily. 22 In the World Diary, which could be accessed from every computer using only a username and a personal password, the editor would browse over the different events in specific countries around the world, and information on new events was constantly updated. Most of the time, the editor coordinated the different photographers and dealt with events planned in advance. She updated the chief photographer on the different events if necessary and often made her own decision on who to send and where. The information on the different events was received via a number of communication channels such as e-mail, fax, or a pager device; in rare occasions, a photographer would notify the editor of an event without her knowing about it in advance (e.g., information that was often received from Palestinian photographers working in the West Bank or Gaza). During the day, most pictures were injected straight into the National FTP by the different photographers in the field; some were sent to the editor via e-mail. Then the chief photographer would be contacted, and he would then go over the pictures of the day using his laptop. The chief photographer would then select the best pictures of the day and notify the editor on which pictures she should work on during her shift. The decision on which pictures to send to the global pictures desk in Singapore and which to spike was taken by the chief, and he was also the one giving the instructions to the editors on what changes to make during the editing process in the office before the pictures were sent to Singapore. The selected pictures then went through a quick editing ­process (although the editor at the local office kept insisting she was only organizing the pictures rather than editing them) using ­Photoshop (mostly cropping and playing with the levels of colors if necessary). 23 If several pictures with no captions were received, similar ones from the past were immediately traced and their captions were copied (e.g.,  ­pictures of ­Gilad Shalit [the Israeli soldier who was captured by Hamas militants in 2006 and was held captive until his release in 2011],

72  The Production Process I whereby there was no need to change their caption). In other cases, a new caption was then created that was based on a written story on the event from Text, information given by the photographer in the field, or both. In such eventualities, the editor would usually stick to the department’s set of regulations and copy the second sentence of the caption from the first sentence of the story written by Text. In addition, the terminology used in the caption (e.g., names) would be similar to the one used in the Text’s story. 24 Whenever pictures with captions were received by the desk, the editor would enter the internal FTP and go over their spelling with the help of Babylon. During an interview with a local agency pictures editor, she told me how usually she already knows what happened at the scene of events, in which cases she would simply read about the event on the web. However, sometimes she would ask the photographer to describe in detail what exactly happened at the scene. Unlike with photographers, who found it crucial to being present at the scene of events during the editing process (that which sometimes was also the cause of certain conflicts between, for example, a photographer and a distant editor), things were seen rather differently from the local office. Here, the office editor did not feel it necessary to be present at the event in order to write the most accurate caption; a photographer’s description from the scene of events or finding out about an event with other means of information were found sufficient to the editor so she would feel confident about her caption’s level of accuracy. Thus, the fact that the editor is absent from the scene of events and yet is taken by her superiors as capable of writing the captions (as a perfectly expectable norm maintained in the office) places the editor in a greater imaginative sphere whereby the presence of some of its members is acknowledged even when they are physically absent from the scene of events. And it therefore allows for the daily routine of Pictures to go through with no interruptions, even when the editor is not physically ‘there’, at the scene, to witness (Giddens, 1991). Being able to write ‘good’ captions without having to physically witness the events, from the local editor’s point of view, can also be explained by loading the reading experience of an event’s visual representation ­(looking at a picture) with a similar testimonial value of the physical experience of one (in which case, the editor would have ­witnessed it with her own eyes by being physically present at the scene. See Ellis, 2000. Peters (2001) describes a similar experience with his “presence-at-a-distance” [p. 717]). Two forces of experience are in play here: The editor is not ‘there’ and therefore cannot testify in first hand to the event itself (given the norm of her profession as a journalist). Yet at the same time, she is very much present, she had witnessed the event’s visual ­representation (picture), and therefore, to her view, the verbal captioning of the event is valid. This play between two forms of experience eventually allows the editor to stick to the classic ethical codes of

The Production Process I  73 professional journalistic objectivity, where facts represent the true nature of things, even when she was not there to experience. Hence, she can caption the pictures while relying only on their pictorial elements, having her journalistic values intact: These pictures, to her view, are not simply representatives of real events. Rather, they express a pure reflection of things as they truly are (Schudson, 1989; Schwartz, 1999). Editors’ level of English was also important. An editor with excellent English skills could work on captions easily and substantially improve the workflow in the office. On the other hand, an editor with ‘poor’ English skills might slow things down. A senior pictures editor at the local office, for example, described to me during an interview how it is far easier to communicate in English in the office (with bosses, reading mails, etc.). She mentioned how, when she was looking for editors to hire, she will not have someone on the desk that needs to use Morfix [a popular Hebrew-English dictionary website used in Israel] or, for that matter, people who cannot think in English, since this can affect the daily flow. Unlike how things are done in TV, she continued, whereby one of the most important things is to send stuff away as quickly as possible, in Pictures even the smallest thing such as a typo, particularly in captions, can be a disaster, and so these things are taken very seriously in the department. 25 Sometimes the editor sent pictures she had selected herself (e.g., whenever the chief was busy covering an event and did not have time to look at the pictures of the day); the best pictures, as seen by a senior pictures editor that I interviewed, were those that capture a moment and that have an element of composition in it. Sometimes the editor also sent pictures straight away, without putting any work to them, whenever these were taken by the more experienced photographers (whom, apparently, were blindly trusted by the editor at the local office), particularly at times when she had more important things to deal with in the office; although whenever a picture was taken by a less experienced photographer, she would wait for the chief’s decision. When the edit/caption process was complete, the pictures were sent by the editor to Singapore via Photo Mechanic – a browsing software that allowed the editors to browse over pictures flowing in through the FTP, add captions, and store the finalized pictures, all via the same i­nterface (Photo Mechanic was also used in Singapore by some of the editors, as they downloaded the pictures). During the sending process, the editor also checked to see if the pictures arrived at the global pictures desk in Singapore by chatting online with Singaporean editors, who also ­double-checked pictures’ details. Apart from dealing with pictures, there was also plenty of administrative work that was handled by the editor (e.g., going over photographers’ mobile phone invoices or making hotel reservations for photographers who had to spend the night closer to a scene of events). The editor also

74  The Production Process I dealt with local photographers’ broken equipment and warranties; purchased new gear; handled paychecks; and managed the allocation of the department’s vehicles. She was also the one solving any potential delays, say whenever a photographer was being held at an army barrier, and would negotiate between the different authorities in order to allow a photographer to get to a scene. It was also the local editor’s job to maintain contact with outside institutions and public organizations, such as military officers or soldiers from the Spokesperson unit; often, a good relationship with such sources would make all the difference to photographers in the field. Whenever a picture was sent to Singapore, the editor checked to see the pictures on the World FTP; they appeared alongside the agency’s pictures from around the world after they were edited at the global pictures desk in Singapore and were then sent to clients. Then she would start working on the production of a new idea. So, the process of picture production has unique circular-linear structures (and the process also performs as an open circle that interacts with external circles of production). The ‘local’ sites of production form an arena in which social power and control are constantly struggled over. And the production of news pictures is also shaped by functional issues and technical aspects dictated by the agency’s need for routine. What is more, in order to cope with the requirements of international markets, when the company’s products must combine international appeal and yet to be tailored to the particular needs of local clients, glocal mechanisms are also important. And the audience plays a key role as well. These unique features of production are reflected not only in the ­‘local’ levels, but also along its ‘international’ stages, where pictures are eventually published by the agency’s clients and gathered back by the agency as data to improve future processes – from product to story.

Notes 1 The choice to analyze the process in a rather linear structure (from story to product) does not imply, in any way, there is a supremacy of a linear form here in any way. Rather, it is presented to the reader as such for two main reasons: The first is due to the limitations of space, forcing me to focus on certain aspects of the process while ignoring others. The second reason is because, during my observations, I myself have witnessed the process at its linear stages. And as much as I was struck by its linearity, it was taken as such by the various position holders whom I had followed. So, it seemed only right to ‘stick’ to the process as it was perceived by the various pictures practitioners I accompanied. 2 To be clear, the Story here does not imply in any way throughout the process’ analysis that it is a significant site of production per se. Rather, it is a term that was frequently used by photographers, editors, and other personnel along the production routine. In fact, the agency’s news pictures were described to me more than once by its pictures professionals as “pictures telling the stories of the events”, having news pictures treated as stories and

The Production Process I  75 vice versa. As a result, this unique form of storytelling in its photographic form, as discussed on various moments in this project, draws from the idea of photojournalism as narrative, professional photography as a narrative media, and news as a form of storytelling. And so the news pictures that are at the focus of this exploration will therefore express two levels of storytelling: pictures telling the story of news, and news telling stories with the help of photography (see, e.g., Tuchman, 1976; Evans, 1997. See also an additional discussion in Chapter 4, fourth event). 3 Based on the Disengagement Plan enacted in August 2005, all Israeli settlers were evicted from the Gaza Strip and from four settlements in the northern West Bank. The Disengagement plan was considered one of the biggest international news events of the year, and the fact that the photographer was grounded and not allowed to cover the event made him feel it was personal regardless of his skills. A few years after I completed my observations, the photographer was facing yet another inside conflict with one of the department’s editors (who became a senior editor in the Jerusalem bureau later on), which eventually led to his resignation in 2010. 4 Occasionally, photographers were shifted around. In 2010, for example, there were five photographers working in Gaza, one in Ramallah, one in Nablus, three in Jerusalem, and one in Tel-Aviv. The photographers in Hebron and Kalkilia, however, were found redundant. The photographer in Ramallah was fired and the one in Jenin replaced him, so there were no agency photographers in Jenin at all. The shifting of photographers also varies according to the different events; where there is a developing news story to cover, there will be an agency photographer allocated for that particular region. 5 The agencies also use the services of stringers. More on this later in this chapter on the work of picture editors under “The Product” section. 6 A Mirs device was a mobile phone that could also be used as a handheld transceiver with a powerful speaker phone. At the time of my observations, this was the easiest way to communicate with photographers on the ground. 7 See GPO (2016, November 24) for the set of rules and regulations regarding press cards in Israel. 8 At the time of my observations, some of these organizations were not legal and so did not require any official authorization at all (e.g., Hazala Yesha, which, apparently, was operated by an ambulance driver). 9 Journalists were required to be personally cleared in order to subscribe to the services of certain messaging groups. Yet the actual pager device, however, could easily change hands and could therefore be used by a number of journalists working for the same organization, even if they were not personally cleared by the authorities. 10 Robertson (1995) referred in his seminal paper to the problem that is ­globalization – a concept which, to his view, was mistakenly assumed in the past as a “process which overrides locality” (p. 26), having also the global-­ local problematic often discussed in terms of a certain polarity. Instead, suggested Robertson, the very notion of globalization should not only involve the linking of locality, but rather the very invention of it, thereby declaring glocalization as the global condition. At the same time, however, Robertson also discussed the idea of glocalization as that which is used strategically by enterprises seeking global markets – the “tailoring and advertising of goods and services on a global or near-global basis to increasingly differentiated local and particular markets” (p. 28). This side of glocalization was developed even further later on, with the conceptualization of grobalization, namely the need of powerful institutions to seeing their power, influence, and profits grow (See Ritzer, 2003. My idea of glocalization as it is

76  The Production Process I

11 12 13 14

15 16 17

18

19

20

expressed in the agency’s production processes of news pictures henceforth lies on both its forms: It is a sophisticated business strategy aimed at tailoring the agency’s pictorial services to local markets so as to increase profits and broaden its circle of clients. But, on a deeper level, it is also that which affects the very structure and process of the agency, and that of international news providers at large (for a useful theoretical discussion on glocalization, see also ­Roudometof, 2016, 2015). Schudson (1978) discusses this strive for objectivity in journalistic practice in early 20th century. See my analysis in Chapter 4, first event, for a broader discussion on this divide. Nowadays agency photographers’ judgment is even more limited. I talk more about this in my concluding chapter. In the digital era, the editing tools available in Photoshop are similar to what Barthes (1977) describes as “trick effects” (p. 21). However, in this case, they are not seen by the photographer as a way of hiding a connoted reality behind the objective mask of denotation. Rather, they are seen so as to ‘embrace’ the photograph’s objective status. Now that the image requires a verbal description, a change of structures is formed. For the description signifies “[…] something different to what is shown” (Barthes, 1977, p. 19). See a broader discussion on this in Chapter 4, second event. After several incidents, a decision was taken by the upper management that all of the agency’s photographers would send their pictures to their local bureaus first in order to avoid future alterations and enforce extra filtering mechanisms for the agency’s pictures before they are sent to clients. Gregory (1983) discusses a similar tension between various occupational communities in the organization. In the days to come, arrangements have been made to move the local bureau in Jerusalem to a different spot. In the new office, all departments are now sharing one big space. At the time of my observations, the formal title of the picture editors in the office was “Editors, picture desk”, although, in reality, they were described to me as having to deal with very little editing. In fact, the photographers in the field described the work of the so-called editors as similar to production and therefore saw them more as “picture producers”. This comes to demonstrate how job descriptions and formal titles serve as nodes of power whereby organizational status is struggled over. Here, to the eyes of photographers, editing is considered a highly powerful process and an essential part of their own daily routine, which also serves as that which earns them a ­relatively high status in the office (they are, to that end, key players in the overall production routine and along the department’s key crossings of decision making). After my observations were complete, one of the more experienced editors in the office insisted on having, and finally received, a “Senior photo editor” title, which earned her a slightly higher status than the other editors in the department. Nonetheless, since “editors” was the term used by the practitioners themselves, and indeed was formally used by the department, it is similarly used in my analysis. Feeds are raw video news footage of different stories that were covered by the agency’s TV personnel from around the world that are received by the agency’s TV and web clients, where they are edited and eventually aired by local TV news outlets and websites. Feeds range from about 30 seconds to a few minutes long; they are received in a package with an English script attached, together with a shot list and a story line. To the eyes of

The Production Process I  77

21 22 23

24 25

the agency’s TV producers, however, feeds are seen as news items on their own right, and often it was not received well whenever I addressed them as simply ‘rough cuts’. More on the process in which certain regions are restricted from distribution in Chapter 3. See my discussion on the international desk in Chapter 3. Once my observations were complete in Israel, photographers were encouraged to do as little editing as possible in the field. In many cases, so I was told, editing pictures on Photoshop appeared to be very hard to execute in the field since laptops’ screens that were used by the photographers were not in great shape, but also since there are constant changes in lighting at the different scenes and this affects editing. The new Apple screens in the Jerusalem bureau were apparently calibrated with the ones in Singapore, and so the editing was absorbed more and more as part of the editors’ daily work, both in the local office and in the Singapore global pictures desk, and became less the responsibility of photographers in the field. Even though it was barely used in the Jerusalem department at the time of my observations, the agency had been pushing its new Paneikon to be used in the field daily, allowing photographers to send their pictures faster without using any editing at all (more on Paneikon in Chapter 3). Later on, captions would receive a tagged title – a slug (e.g., a violent event between Israelis and Palestinians would appear as Palestinians/Israel/ violence). In TV, so I was told, it is, in a way, preferred that producers acquire different nationalities and have different accents, perhaps in order to add a certain international ‘scent’ to the agency. Still, good English skills are mandatory. In the Jerusalem department, most of the Palestinian photographers communicate with the editors in English as well.

References Barthes, R. (1984). Camera Lucida: Reflections on photography. London: Fontana. Barthes, R. (1977). The photographic message. In S. Heath (Ed.), Image, music, text (pp. 15–31). New York, NY: Hill and Wang. Bazin, A. (1967). The ontology of the photograph. In H. Gray (Ed.), What is cinema? (vol. 1, pp. 9–16). Berkeley: University of California Press. Berger, J. (1972). Ways of seeing. Harmondsworth: Penguin. Berkowitz, D. (2000). Doing double duty: Paradigm repair and the Princess Diana what-a-story. Journalism, 1(2), 125–143. Bock, M. A. (2008). Together in the scrum: Practice news photography for television, print, and broadband. Visual Communication Quarterly, 15(3), 169–179. Bourdieu, P. (1993). The field of cultural production: Essays on art and literature. Cambridge: Polity Press. Bourdieu, P. (1986). Distinction: A social critique of the judgment of taste. London: Routledge. Boyer, D. (2013). The life informatic: Newsmaking in the digital era. Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press. Bruns, A. (2008). Blogs, Wikipedia, second life and beyond: From production to produsage. New York, NY: Peter Lang.

78  The Production Process I Carey, J. W. (1989). A cultural approach to communication. In Communication as culture: Essays on media and society (pp. 13–36). London: Unwin Hyman. Curran, J. & Seaton, J. (2003). Power without responsibility. London: Routledge. Defoore, J. (2005). Reinventing the wires: How Getty images is shaking up the wire service business, and what AP and Reuters are doing in response. PDN. Retrieved from http://corporate.gettyimages.com/en-us/media/highlightfiles/ pdn_jan2005.pdf Ellis, J. (2000). Seeing things: Television in the age of uncertainty. London: I. B Tauris. Evans, H. (1997). Pictures on a page: Photo-journalism, graphics and picture editing. London: Pimlico. Frosh, P. (2003). The image factory: Consumer culture, photography and the visual content industry. London and New York, NY: Berg. Frosh, P. (2000). The image factory: Stock photography, cultural production and the image-repertoire (Unpublished doctoral dissertation). Hebrew ­University, Jerusalem. Galtung, J. & Ruge, M. H. (1965). The structure of foreign news: The presentation of the Congo, Cuba and Cyprus crises in four Norwegian newspapers. Journal of Peace Research, 2(1), 64–90. Gans, H. (1979). Deciding what’s news: A study of CBS evening news, NBC nightly news, Newsweek and Time. New York, NY: Pantheon Books. Giddens, A. (1991). Modernity and self-identity: Self and society in the late modern age. Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press. Goodman, G. & Boudana, S. (2016). The language of objectivity: Reuters’ internal editorial discussions on terminology in the Arab-Israeli conflict, 1967–1982. Journalism, 1–17. GPO (2016, November 24). Rules regarding cards for foreign media journalists, press technicians and media assistants. Israeli GPO. Retrieved from http:// gpoeng.gov.il/media/53955/rules-for-foreign-media-b160216.pdf Gregory, K. (1983). Native view paradigms: Multiple cultures and culture ­conflicts in organizations. Administrative Science Quarterly, 28(3), 359–376. Gürsel, Z. D. (2016). Image brokers: Visualizing world news in the age of digital circulation. Oakland: University of California Press. Hadland, A., Campbell, D. & Lambert, P. (2015). The state of news photography: The lives and livelihoods of photojournalists in the digital age. Oxford: Reuters Institute for the Study of Journalism. Harcup, T. & O’neill, D. (2001). What is news? Galtung and Ruge revisited. Journalism Studies, 2(2), 261–280. Jarvis, J. (2006, July 5). Networked journalism. Buzz Machine (blog). Retrieved from https://buzzmachine.com/2006/07/05/networked-journalism/. Lehman-Wilzig, S. N. & Seletzky, M. (2010). Hard news, soft news, ‘general’ news: The necessity and utility of an intermediate classification. Journalism, 11(1), 37–56. Liebes, T. (1992). Our war/their war: Comparing the Intifada and the Gulf war on US and Israeli television. Critical Studies in Mass Communication, 9(1), 44–55. Lutz, C. A. & Collins, J. L. (1993). Reading national geographic. Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press.

The Production Process I  79 Mäenpää, J. (2014). Rethinking photojournalism: The changing work practices and professionalism of photojournalists in the digital age. Nordicom Review, 35(2), 91–104. Mitchell, W. J. (1992). The reconfigured eye: Visual truth in the post photographic era. Cambridge, MA: The MIT Press. Nossek, H. (2004). Our news and their news: The role of national identity in the coverage of foreign news. Journalism, 5(3), 343–368. Peters, J. D. (2001). Witnessing. Media, Culture and Society, 23(6), 707–723. Ritchin, F. (1999). In our own image. New York, NY: Aperture. Ritzer, G. (2003). Rethinking globalization: Glocalization/grobalization and something/nothing. Sociological Theory, 21(3), 194–209. Robertson, R. (1995). Glocalization: Time-space and homogeneity-­heterogeneity. In M. Featherstone, S. Lash & R. Robertson (Eds.), Global moderrnities (pp. 25–44). London: Sage Publications. Robins, K. (1995). Will image move us still? In M. Lister (Ed.), The photographic image in digital culture (pp. 29–49). London and New York, NY: Routledge. Rosenblum, B. (1978). Photographers at work: A sociology of photographic styles. New York, NY: Holmes and Meier. Roudometof, V. (2016). Theorizing glocalization: Three interpretations. ­European Journal of Social Theory, 19(3), 391–408. Roudometof, V. (2015). Mapping the glocal turn: Literature streams, scholarship clusters and debates. Glocalism: Journal of Culture, Politics and Innovation, 1(3), 1–21. Ryan, B. (1992). Making capital from culture: The corporate form of capitalist cultural production. New York, NY: Walter de Gruyter. Schudson, M. (1989). The sociology of news production. Media, Culture & Society, 11, 263–282. Schudson, M. (1978). Discovering the news: A social history of American newspapers. New York, NY: Basic Books. Schwartz, D. (1999). Objective representation: Photographs as facts. In B. Brennen & H. Hardt (Eds.), Picturing the past: Media, history and photography (pp. 158–181). Chicago: Illinois, University Press. Sontag, S. (1979). On photography. New York, NY: Dell. Tuchman, G. (1991). Media institutions: Qualitative methods in the study of news. In K. B. Jensen & N. W. Jankowski (Eds.), A handbook of qualitative methodologies for mass communication research (pp. 79–92). London: Routledge. Tuchman, G. (1976). Telling stories. Journal of Communication, 26, 93–97. Tuchman, G. (1973). Making news by doing work: Routinizing the unexpected. American Journal of Sociology, 79(1), 110–131. Zandberg, E. & Neiger, M. (2005). Between the nation and the profession: Journalists as members of contradicting communities. Media, Culture and Society, 27(1), 131–141.

3 The Production Process II From Product to Story

Final Stop (I): The Global Pictures Desk in Singapore and Sales From an earthquake in Haiti to the Golden Globe ceremony in Los ­A ngeles, from a fashion show in Paris to explosions in Kabul, greetings from the agency’s global pictures desk in Singapore. Once the ­pictures were processed in local picture desks by editors, or sometimes by ­photographers in the field, most of the agency’s pictures ended up here before they were distributed to worldwide clients.1 The global desk had only been fully operational since 2005 (although a smaller version of it was operating since the 1990s and was in charge of Asia after the Hong Kong desk was handed over to China, with ­a nother desk operating in Washington and the main hub located in London). The idea for a three-desk structure was meant to bridge the time zone gap and was based on the main agency’s ­organizational structure, but this was also possible because during the 1990s the daily volume of pictures was relatively low. With the digital era, ­however, things have changed, since, as I was told by the  deputy editor at the global pictures desk, e­ verybody started to shoot like crazy with the emergence of large-­c apacity memory cards (Figure 3.1). Soon the London desk was unable to handle the huge flood of pictures and lots of good pictures were lost (pictures, remembered the desk’s deputy editor, were spiked because these were busy times, and this was hurting the company badly, since some of these pictures were apparently really exceptional). Singapore was attractive because of the low-cost staffing and maintenance, English as a spoken language, and a highly educated workforce, and the three desks were finally ­absorbed into one global pictures desk which became fully operational in 2005; the funeral of Pope John Paul II on April was the first big event successfully handled by the desk. Paying less, speaking English, and overcoming time differences, the decision to place the global picture hub in Singapore is an example of glocal mechanisms required from an international organization to cope with

The Production Process II  81 Global pictures desk

Europe East

Europe West

Middle East & Africa

Americas (Canada, US and South America)

UKI (UK and Ireland)

Asia

Local Bureau (e.g., Jerusalem)

Figure 3.1  T he agency’s pictures regional network, 2010. All pictures were sent to the global pictures desk in Singapore apart from those taken in Germany, Austria, and Switzerland; these were sent to the Western Europe pictures desk placed in Berlin during day time.

the demands set by an international market. At the same time, this also puts the agency’s organizational structure under the inevitable experience of what Robertson described as the “universalization of particularism and the particularization of universalism” (Robertson, 1992, p. 100). 2 Operating as the final stop for the traffic of the agency’s ­pictures ­before they were sent to clients, the global pictures desk was ­capable of handling a daily work flow of about 1,700 pictures (and up to 2,000 on a busy day); it worked around the clock. The desk was operated by several subs (subeditors), senior-sub-editors, and EICs ­(Editors- ­I n-Charge). In contrast with photographers in the field, there were many female editors on the desk, and it was managed by the desk’s deputy editor alongside the Asia editor, with ­additional ­pictures units (e.g., Magazine desk, the ­ raphics), all sharing the same open space alongside Keyword team, and G Asia’s TV and Text. The desk itself was not as big as one would think it would be, considering the number of pictures flowing in through its systems: Two broken lines close to one another consisted of four working stations each, with every station formed in a shape of an open cubical, having three subs and an EIC sitting back to back to additional three subs and a senior subeditor. In a similar linear structure were the stations of the desk’s editor-in-charge, his deputy, and that of the chief photographer of Asia  – all capable of observing their desk closely – sitting next to the administrator of the global desk as well. A few meters away was the Magazine desk with three work stations in a similar structure, in the corner the Keyword team of three, and nearby was Global Graphics (Figure 3.2).

82  The Production Process II

Figure 3.2  T  he global pictures desk, 2010.

All units were within shouting distance from one another and exchanged valuable information at all times. Despite the massive work flow, the daily routine on the desk was surprisingly pleasant, unlike a hectic news room. There was a calm working environment that was crucial for the daily routine here: Placed in a distant location and far from the scenes of events, the global editors worked in sterilized ­surroundings and were therefore capable of making the ‘right’ decisions. Unlike in the field, as I was told by the deputy editor, bombs are not flying around here, and a lot of thought was invested so as to make the environment on the desk as pleasant as possible so that the editors can focus on their job. The rationale behind this site of production was that good editors on the global desk should be detached from events. Yet it is their distant location that would often create tensions between the global editors and the photographers (e.g., whether the editors were indeed authorized to ‘work’ on pictures if they did not shoot them at all, or even change captions). Witnessing takes different forms at varying sites along the production line and constantly shifts between representation and experience whereby the pictures serve as testimonies of ongoing struggles between departments and personnel over different forms of power and control. 3 Then again, with so many pictures to deal with daily, no one here really had time to spare. With one-time plastic boxes flying in and out and fast food eaten in front of running pictures, there was reason to believe very few could actually ­remember what the indoor of the canteen looked like during lunch time. For an outside observer, this left little room for mistakes: This was the front line of an enormous factory, a magnificent machine in action.

The Production Process II  83 Right next to pictures was the TV desk. At times, it was useful to have access to raw footage to grab pictures from when there were no other pictures available, although this also worked in reverse (the first  ­pictures, it appeared, often came from TV). Communication ­b etween personnel was important, and although the technology on the desk was the most advanced available, it was not sufficient. Above the EIC station, for instance, were three computer screens with ­pictures running nonstop; these were sent to clients in the main regions. Each  screen showed ­pictures from a different region: one from Asia; one from EMEA ­­(Europe, the Middle East, and Africa); and one from the Americas. Given their location, they were constantly monitored by the editor-in-charge, who could immediately spot a transmission problem if a sent picture did not appear on one of the screens, and he could also make sure pictures were sent in the right colors. Behind the deputy editor was the “Japanese phone” (as it was ­described to me by the editors on the desk). Japan was the home country of one of the agency’s greatest pictures clients (given the high circulation and great volume of publication of the agency’s pictures by Japanese clients). Since many of the Japanese editors at the clients’ end did not speak English and their requests were not fully understood by the editors on the desk, it was decided to dedicate a specific phone-line to deal with requests from Japan, and the phone number was delivered to Japanese clients as their ‘customer service’ line; whenever it rang, Japanese speaking editors would take the call. Requests from Japan were still accepted on other telephone lines, and the “Japanese phone” was not taken too seriously, but could still cause a certain excitement on the desk whenever it rang. When the global pictures desk is fed back with valuable information (requests from Japanese clients) at particular moments of production, a circular structure is in play. And when an operational environment is tailored to the needs of particular regional clients (e.g., a special ­telephone set or specific language skills required from certain editors on the desk), production and consumption are entwined (Frosh, 2003b; Gürsel, 2012). The proximity of the editors was also important. Once an editor started working on a series of pictures, for example, he/she notified the senior subeditor so that no other editor would start working on the same series. Or, a photographer might have sent a picture to the desk and then realized he/she had misspelled a name in the caption or had gotten the story slightly wrong. The editor would then call the desk, and an editor receiving the call would ask his/her colleagues to “hold the picture”. While pictures were quick to fly by the editors on the global pictures desk, this caution could make the difference between a successful ­picture and a total fiasco (Figure 3.3).

84  The Production Process II

Figure 3.3  T  he “Japanese phone”.

The Global Pictures Desk Operating 24/7, the working flow of the pictures desk was divided into three shifts: the morning shift (7:00–15:00); the midday shift (15:00–23:00); and the night shift (23:00–7:00). Each shift was managed by one EIC, one senior editor, and several subs (two to three in the morning shift, three to four in midday, and five to six in the night shift considered the busiest). In a morning shift, about 100–300 pictures were running through the desk and were sent to clients, 300–500 in the midday shift, and about 600–900 in a night shift. A single subeditor handled approximately 100 pictures per day (and 150–200 during busy ones). About 40 editors operated the desk daily, and although shared ­between the members of a relatively big group and done on computers, the work here was extremely hard and was often physically demanding. So much so that during the busy night shifts, editors found themselves in a constant struggle to stay awake and worked under high pressure. A single editor usually worked five to seven nights every couple of weeks and was given some time to recover before his/her next morning shift (although with 1,000 pictures dealt with on busy nights, the deputy ­editor was having strong doubts as to how long they could run like this). The organization has to accommodate the extreme conditions of work. Given the high work volume, editors could not ‘close the shop’ for lunch and were advised to walk around and stretch their legs every once and a while. And while working on computers during an eight-hour shift, they were all sitting on ergonomic chairs bought especially for that reason and

The Production Process II  85 used new bigger Apple screens. Also, whenever there were preplanned big events to cover (e.g., the Winter Olympics or the World Cup Soccer Tournament), the editors were sent to help out and have a chance to meet some of the photographers in the field and thus gain a different perspective on the agency’s pictures production; this was also a nice way to break the editors’ demanding work routine a little. From the minute a picture was received, it went through a highly structured procedure: A picture not needing much work would fly in less than a minute from the second it was received by the desk. A problematic picture, however, might take an hour to work on or even more; it may require contacting a photographer who was not always available, and the picture was therefore tagged “untransmitted” so it was dealt with later on. All pictures were sent in the same JPEG format in two different sizes: An original received by the desk was sent directly to the agency archive and to several clients (mostly magazines and third parties as mediators selling in the name of the agency in countries with no agency sales representatives).4 A clone (and other clones thereafter) was sent to all other clients within a standard range of 2200×3500 and in the size of 700 kb. 5 Most of the work on the desk was done by subeditors, senior subeditors, and EICs, who operated a relatively simple process of traffic. And while EICs mainly monitored the operation and senior subeditors gave a hand, it was up to the subs to carry most of the weight on the desk.6 The Sub-editor Most of the pictures moved by the global desk were handled by subeditors, each working on approximately 100 pictures a day and up to 30,000 pictures a year. With such high volume, experience was acquired fast; subs were considered highly professional as they need to be, for one press of a button might turn the global desk from the company’s prestigious front line into a broken last line of defense. On a regular shift, a subeditor went over his/her emails, for sometimes pictures were sent by photographers via email when communication was bad, and received special requests from clients as well. He/she had the agency’s Kobra (the agency 3000x text) constantly at his/her service, in order to get updated with recent stories covered by Text, and an AOL screen in which the editor might contact photographers by chat if they were connected online. He/she used different software to get updated with already sent pictures (e.g., the Photomechanic that was used also by most of the photographers in the field, or the agency’s Media browser) and was constantly updated with new pictures flowing in via the MED (the Media Editor, also known as The File).7 And once a picture was stored on the PSED (Picture Stream Editor) software with its metadata filled and then sent from the field via the FTP (File Transfer Protocol), it immediately became ready for use on the global desk.8

86  The Production Process II Trying to improve the transmission time of pictures from the field to the desk, the agency’s Paneikon software was launched in 2005; it allowed photographers to transmit their pictures from their cameras directly to editors, who could be located miles away from the scene of events and yet work as if they were on site. The software was mostly used during big events when a high volume of pictures needed to be transmitted in a pressing time frame. In such eventualities, when both the photographer and the editor were logged into the system, once the pictures were taken by the photographer they were automatically transferred to the distant editor for minor corrections and then sent to Singapore or even directly to clients (a process known on the desk as Direct Inject) in a matter of minutes. Apparently, Paneikon gave the agency a huge advantage in big events over its competitors; when the agency’s editors already finished sending their pictures, as I was told by one of the desk’s EICs, editors from competing agencies were still looking for them. Even though it was ready to use for a number of years, it was still mostly used in big events (e.g., the winter games or the Olympics) and was first fully operational during the coverage of the 2006 Olympic Games in Beijing. Paneikon was also used during smaller events with high news value. Example: On one occasion in the past, heavy fighting had emerged in ­Kabul. Given the stressful situation, the agency photographer had to get in and out fast, shooting his pictures with little time to send them away. As this was a big news story, the desk in Singapore was asked to operate the Paneikon, and an available editor in Japan was immediately traced (since all the Singaporean editors were busy). Operating the ­Paneikon from his side, he was then able to receive the pictures in real time and send them away in a matter of minutes. Nonetheless, the software was still not used daily since it required two people to operate (a  photographer and an editor), while, during small events, many photographers usually shot and edited their pictures on their own. In addition, it ­required a very good internet connection, which is still not always available (although it was made clear to me the process would change in the very near future). The use of Paneikon substantially challenged the gaps that occurred in the past between the events, the transmission time of pictures, and editing processes. It allowed a detached editor to work on raw footage as if he was at the scene of events, who was capable of making corrections on real time accordingly without the pressure which often accompanies live coverage as well. It also solved the problem of intermediaries such as runners, who often needed to shuttle memory cards between photographers and on-site editors during big events, and therefore reduced costs. Developed by an ex-agency photographer and the agency’s North ­A merican news picture editor, the Paneikon (the name itself is a combination of the Greek eikona [image] and pagcosmios [global]) gave the agency an advantage over its competitors. Having a long history of technological innovations developed by the agency as the means

The Production Process II  87 of improving its processes of production, the Paneikon overcame the obstacles of time and place and was thus an important tool at the service of an international agency.9 Usually a subeditor started working on a number of pictures from series sent by a particular photographer, and then moved on to the next. Series contained between three (considered a very small set) and up to 60–70 pictures (an unacceptably large one), although in such rare cases, as I was told by one of the desk’s EICs, they would usually notify the chief photographer to tell the photographer to slow down, as sometimes they [the photographers] think the editors were working for them and did not understand how an international agency should work. Clearly, practitioners from different departments do not always share the same views, often since their daily job requires particular skills and they are dealing with varying pressures. When stories or routines require the combined force of different departments, tension may rise, turning a shared working environment into an arena in which members of two occupational communities fight over organizational status and different forms of power and control (Gregory, 1983. See also Bourdieu’s discussion on classes and classification in Bourdieu, 1986). The traffic process of pictures was relatively simple and highly ­structured: Once received by the desk, each picture was then cloned, checked for manipulated possibilities (often by using the Levels tool in Photoshop), and then corrected if necessary by checking Contrast, Shadow Highlight, Color Balance, Curves, Levels, Crops, Brightness, and Sharpen. The use of Photoshop was taken seriously here, and it was dealt with using special care, and the corrections process had little room for personal interpretation: Subeditors were strictly trained, and the agency’s guidelines for a proper use of Photoshop were published and constantly updated. The desk’s operations guide (2008) was authoritative and kept up to date. It supplied a new subeditor with instructions about the proper use of Photoshop and guided him/her through every step of the process (e.g., examples of bad use of Photoshop were also available within the operations guide, as were certain doctored pictures from the past) (Figure 3.4). Nonetheless, altered pictures were still received by the desk every once and a while. Occasionally these were received from national agencies or government offices, and the agency’s editors would often find themselves giving special attention to cloning, extra color corrections, a shadow going the wrong way, or even to several pictures that were pasted together.10 Editors were also well aware of legal issues a single picture might cause and carefully examined pictures arriving from ‘volatile’ regions such as the Middle East; pictures of commercial products were also carefully examined (e.g., logoed plastic bottles containing chemical materials in a picture, which were said to have been used for making a bomb). Occasionally, pictures sent by new stringers could also raise an editor’s suspicions, although, as a desk’s EIC told me during an

88  The Production Process II

Figure 3.4  A doctored picture recieved by the desk: So many sheep, which ones are cloned?

interview, this was usually a matter only of over-photoshopping so as to make a picture look better. This, he continued, was mainly since many different standards are acceptable out there, but what might look perfect to a certain stringer might look way over-­photoshopped on the agency’s global desk, in which case they would ask for the raw file and then fix it. To the eyes of stringer photographers and agency editors alike, the photographic truth is therefore based on particular individual/organizational ethical standards (see, e.g., Mäenpää, 2014).11 Usually badly photoshopped pictures taken by new stringers were spotted by the local chief photographer and dealt with on the spot, and it would take some time until a new stringer was authorized to send his/her pictures directly to Singapore (Figure 3.5). Special consideration was therefore given to pictures received by ­secondary sources if only to avoid an incident in which an altered ­picture would accidentally slip through and reach the client’s end, jeopardizing the prestigious agency’s brand. The agency’s photographers were therefore not only measured by the quality of their pictures, but also by their editing skills and ethical standards. Whenever a new photographer sent pictures, he/she first had to meet the agency’s editing considerations ­before they could join the circle of trust. Once the Transmit button was pressed, each picture was sent to clients and its mark on the MED changed from grey to a green dot. A red dot meant there was a problem with transmission (in which case another clone was sent to clients but changed from Original to ­Correction).

The Production Process II  89

Figure 3.5  M  ore doctored pictures: Two pictures made into one; Perfect lines, but what happened to the soldiers’ shadows?

All pictures were checked for restrictions and tagged accordingly. Thus, a picture sent from, say, an organization in China with the condition that it would not be circulated in China was tagged “China out”. ­Pictures that were sent to all clients, for example, were tagged as followed: ­Medwas (MED Washington), Medlon (MED London), XONL (the  agency’s ­online clients, e.g., Yahoo), Asia, AONL (Asia online), APC (European, Middle Eastern, and African countries), USA, Canada, SAM (South America), and Philip (clients in Philippines). Culturally Sensitive Pictures (these were tagged CSP) were often ­pictures the editor considered might be offensive (e.g., containing nudity), in which case their CSP tagging automatically left out the Middle East, the US, and all online clients from their circulation. The decision to tag a picture CSP was made by the subeditor and was based on his/her own judgment. Occasionally, some pictures fell within a certain ‘grey area’ whereby the editor asked for the advice of an EIC. During

90  The Production Process II the annual Australia Open tennis competition, for example, the picture of Jelena Docik, the Australian female professional tennis player, was received by the desk. Looking at the picture, the editor felt as if Jelena’s nipples were slightly showing through her shirt in a way which could, to her view, have been considered inappropriate to some clients, and based on her EIC’s second opinion, she decided to tag the picture as CSP. Wire services push different images to various parts of the world, and so one of their offers is deciding which part of their worldwide subscriber network would be interested in particular images (Gürsel, 2012). To that end, and in order to smooth the distribution process and tailor ­pictures to the particular needs of local clients (in this case ­preventing the ­distribution of potentially offensive pictures), the CSP category is a fascinating glocal mechanism at the moment of transmission: Such ­pictures are aimed at an international market and are yet tuned for the particular needs and possible limitations that are dictated by local ­markets and audiences. And they are also part of an elaborative technological infrastructure of distribution. In that sense, the CSP tag can be seen as the means of reinforcing existing communities and establishing ­contact (e.g., a business relationship between local organizations and an international agency) that is similar, in a way, to what Wellman defined as “global connectivity and local activity” (Wellman and Hampton, 1999, p. 651. See also Hampton and Wellman, 2002). Pictures’ captions were written according to strict rules and were primarily based on the traditional ‘what, who, when, where and why’. The second sentence was usually taken from the first sentence of the event’s story as it was written by the agency’s Text services (although, in some cases, editors would still go over the entire text story just to make sure the first sentence fit perfectly). Then ‘The agency’, ‘Country’, ‘Name of photographer’, and ‘Category’ were also added. Subeditors often surfed the web to verify names and facts in captions and favored Wikipedia and Google’s search engines for the task, as well as certain professional websites (e.g., IMDB for entertainment [International Movie Data Base] or Yahoo Sports for sport). Apparently in some cases it was very hard to verify a certain name or position, and editors did come across different errors from time to time. During the 2010 Golden Globe ceremony, for example, a picture of the famous actress Vera Farmiga hugging a man was sent to the desk with a caption stating that the guy next to her was her husband, Sebastian Roche. Trying to verify the names of figures using Wikipedia, and with the help of IMDB, the editor found out that Farmiga had in fact divorced Roche in 2005 (although under ­ “Sebastain Roche” in Wikipedia it says 2003) and that she had married Renn Hawkey, the man in the picture, in 2008. Wikipedia and Google serving as secondary sources of information were already recognized as to being essential tools for journalists and researchers (Lih, 2004). Wikipedia is the largest example of what is known

The Production Process II  91 as participatory journalism; it works as the means for “[...] engaging the news audience to participate in the process of rationalizing Web content, crafting the news and contributing knowledge in the media ecology” (Lih, 2004, p. 2. Italics in origin). Even though the dependability of its content was said to have improved, and parts of its editorial policy are strikingly similar to certain operational policies adopted by different news organizations, it still deserves special ­attention when discussed in the context of news-making, mainly since in a Wiki “[...] all users are potential users and editors” ­(Rafaeli, Hayat and Ariel, 2009, p. 51).12 Wikipedia allows anyone to add, change, or delete content on any of the (Wiki) articles. What is more, these are not reviewed by professional editors. Rather, their content is monitored by visitors, while only a few users (called bureaucrats and ­administrators) are privileged to suspend the editing of an article in case it was vandalized (Rafaeli et al., 2009). As such, its content was seen as a form of collective knowledge and was thus taken to be “dynamic, ­relational, and based on human action [...]”, depending on “[...] the situation and people involved rather than absolute truth or hard facts” (Von  Krogh, Kazou and Nonaka in Rafaeli et al., 2009, p. 53). A popular tool used by journalists, this form of knowledge building clearly raises challenges in terms of accuracy and balance in the daily routines of news-making, and even Wikipedians have already expressed their own concern on copying information into Wikipedia; some information is simply inaccurate (Rafaeli et al., 2009). In a sense, the routine use of Wikipedia by editors on the global pictures desk points yet once again to the process’ circular formation – the daily routines of production are fed with information that is distributed by certain populations, serving as its consumer audience (Wikipedians in this case). In turn, these populations would rely on news information while creating their new (Wiki) articles and/or reediting the information on existing ones (Lih, 2004). Significant unidentified figures in pictures could not be ignored; these were called unidentified guests or unidentified people. In such eventualities, editors went over stories of other agencies in order to verify specific details since, in many cases, competing agencies carry pictures from the same events. Spelling of captions was checked (often verified with the Chambers website) and kept in the British English style. Pictures that were sent from the US having captions in an American English style attached to them were left as such, mainly since, as I was told by one of the desk’s subeditors during an interview, some American clients ­apparently got a bit iffy if they saw a picture that was sent from the US and yet had a British style caption attached to it (I was also informed of cases whereby American editors sometimes wrote or corrected captions of pictures that were taken outside the US in American style, although in such cases they were immediately notified and so the desk stuck to its British spelling rules).

92  The Production Process II Produced as the means of attracting clients internationally, English is favored for captions, since most (but not all) of the agency’s pictures’ major clients are located in the West, where mass culture was already said to have been centered and that it “[...] always speaks ­English” (Hall in Maynard and Tian, 2004, p. 287). Yet even the use of the E ­ nglish ­language was sometimes a source of dispute on the desk, rather than consent, and an example of inner conflicts: On the global pictures desk, the English skills of Singaporean editors were met with the B ­ ritish ­English standards, and, occasionally, in conflict with the American ones. In fact, such conflicts become even more apparent, since, in order to cover the world, many of the agency’s employees come from non-­English speaking countries, having English as their second language, and are positioned in the agency’s local bureaus worldwide. Clearly, ­local professionals are extremely valuable to an international agency, for, as I discussed earlier, they would probably find it easier to travel, communicate, or simply make local relationships, etc.; this is usually very useful while trying to achieve a successful coverage of local events.13 At the same time, ­however, the English skills of many foreign professionals working for the agency are sometimes found not sufficient as required from a prestigious international news agency. So, whenever English skills were specifically required for a particular job (e.g., writing captions), photographers and editors whose English was found ‘poor’ were forced to send their captions to English speakers who then made the ‘necessary’ corrections. That is also the reason why new openings for the agency’s bureaus around the world (either in pictures, TV, or Text) quite often required certain language qualifications, and applicants had to be fluent both with English and the ‘local’ language.14 Thus, agency employees who were fluent both in English and in the languages of the regions they were positioned at (other languages are a plus) were important assets for the agency. A glocal condition is therefore manifested here in structure: Such language skills are required so as to meet the demands of a complex international market and are embedded deep within the organizational structures and daily routines, and are often the cause of inner c­ onflicts and dispute (British English vs. American). These demonstrate how the international news agency, along its moments and sites of production, serves as an arena in which cultural identity is constantly struggled over. Some pictures were accidentally sent to clients with a word misspelled in their captions or wrong names that were referred to different figures in the picture. Sometimes the editor noticed these errors while working on a picture. In other cases, however, a photographer might realize a mistake was made and contact the desk only after his/her picture was already sent to clients. Or, sometimes clients might notice a mistake was made in a picture that was already received from the agency. In such incidents, subeditors had to prepare particular templates and moved these

The Production Process II  93 quickly to clients. Whenever a caption error occurred, for example, a Caption correction template was then created by a subeditor (once a decision was taken by the EIC). Then the picture was added to the template with both the wrong caption and its correction attached to it and was sent back to clients, framed in a bright red. In rare cases, the agency might have to use a Picture kill template, whenever a picture was circulated by mistake to clients after it was already spiked by the agency. These rare Picture kill cases might come from viewers who did not wish their picture to be published, and they would contact the agency with a specific request to remove the picture from its files. Other cases might show up in the form of sensitive political or legal matters whereby company lawyers positioned in London and Paris would then have to deal with it under special circumstances. Once a Picture kill template was created, it included a caption stating the reasons for ‘killing’ the picture and a statement that the agency withdrew its rights over the picture and that it should be removed from all archives immediately; it was also framed in bright red (Figure 3.6). Once a request to kill a picture was received by the desk, all units were notified (the magazine desk, graphics, the online department, and third-party agents) in an attempt to identify the source of the picture as quickly as possible. In some cases, a demand for a picture kill might be received for a particular archived picture. Or, sometimes a picture whose distribution was based on a pool agreement of which the agency was excluded from was accidentally sent to the agency and was then circulated to clients. In such cases, the other larger agencies would ask the agency to kill the picture. Some pictures were regionally killed (e.g., a picture that was sent from Mexico with an instruction to leave ­Mexico out from its circulation [“Mexico out”]). These particular pictures were often received by the desk from various national agencies, in which case the agency would then send a Picture kill only to regional clients. ­Having pictures ‘killed’, they have thus acquired an additional status, that which places them within a symbolic ‘circle of life’. Such templates

Figure 3.6  T  he agency’s picture templates: Caption correction, Picture kill, and Highlights.

94  The Production Process II also demonstrate yet once again the extraordinary open circular structure that governs the entire process: between the audience of consumers, clients, and competing agencies. The Senior Subeditor At the time of my observations, most of the sub- and senior subeditors on the desk were originally from Singapore, and being part of the a­ gency’s global pictures service was their first position in the image industry. This worked out very well for the agency, primarily since the global desk was interested in young inexperienced employees who could easily be trained from the start. An EIC from the magazine desk explained this during an interview: It was perfectly OK if new personnel the agency was hiring did not have much of experience, said the EIC. Essentially, they were not looking for people with lots of prior image knowledge on the desk in the hope that they would acquire their opinions during their work on the desk, and these would be the agency’s opinions. At first, continued the  EIC, it is usually a shock, but slowly, slowly, the newcomers are taught from scratch and eventually turn into qualified editors – agency editors (Figure 3.7). And yet, some photography background did have its benefits. To begin, it would take a couple of years to become highly qualified for someone

Figure 3.7  E  ditors at work (Singapore, 2010).

The Production Process II  95 with no prior knowledge in photography, but an ex-photographer would learn the job in just a few months. Moreover, ex-photographers on the desk would probably communicate better with photographers in the field, knowing, for example, how annoying it is at times to chat with a distant editor while working on a caption at the scene of events. And they would also know that photographers might sometimes be working in highly dangerous conflict environments, and so it is best not to disturb them with questions on, say, color corrections or an unclear caption. In such cases, the more experienced editors usually handled the pictures. One of the desk’s senior subeditors, for example, described to me during an interview how, whenever a photographer was with the American army or in Afghanistan, and particularly whenever Middle East pictures were received by the desk, they usually assigned the more experienced editors to work on the pictures. She remembered, for instance, how, at the beginning, a new editor did not know what an RPG (a Rocket Propelled Grenade) meant. She started asking the photographer in the field all sorts of questions about the weapon, which made him rather furious. Here is a good illustration of what it means to be a professional editor at different departments, how moments of production reflect a struggle between occupational communities over status and control, and how these are constantly entwined with consuming practices (Gregory, 1983; Bourdieu, 1986): To the eyes of the magazine EIC, the perfect editors to hire on the desk are those with no prior professional knowledge in photography – tabula rasa. The rationale is that they would acquire their professional skills throughout extensive training until they are qualified to make editing decisions on their own. Yet these editors are highly ­experienced visual consumers (and often apply visual consumer practices in their daily editing routine) long before they were hired to work as picture editors on the global desk. Then, their new acquired skills are added to an already comprehensive and sophisticated set of consuming visual culture practices, putting their production and consumption practices simultaneously into work throughout their daily routines. ­Editors on the global desk that have prior ‘photographic experience’, on the other hand, are seen to be more ‘professional’, even though their daily work requires seeing rather than taking pictures, as if ex-professional photographers are better spectators than others. At the same time, and even though they all work together towards the same goal, a clear line is drawn between the work of editors and that of photographers, and strict borders are established that should not to be crossed (e.g., editors should not bother photographers with ‘silly’ questions). Senior subeditors started their shifts half an hour early, went over mails, and focused on the desk report left by the earlier shift. The main work in a senior sub’s shift was described to me as “fighting the grey dots”: While some pictures were quick to fly, others required more attention (e.g., having a problematic caption or needing several color

96  The Production Process II adjustments), and since the desk was designed to move all pictures in no longer than five minutes per picture, these were left for later and appeared as a grey dot on the main working screen. Once a problematic series was received by the desk, a single picture was usually sent to clients (this, as pointed to me by one of the desk’s senior subeditors, was simply in order to release the pressure from the photographers; apparently sometimes they were very nervous, and when they sent their pictures to the office, all they cared about was whether the pictures were sent to clients or not, while the editors were in fact those who saw the ‘bigger picture’) and the rest of the series was dealt with later on. Sometimes, several series were received by the desk at the same time, in which case a full set might be left behind, and the senior subeditor had to prioritize the work volume (Children and animals make nice pictures, continued the desk’s senior subeditor, yet certain pictures received by the global desk were more important than others, e.g., pictures flowing in from war zones). Some pictures are more important than others. Some positions are only about taking pictures (the photographers), while other professionals are privileged to see the bigger one (now the editors have the upper hand). During a shift, the senior subeditor also went over Top Pix (top ­pictures, more on these later on), got a sense of the dominant stories of the day, and made sure all subeditors were working only on one set each (see, e.g., Gürsel, 2016). Since senior editors had a broader scope of what came in, unlike subeditors who were often too busy moving pictures, they also monitored the traffic of new series flowing in, prioritized these by their perceived importance to the different subeditors, and checked to see that everything was under control. Occasionally, subs sometimes had tense relationships with certain photographers, and in such cases senior editors also helped calm things down and gave a hand in moving pictures as well. The overall output of the desk was monitored by the editor-in-charge. The Editor-In-Charge (EIC) Much like senior subs, EIC’s also started their shifts earlier so they could get a good sense of the big stories first. An EIC went over his/her mails from the last shift and focused on the last desk report; it summarized the number of pictures that were sent in a single shift and also the number of pictures that were spiked. An EIC then browsed through the Top Pix and the Supplemental Code Top Pix, looked at spikes, and from time to time, unspiked a good picture (although, as I was told by one of the desk’s EICs during an interview, this rarely happened). And he/she also entered the main File and went over the main stories of the day by simply flipping over the pictures that were sent during the earlier shift.

The Production Process II  97 In order to be constantly updated with the daily events, EICs also went over their favorite news websites (one EIC, who was originally from ­Germany, described to me, for example, how he personally preferred the Stern and Der Speigel since these were considered reliable news sources, but also since they are in German), watched the news on a small TV set at their stations (usually BBC World or CNN), and got familiar with the recent news stories of the world. In addition, the agency’s 3000x text software called Kobra was always open on one of the EIC’s screens, serving as one of their main Top News information sources over the recent stories that were delivered by the agency’s Text services. Many of the EICs were photographers in the past. Some have been working for the agency for more than 30 years, while others were originally from Singapore and had no, or very little, experience with photography. However, all EICs were considered highly professional and were capable of managing the entire work flow on the desk, even at its busiest moments. The EIC was on top of things: He/She had to make sure the system was operating like a clock, prioritized certain stories over others at times of pressure, spiked bad pictures, and made the call on whether or not certain pictures could be received badly in certain regions. One EIC ­described this process in detail: If it was a big news event, and even if it was not in great quality, said the EIC, then they would move the picture. However, they would not move a picture if it was too gory, too face on. In certain countries, for example, they clearly could not show nudity. Over all, he continued, they were trying not to censor pictures, but of course in certain cases they would avoid sending pictures to the masses and would not send certain pictures to online clients. All and all, the basic rule on the desk was that if a picture was really part of the bigger story and not too gory, then they would move it. In one occasion, for instance, I noticed a senior subeditor discussing with the EIC on whether to move a long shot picture of a pile of bodies of Haitian victims from the earthquake in Haiti (2010). Given its news importance and that it was judged not too gruesome, it was moved to Magazines, to the agency’s archive, South ­A merica, and Asia, yet it was restricted from the US and Canada. ­However, the prioritization of series was sometimes simply based on deadlines that had already passed (e.g., pictures received from Asia in the middle of a night shift, when deadlines had passed in Asia in Singapore time). Occasionally, the EIC also had to deal with various complaints received by the desk, for example, say, from furious sports fans. With the mushrooming of blogs and websites, sports fans nowadays are watching closely for online pictures (such is the case with Yahoo), and so, if a name was misspelled, they would often contact the agency’s customer service immediately and send a complaint form over the net. The agency distributes its pictures directly to clients, but its pictures are closely monitored by the audience of consumers, whose complaints are injected straight into future processes of production.

98  The Production Process II Unlike the case with senior editors and subs, EICs frequently came from outside Singapore. When their daily routine is examined, their origin and local news practices demonstrate glocality as manifested in both structure and process: To begin, the agency has its own career structure. Career opportunities are an incentive for employees to excel in their ­positions, so they would be potentially qualified for better positions with greater responsibility, and they are a good management technique for keeping personnel highly motivated. Opportunities help build an organizational hierarchy and a successful organizational pyramid whereby the best qualified employees would (hopefully) achieve the highest positions with greater responsibilities, as well as access to sensitive information and strategic decisions. They also help in preventing employees (often in sensitive positions) from ‘defecting’ to competing organizations. In international news organizations, such job opportunities become available at different countries and bureaus, turning the agency’s employees into potential organizational cosmopolitans, shifting between different countries in their ‘rise up the ladder’ (Tomlinson, 1999). To that end, such opportunities represent Appadurai’s (1996) dynamic model for the idea of the global economy and global cultural flows; they illustrate certain fundamental disjunctures between economy, culture, and politics with the specific case of Ethnoscape, when the landscape of persons who constitute the shifting world in which we live: tourists, immigrants, refugees, exiles, guest workers, and other moving groups and individuals, constitute an essential feature of the world and appear to affect the politics of (and between) nations to a hitherto unprecedented degree. (Appadurai, 1996, p. 33) Those ambitious agency employees, constantly aspiring to move to new bureaus around the world, also represent a popular global dilemma in which “[...] more persons and groups deal with the realities of having to move or the fantasies of wanting to move” (Appadurai, 1996, p. 34).15 Second, here again the daily demands set by the international news organization are met with local practices of news-making routine. On the global desk, for instance, it is expressed with the position of a ­G erman EIC in Singapore after applying for a position on the global pictures desk, at a distant location from his place of origin, where he was working at a ‘local’ site of production. As his position requires, he is then constantly updated with the current news stories: He relies on local/national platforms of information (German news websites), and at the same time he relies on the information updates received from international news broadcast channels (e.g., BBC world and CNN). He monitors the daily flow of pictures received from local bureaus to the global desk which

The Production Process II  99 then travel on to local and international clients, and at the same time pays special attention to sensitive pictures, having also the ability to restrict their distribution. During a 24-hour cycle, 30–50 of the best pictures of the day (an ­average of 10–15 per shift) – the cream of the crop as they were described to me by one EIC – were picked and categorized as Top Pix, with about 80–100 as Supplemental Code Top Pix.16 The decision on whether to Top Pix a picture or not was described to me as being based either on its high news value, its ‘visually captivating’ qualities, or both. The picture’s news value, however, is overreaching: An EIC told me during an interview, for example, how, if it was from the top of the news, it will be Top Pixed, regardless of whether the picture was not perfect, not powerful, or even in bad quality. Yet pictures with less news value but that could generate a certain emotional reaction by the spectator also went in. This means that although Top Pix were checked regularly by the EIC, who could un-tag some of them, the decision on whether to Top Pix a certain picture or not was mostly taken by the subor senior subeditors, which therefore left plenty of room for personal interpretation based on the editor’s personal interest and taste. And so, certain pictures were Top Pixed simply because they were seen to be visually captivating, regardless of their newsworthiness importance. What is it, to the eyes of editors, that makes a certain picture visually captivating? One senior editor explained to me during an interview, for example, how, by visually captivating she regards to those pictures that do not have a great news value but that are visually fantastic. She described, for instance, how she really liked silhouettes, sunsets, or animals, and that for a while she kept telling herself to stop Top Pixing silhouettes and sunsets simply because such pictures are very predictable. To her view, she concluded, a good Top Pix is a picture that made her go ‘wow!’ The editors’ background also plays an important part in this process. Thus, the deputy editor of the department, for example, told me during an interview how, in 30 years being a photographer, he only took one or two sunset pictures. Indeed, said the deputy, these pictures have a nice color to them, but photographers usually really need to have a very good reason to take such pictures in the first place.17 Editors on the desk were therefore told to see things in broader perspective, and their Top Pix selection was said to be based on the biggest stories of the day and, primarily, on the global pictures demand, since, on a global pictures desk, as pointed to me by the deputy editor, one has to think globally. He then demonstrated his view on things with an example: For an editor in Singapore, a picture of, say, an elephant on the street might not be an exciting event. Yet, pointed out the deputy editor, in the US and Europe, the only way an elephant can be seen is, perhaps, in the zoo. Global picture editors, he concluded, cannot have prejudgment and are required to be extremely flexible.

100  The Production Process II Both categories demonstrate a number of intersecting levels in terms of representation. To begin, the agency’s Top Pictures, as they are selected by a powerful international news agency, are extremely valuable representational texts of world occurrences as opposed to pictures distributed by the agency’s less powerful rivals. Then these very Top pictures can also be seen as having the highest representational value, as opposed ‘regular’ pictures distributed by the agency. Further, when assessed by their news value or visually captivating powers, it is the pictures’ newsworthiness which prevails; it becomes the key element throughout their process of selection, even when these are not ‘great’, not ‘visually powerful’, or perhaps even in ‘bad quality’. To that end, the level of newsworthiness is thus that which represents worldly ­occurrences the most. Finally, top pix are also selected given their profit potential; they require a ‘global appeal’ and the editors on the desk are therefore told to ‘think globally’ (yet why is it that an elephant walking on the street is globally appealing?). Their selection is therefore done mainly from the overall coverage of ‘big stories’ (which might appeal more to international clients). At the end, this results in the agency’s clients being given wider choice with the addition of ­Supplemental Top Pix as well, so as not to lose valuable searching time, as both ­categories – Tops and Supplementals – encapsulate the agency’s ‘best’ visual ­summary of world events. During Top pix’ process of selection, the photographer-editor struggle comes into play again: An ex-photographer editor often sees himself/ herself to be more experienced in selecting Top pix given his/her own personal experience. Unlike the need expressed by EICs earlier to hire editors with no prior knowledge in photography on the magazine desk (who are thus easier to turn into agency editors), editors here were in fact considered more professional if they had previous photographic experience whenever selection processes of Top Pix were at stake. What is more, this unique process of selection represents yet another moment in which production meets consumption, when visual consuming practices come into play at a critical moment of selection. Such is the case, for instance, when an editor described how she Top Pixed pictures simply because she favored them (sunsets and silhouettes, or simply pictures that made her go wow!) that might, at the same time, be rejected by a different editor simply because he/she favored others (is it not possible, for that matter, that the deputy editor who is an ex-photographer rarely Top Pixed pictures of sunsets simply because he disliked such pictures in the first place?). To that end, such consuming practices can easily be seen as the tools in the battle over power and control, considered now in the light of cultural taste. For those same consuming practices expressed in ‘assisting’ an editor to Top Pix certain pictures and another to reject them might represent higher or lower levels of cultural taste (in this case, an editor captivated by pictures of sunsets and silhouettes, and another

The Production Process II  101 who seemed to despise them) and that which separates between the masters and the commoners on the desk (Bourdieu, 1986). Editors were told to put aside their personal friendships while categorizing pictures, for good friends could sometimes take bad pictures and vice versa, and so detachment was found essential for a successful selection process. That was also the reason why only a small number of photographers were believed here to be able to edit their own pictures; photographers, pointed out the deputy editor to me once, carry with them the visuals, but also the smell, the sound, even their overall impression from the field, and therefore could be very wrong in their selections. News photographers are in constant dialogue with their surroundings and are thus highly alert; the photographic moment is far beyond that which is seen. Of course, photographers and editors alike are required to have the special needs of the agency’s clients in mind at all times as well. The Magazine Desk Editors on the magazine desk were working in an entirely different time frame, creating picture packages that were based on fresh or old ­pictures (or both) from the agency archive. And while most of the pictures received by the global desk were ‘good to go’, pictures on the magazine desk were carefully categorized (although sometimes this was done pretty quickly), selected for different packages and sent to clients via the agency’s sales representatives. For the work here was about trying to think what pictures could be reused and resold in the future, to bring ‘dead’ pictures back into commercial life (see, e.g., Gürsel’s discussion of a similar anticipatory process at AFP’s “Third Desk” in Gürsel, 2012, 2016. A similar process in the stock photography industry is discussed in Frosh, 2013). The magazine desk was originally set up to provide for the needs of magazines (the archive was in operation since 1995). At the time of my observations, however, its circle of clients was based primarily on news providers, with additional publishing companies (since the magazine market was becoming unstable) and also on magazines which aspired to increase their online presence. Those estimated changes in the pictures market had forced the editors at the agency’s archive to adjust and diversify its line of products, and some of the packages compiled on the desk, as I demonstrate later on, are clearly the result of such changes in the international commercial photo industry. Perhaps what is mostly striking in the archive’s daily production routines and constant business considerations, as the agency’s news pictures acquire additional meanings in their processes of archiving, is the fascinating relationship that is formed between the news pictures archive and the Stock business. Thus, much like stock images, news pictures can also be seen as to participate in what Frosh described as “[…] the

102  The Production Process II selective categorization and representation of reality” (Frosh, 2003b, p. 91). They are objects of classification: Their high realism value relies both on their particular context and specific visual content, turning their “indexical singularity” into “the basis of a type” (ibid, p. 92), much like the genre of documentary photographs. At the same time, however, they are also serving as agents of classification constantly involved in the categorization of objects and people around the world as a thing of nature having their testimonial powers in play (photos that are also news information), and are thus part of an “archival paradigm of visual representation” (Frosh, 2003b, p. 93. Italics in origin; Sekula, 2003). Now, when news pictures are seen both as agents and as objects, this points to an additional archiving structure, a general principal ‘above’ discourses similarly dual in nature that uses all photographs as its representatives; […] A generalized, inclusive archive, a shadow archive, that encompasses an entire social terrain while positioning individuals within that terrain. This archive contains subordinate, territorialized archives: archives whose semantic interdependence is normally obscured by the ‘coherence’ and ‘mutual exclusivity’ of the social groups registered within each. (Sekula, 1986, p. 10. Italics in origin) As objects of classification, pointed Frosh, photographs are “[…] created for and/or stored in actually existing archives[…]”, and as agents of classification “[…] they are produced according to the archival p ­ aradigm of various social institutions and discourses (the state, medicine, social ­science, geographical research, etc.) by which the natural and social worlds are mapped and ordered” (Frosh, 2003b, pp. 95–96. Italics in origin). Particular photographic archives, such as the agency’s, are therefore “[…] ‘contained’ by the general, epochal and epistemic archive that organizes the knowledge and representational practices of ‘an entire social terrain’” (ibid, pp. 95–96). When photographs are placed in the catalogue of a commercial ­archive, they are no longer ‘unique originals of experience’. Rather, they are part of a group of generically equivalent visual forms only to become an exchangeable commodity available for purchase and evaluation, “like goods in a market place” (Frosh, 2003b, pp. 95–96; Sekula, 2003; Leong,  2009). Once archived, news pictures ‘experience’ a similar ­process, as they become ‘genetically transformed’ (but not entirely), they are reprogrammed only to acquire additional meanings (although not necessarily on the account of their already existing ones) when positioned in a new and thus additional system of classification (now they are also specifically part of the agency archive). Then their photographic

The Production Process II  103 meaning becomes “liberated” (and yet ‘lost’), for they are decontextualized and can therefore be reused and thus resold time and time again (Sekula, 2003, pp. 444–445; Frosh, 2013). But there is, however, one important difference to point out in this particular process: Thus, most stock images, as already pointed by Frosh, are produced specifically in order to strip them of their original and thus privileged status once they are archived, thereby losing their singular, particular “sensuous existence of phenomena” early in the processes of production (Frosh, 2003b, p. 97). They are produced, in other words, for an already existing system of classification (e.g., a stock picture of a romantic couple designed in advance for the category of Romantic Couples in a stock archive). News pictures in an archive, on the other hand, are grouped not necessarily as the means of draining them from their singular status, but rather, to an extent, to glorify it. For it is their singular, ‘one of a kind’ newsy status that loads them with their extraordinary value and that which separates them from all other images.18 Finally, once these extraordinary pictures are carefully placed in the archive of a powerful international news organization targeted at an international market, the agency’s archived news pictures serve as a collection of the world’s ‘perfect’ reflections (since these are news pictures and are therefore designed to ‘reflect’ the real world. And they are also part of a prestigious international news agency’s line of products and therefore acquire an even higher value) and the agency archive as that which accurately catalogues the “ensemble of reflections” (Sekula, 2003, p. 446). It is at that point that they acquire a two-headed set of performances: one of an extraordinary singular experience (a visual evidence of news events that occurred once and will never occur again) and yet one that is, to an extent, also similar to other generic visual forms (they are now archived together with other pictures on the basis of an abstract visual equivalence). It is, in other words, an extraordinary collision between the particular and the universal, singularity and multiplicity, the local at the service of the international. And it is that very set that renders these pictures easy for distribution to specific markets and clients worldwide, as they can constantly transform according to the particular needs of their new owners (see, e.g., the discussion on photography and repetition in Leong, 2009). The magazine desk was operated by six editors in Singapore and two in Paris, and most of its daily production volume was done in the Singaporean desk in five to six shifts from 9:00 to 18:00. At the time of my observations, Paris was the most influential center for magazine publications; it had a large agency sales team and a senior pictures manager, and it was mostly used to monitor the process in France from up close. The Paris magazine team was also in charge of selecting Top Pix; some of the selected Top Pix were chosen for the agency’s ‘Best of the month’ and ‘Best in the last 24 hours’ during weekdays and appeared

104  The Production Process II on the agency’s pictures website (during weekends these were selected in ­Singapore). Given the time difference, the Paris desk also helped in monitoring the work of Singapore’s junior staff during the night. The decision to position the desk’s main operations in Singapore was mainly an issue of funding, since it was far cheaper to staff here than it was in Paris, although the high proximity to the global pictures desk was also an important factor: It allowed magazine editors in Singapore to ask for, and easily receive, pictures from the global desk itself and even to have direct communication with photographers, for instance, whereas in Paris this would have been more complicated to execute. Editors on the magazine desk reacted to breaking news and worked on instant packages. Those were often considered the easiest of packages to compile, since hard news items tend to die quickly and their stories often carry a clear beginning, middle, and an end (e.g., a number of pictures received by the global desk from a movie premier, which would easily turn into a nice package containing key pictures from the premier itself). Although, events spread over a number of days or having too many ‘similar’ pictures to choose from clearly took longer to package. Most of the time, however, magazine editors worked on longtime packages and themed packages such as “Animals in snow”, whereby the editors went back into the archive and selected the most appropriate pictures for each package. A strong line connects between a form of storytelling and the process of compiling picture packages, that which expresses photojournalism as a form of narrative and professional photography as a narrative media (see Tuchman, 1976; Evans, 1997): The packaging pictures process resembles, to an extent, the story-making process, with a clear beginning, middle, and an end. In that sense, editors on the desk are capable of weaving stories not only by selecting pictures from events, but also by grouping them together as part of a package that serves as a narrative form in itself. Single events could be represented by multiple pictures under many different categories in the archive, and therefore a reading of a single story might invite ­multiple viewpoints, placing vision “beyond the individual” (Leong, 2009, p. 261).19 This clearly made archived pictures more ‘easily digested’ by international clients and, in turn, more appealing for an international market. 20 The magazine desk dealt with about 300 projects daily; some were quickly compiled, and some were slowly created over time. These projects were divided into two main categories: Some were decided on the spot and others were dealt with for months and months daily. Some of these projects, however, were sometimes reused. Example: A big story that had broken on Mark McGwire, the former US baseball player who admitted taking steroids throughout his career, immediately brought up his pictures from the archive given their huge demand. A package of 30–40 pictures was then selected out of a total 900 McGwire pictures from the archive so as to supply clients with a good up-to-date collection to choose from.

The Production Process II  105 During a regular shift on the magazine desk, editors often worked on packages and dealt with special requests received from clients. Such requests were common; quite often these showed up in the form of a new crop of a known picture or a raw file of another. In such eventualities, mainly since these were often very specific requests that were considered real profit in real time (unlike packages in the archive whereby pictures were simply ‘waiting on the shelf’ only to get picked from), the editor would often contact the photographer directly. Once a raw file of a picture was sent to the desk by a photographer, it was added to the archive by the editors. If, however, a request was made for the exclusive use of a picture by a client for a specific period of time targeted at a particular market (e.g., an Italian magazine requesting to have exclusive rights over two pictures from the earthquake in Haiti for a period of six months), restrictions of use were attached to the picture in the archive, and sales were notified. 21 Special requests were handled first since these were frequently time sensitive; it might take a while to make contact with a photographer, for instance, and make the worldwide deadlines on time. Deadlines around the world were always on the minds of editors, even on particular desks such as the magazine desk, where the time frame was perhaps less pressing than in others. One of the magazine’s EICs explained this to me in detail during an interview: When their shift started at 9:00 in the morning, he explained, it was already 21:00 at night, East Coast time, so that would be too late for Europe and too late for Asia. So if, on the magazine desk, they were, say, ‘chasing’ the US, then within a few hours everyone in the US was going to sleep and a whole eight hours would go by, resulting in the magazine desk missing the deadline. During their shift, magazine editors went over special requests and read through the File from the last picture viewed the day before and up to the last picture received by the global desk, using the MED or Media Archive.22 On a regular day with no big stories in it, the desk used about 300 pictures (about 100–150 of these were new pictures received by the global desk, while the rest were taken from the archive). Whenever there was a big event, say the Oscars, the total number of pictures might rise up to 600. Big events’ packages were thus broken down to a number of smaller ones (e.g., “Arrivals” or “Backstage”, if Oscars packages were indeed compiled), although in some cases a single package might also contain a great number of pictures as well, e.g., the former President Obama’s inauguration, from which a single package of 100–150 pictures was created from the event alone (it is impossible to select only 20 pictures from certain events such as the president’s inauguration, one of the magazine desk’s EICs pointed out to me. However, he continued, this makes perfect sense, since, at the end of the day, they were supplying the agency’s customers with a search result). Some packages only contained a single picture (e.g., a satellite picture of the UK completely covered in snow), although usually packages contained at least 10 pictures, since some clients would rather have a

106  The Production Process II selection to choose from on their own. Archives are aimed at attracting clients and this is what they are designed for. Big events generating a large number of pictures were therefore broken down to a variety of packages. For different clients have particular needs in mind, different working environments, and a variety of positions and particular staff limitations to deal with daily, and a diversified archive based on a considerate packaging system is essential in order to try and catch their attention. How was a package created? Once the theme of a package was chosen (described to me as the hardest part in the process), and as soon as the pictures were selected from the archive, the editor started creating a new package by naming it, adding or removing pictures, or managing their order of appearance; this was done in the archive’s website. A single picture was then selected as the package’s thumbnail (by clicking on it, the client would see all the pictures in the package), and an option to view the pictures in the package as a slide show could also be added. The pictures that appeared in a package were not, in fact, the photos themselves but rather an HTML link to a server, and so was the package as a whole and its slide show option, since these were sent to the agency’s sales representatives first once the packaging process was complete. When the link was received at the client’s end, it could be viewed as single pictures or even have the URL of the slideshow embedded onto a website whereby the pictures could be presented as a gallery. Each package was linked to a certain category while both were linked to a “Super topic” – the so-called ‘highest’ category that carried a relatively simple name, such as “Sport”. And while the rationale behind the packaging process was mostly to keep things simple, there was still some room for editors to name a package in a witty way, such as the “Guess Who?” category, in which pictures of sporting stars appeared in obscure pictures and attracted the viewer to try and guess who they were (e.g., a picture of a pair of yellow shoes with the title ‘RAFA’ printed on them, suggesting that these are the shoes of the Spanish tennis player, Rafael Nadal, also known as “Rafa”). The tree of categories where each package was finally linked to was highly structured: Under the super categories (these were known as the Grandparents on the desk), such as “Sport” or “Conflict”, additional categories (the Parents) were created (e.g., “Iraq Conflict” category that would appear under “Conflict”). Then the specific packages that appeared under Parents were the Children (e.g., “Bombing in Bagdad”); certain packages could also be linked to other Parents as well (e.g., “Bombing in Bagdad” that was linked both to “Iraq Conflict” and the “News from Iraq” categories). One of the most intriguing categories within the group of super-­categories was clearly “Creative use”, in which illustrated pictures were slowly packaged (mostly in Paris), took a substantial time to group, and were often

The Production Process II  107 aimed at advertising companies. Similarly to how things are done in the stock industry, these pictures appeared under particular ­meta-categories such as “Summer”, “Animals”, “Let it snow”, or, for example, “Overweight”. Moreover, the figures that appeared in these pictures were not individually recognizable so as to make the pictures versatile, flexible, and ready for reuse. One of the magazine desk’s EIC’s explained this to me during an interview: Illustrated pictures, he said, can be used in more than the obvious level. They are usually very powerfully graphic pictures, may not be easy to categorize, and also have multiple uses; this, he continued, was clearly their first swing at stock photography.23 This resembles Frosh’s observation as he describes how documentary p ­ hotographs are becoming more like stock, as they become “increasingly subject to an informational logic, abstracted from immediate contexts of use and open for multiple form of resale and recycling in a plethora of contexts, both journalistic and non-journalistic […]” (Frosh, 2013, p. 142). Similar, in a way, to how things were done in the stock industry, the agency’s pictures were also categorized in the archive under a taxonomic order that was mainly based on ‘subject’ and ‘concept’, since they were eventually aimed at a client who usually looks for particular images of the same subject or about a specific theme (see Heron, 2001; Frosh, 2003b; Sekula, 2003;).24 And since concepts are far more difficult to categorize (the same picture can be made to signify a variety of themes and requires, conceptually speaking, a particular context), they were eventually categorized in the agency archive according to their subject. 25 Yet subjects are deceptive on their own right, as pointed out by Frosh (2003b), since these might suggest that the agency simply bases its archival system on ‘naturally’ existing categories and divisions and particular denoted objects in the real world. Hence, placing pictures in a particular category (e.g., “Bombing in Bagdad”) would therefore not only classify the visual content of those pictures within that particular label according to a familiar category from the viewer’s social experience (which can, in itself, serve as what Azoulay [2008, p. 13] calls an “album of planted pictures”), but rather perform, in Frosh’s words, two “simultaneous semantic exchanges” (2003b, p. 101): connecting the pictures under that category with a variety of connotations under the label “Bombing in Bagdad” (which match up with the visual content of the pictures) and naturalizing the category, suggesting that those pictures under ­“Bombing in Bagdad” are in fact what bombing in Bagdad really looks like.26 These inevitable semantic exchanges and the unavoidable deceptiveness of subjects allowed the magazine editors to play with categories: They could easily create a hierarchal tree of categories with generic subjects as ‘Super-topics’ such as “Sport” or “Conflict” and sub-­c ategories such as “Bombing in Bagdad”, even though, conceptually speaking, these are by no means on higher or lower levels of importance in the real world. They could treat them as Grandparents,

108  The Production Process II Parents, or Children, as if they were somehow related by blood simply on the basis of what appeared to be their visual equivalence, and thus maintain the entire archival classification system within a greater archive – that of social order and the organization practices of social experience (in this case that of ‘Family’). This also explains how the same pictures could therefore be attached to different categories simultaneously as well (e.g., the ­“Bombing in Bagdad” category that was attached both to the “Iraq Conflict” and “News from Iraq” categories). When these pictures were catalogued by a powerful international news agency, they had other effects. Those categories and their pictures would become even more valuable as ‘perfect’ representatives of reality, as I pointed earlier, given their news value (they were also selected for the archive when other agency pictures were not), and enjoy the high status of the agency’s branding as well (‘good quality’). To that end, abstract categories such as “Guess who?” can be seen not only as a clever way of attracting the attention of clients, already thought of early in the process of packaging, but that which dictates that all other ‘concrete’ categories are not at all a matter of guessing but a perfect representation of things as they truly are. When these were grouped in the same archive together with pictures which appeared to be similar to stock, attract advertising companies, and that are programmed for multiple uses under “Creative use”, a dialectic process is in play: On the one hand, their representational value would immediately become multiplied now that they were placed in the catalogue as opposed to an ‘unrealistic’ category of p ­ ictures containing photos that were similar to stock. Yet once archived, those very same boundaries that load news pictures with their higher realistic value and distinguish them from illustrated pictures (these were grouped under the “Creative use” category) simultaneously collapse, as they were similarly categorized and were thus equally valued. These force both photography genres to mesh, turning news pictures into extraordinary and original specimens, one of a kind and yet ­versatile, always accessible for different purposes by a variety of users. Then, much like the classification systems that put them in order once they were archived by the editors on the desk, they have become fixed (as pictures, as news) and yet flexible, “similar, but not the same” (Leong, 2009, p. 251), to enable “[…] sufficient sensitivity within generalizations to allow for practical application and repeated production of the new” (Frosh, 2003b, p. 105). The desk’s clients varied from large organizations to individual people. Anyone could view the thumbnails in the archive’s home page, and opening an account was free, although restricted to strictly business ­users, while special requests from private people were also

The Production Process II  109 considered every now and then (e.g., a US citizen might identify a picture of his soldier son from a package in Iraq and would ask the agency for the picture, in which case his request would probably be fulfilled, if sent directly to the magazine desk). Clients were never simply supplied with the original file of pictures, since the price of the agency’s pictures from the archive was based on the use of a picture, its location of use, and circulation. Thus, explained a magazine desk’s EIC during an interview, clients are always paying for a single picture and the price is based on what it is that they are using it for, what kind of publication, what is the circulation, and how many times it is going to run, so clients are paying per use and only for one publication. Pictures on the archive were not valued for their visual content, but rather for their business potential. When payment was in question, their indexical singularity was overcome by their chances of high circulation, having their originality and aura governed now by the simple rules of exchange. The editors on the desk received no reports about the commercial success or failure of their packages and had no information about the prices of pictures. Although one thing the editors on the magazine desk did know, however, was that some magazines made their decisions based on actual prints of pictures. Even though this did seem more relevant to sales, it had a certain importance for the daily routine on the magazine desk as well, thereby illustrating yet again the strong connection between consumption and production. For in order to have prints ready on time, a packaging process had to be done rather quickly in order for sales to get the prints ready for such magazine clients before their deadlines were overdue; somewhere around the world, a magazine desk’s EIC pointed out to me, there are picture editors who are making a decision on what is going to be next. Meanwhile, there were other agency picture editors who tried to affect those decisions by thinking of words that clients might use in their online search for pictures in the archive as well. The Keyword Team The pictures’ keywording process at the agency begins, quite simply, by looking at a picture, ‘studying’ it visually, and reading its caption. Observing a picture of, say, protestors from Sweden, the keyword editor would first try to understand what it is that he/she actually sees in the picture. With the help of the caption, and while realizing that these are protestors demonstrating against the potential bankruptcy of the Sweden Saab car company, he/she would then try to think of words to describe the event that do not appear in the caption (e.g., the word “Placard”, which some of the protestors seem to be holding) (Figure 3.8).

110  The Production Process II

Figure 3.8  Keywords entry: Protestors in Sweden (Singapore, 2010).

Sometimes the keyword editor would think of words that describe the picture by thinking whether he/she would be able to find the picture if they searched the archive using a specific word, “Redundancy” for example, but they try to avoid using details that are ‘too specific’. Then words such as “Swedish” (the word “Sweden” is already attached to the picture’s metadata) or “People”, and “View from above” are added as well. Some keywords, “Car factory worker” for example, would be rechecked only to see whether these are part of the keyword tree at all, and if so the editor would pick its lowest possible Child (always aiming at the lowest level of the keyword tree) and add these as well. Finally, the editors would add the word “KYWD” as the administration keyword and their own initials as the picture’s keyworders, and move on to the next picture. Quite similar to the packaging process on the magazine desk, the keyword tree was also based on the Grandparents, Parents, and Children categorizing system, although, here, the ‘golden rule’ was to aim at the ‘lowest’ Children category so as to make a single search based simply on keywords by clients as accurate as possible. Key words were clearly based on captions, although certain words that did not appear in the caption were also used as keywords, since keyword editors were taught to tell a story by the keywords yet one that is slightly different from the one that is told in captions, as I was informed by one keyword editor. There was also no specific limit for the number of keywords that could be used in each process, and so editors were using a large number of words to keyword if it was found necessary.

The Production Process II  111 The desk was operated in a small, separate, and slightly hidden circle of three open cubicles located nearby the magazine desk. On the ­keyword desk, a team of five (there used to be seven before the 2008 financial crisis) worked in two shifts from 8:00 to 16:00 and from 16:00 to 24:00, and three often worked here during the morning shift considered the busiest. Unlike the work on the global desk, keyword stations were not staffed during the night, since speed was far less important here compared to quality and accuracy; on the keyword desk, as one keyword editor pointed out to me, there were no ups and downs. Even though the work on the desk was very much related to the ­magazine desk, the ­keyword team was a separate unit reporting directly to the magazine personnel in Paris. At the time of my observations, it was mostly governed by the hands of a former Magnum manager, who established the team in 2006 when it became clear the pictures’ search engine in the archive should be more accessible to clients apart from the option of tracing pictures by their packages; he also created the keyword tree. The head of the team was positioned in London but received full report, and he was informed on the daily work of the team at least twice a month via video conferences, whereby he was constantly offering ways to improve the service (e.g., informing the team of popular keywords often used by clients in their search for pictures from certain events, thus encouraging the editors on the desk to make use of such words in the keywording process). While other image companies found a keywording force to be pointless (such as Comstock Images, which had a strong view against the use of keywords in its archive. See Frosh, 2003b), the keyword force here in fact proved itself highly valuable to the success of the pictures operation. And even though it required substantial resources to cover the costs of editors and their long training (the keyword process itself was relatively simple but required a great deal of experience; it would take about six months of training until a new keyword editor was qualified enough to select pictures from the File and create keywords on his/her own), sales have gone up ever since the team was operating. During a shift, an editor volunteered to divide the work between the editors within three main categories: keywording packages flowing in from the magazine desk; keywording Top Pix selected by Paris with an additional sample selected from the daily flow of pictures running through the global desk daily; and working on ‘leftovers’ from the previous day. Working on packages was considered a small part of the daily routine: Going over their mails, editors often received links to packages made by the magazine desk and worked on their keywords (although only for the packages, not for the pictures in them), and they also helped correct captions whenever the magazine desk was under pressing circumstances. In the past, keyword editors used to help sales representatives on the desk while searching for pictures for specific clients since some were time sensitive, and they were thus less

112  The Production Process II involved with keywording. However, ever since the financial crisis (2008), sales were no longer operating from the global desk, and editors from the keyword team had no direct communication with clients. Dealing with Top Pix was one of the main daily tasks on the desk. Each day, a selection of 50–70 pictures was made by the editors on the desk in Paris while most of these pictures were categorized under “The best in the last 24 hours” or “The best of the month”. Some Top Pix did not require keywords at all since these pictures would often carry a very specific news value from a particular day and would probably not be used by clients in the future. Pictures selected daily from the File by the experienced editor were often different from those that were Top Pixed in Paris. Thus, keyword editors usually had their eyes set on those pictures that might be reused by clients in six months’ time, the ‘less obvious’ pictures, whereas Top Pix were often selected by the editors in Paris mainly by assessing the qualities of their visual composition. Thus, on the keyword desk, a keyword editor explained to me, they usually looked for society pictures, daily life; pictures with a potentially long shelf life that could be used over and over again. Keywording a sample of pictures selected from the daily File was an important task. Each day, the team’s leader went over the pictures received by the global desk in the last 24 hours, from which he then selected between 50 and 120 pictures and stored them in a folder available only to be viewed by the editors on the magazine desk or the editors from the keyword team. All and all, whenever the daily workflow consisted of keywording alone, a single editor would ‘hit’ approximately 60 pictures a day (an experienced editor in the team had probably keyworded about 50,000 pictures in a period of approximately four years!). The work of the agency’s keyword editors contributes greatly to the discourse concerning the complex relations between word and image, that cut across disciplines and experiences, dividing the “seeable and the sayable, display and discourse, showing and telling” (Mitchell, 2003, p. 51. See also Foucault, 1982; Deleuze, 1988/1986; Mitchell, 1994). These relations have set the ground for the pictorial turn and the study of visual culture, drawing from the ‘anxiety’ of speech against the visual (Mitchell, 1994, 2002), and have played an important part in the field of electronic and digital media (Frosh, 2003b). A dialectic is in play when focusing on the connection of visual representation to language: Words are not sufficient to represent the visual; they cannot do the job of the ‘natural sign’ as they are arbitrary signs in their own right (Krieger, 1998, p. 3). Images obtain certain features that are independent of language, their figural aspects – their ‘being-as-­ image’ (Bryson, 1981, p. 6). The image thus cannot ‘rely’ entirely on text; its understanding should come from within representation itself, “[…] to be found in the vernaculars of representational practices” (Mitchell, 1994, pp. 14–15). There appears to be something that exceeds the text

The Production Process II  113 in the image – an “obtuse meaning” that is “outside language”, one that is “[…] ‘over the shoulder’ or ‘on the back’ of articulated language […] what, in the image, is purely image” (Barthes, 1977b, p. 61). Further, the relationship between images and texts can never be assessed from an external point of view, since it is always described in words in academic ­research. In their commercial form, words are also usually juxtaposed to images and are thus necessary for their interpretation (Frosh, 2003b). A similar struggle resides in what is known as ekphrasis, the verbal representation of visual representation – a rhetorical term used to describe objects by early Greek scholars to “bring them before the eye” and, later, as a rhetorical figure used by writers to capture artwork (Heffernan, 1993; Robillard and Jongeneel, 1998, p.  ix). The “problematic that is ekphrasis”, writes Krieger (1998, p. 3), lies in two opposing forces: words can, or cannot, or only to some ­extent, represent images (any visual images). Images can or cannot, or only to some level, be ‘put’ into words: “to be understood or half-­ understood, sometimes even to be misunderstood” (Cheeke, 2008, p.  20). ­E kphrasis, then, is a constant relation of war and peace between words and images, as the ekphrastic ambition is an assignment given to l­anguage to “represent the literally unrepresentable” (Krieger, 1998, pp. 4–5). Frosh (2003a) adds an important contribution to the study of e­ kphrasis from an industrial cultural production point of departure. He discusses how the word-image relationship is productive in practice, while focusing on the commercial photography industry. Frosh (2003a) considers the word-image relationship through semiotics and cultural theory, exploring the industrial systematic deployment of words and images in commercial photography production. Discussing how words are used in the process of rationalizing the interpretative frames for stock images, Frosh (2003a) addresses the archival orders that make sense for most stock agencies as taxonomic, based on ‘subject’ and ‘concept’, as “ways of rendering the ‘content’ or ‘meaning’ of an image into verbal category labels” (p. 249). The agency’s keywords are clearly used to make life easier for the clients who search the picture archive, to perfectly ‘describe’ images, and thus to direct clients to the ‘right’ image as quickly as possible. In so doing, they increase the chances of an agency’s picture being picked from a vast store of pictures, thus making a profit. So at the most basic level, and similar to how things are done in the stock business, the agency’s keyword editors are engaged in the delicate art of anticipation and interpretation (Frosh, 2003a): They need to base their keyword decisions and selections – from image to word – on a reverse process that will be executed by picture editors at the client’s end as they search for archived pictures – from word to image.

114  The Production Process II Similar to stock image editing, the order that makes sense in the keyword process at the agency is also based on ‘subjects’ and ‘concepts’ (Heron, 2001). On the first level, however, the agency’s keywords are clearly a matter of ‘subjects’, as they refer to the “ostensive referent of an image, its depicted ‘content’” (Frosh, 2003a, p. 253. See also Heron, 2001). The keyword process thus begins by simply looking at a picture, ‘studying’ it visually, and reading its caption. Note, for example, some of the keyworders’ commandments: “Man, woman, boy, girl, teenager, etc.?”; “What is it?”; “Who is it? What sex are they? What do they do […]?”; “What are they wearing?”; “How many people or subjects are in the picture”, etc. The keyword editor must, first, begin by ‘capturing’ the picture at its most basic informative level – that, in the example of the picture from Sweden, which immediately generates several keywords such as “People”, “Placards”, or “View from above”. Keyword editors must also obey the team’s ‘golden rule’ and so think of keywords at the ‘lowest’ level of the category ‘tree’ – the ‘lower’ a keyword gets, the more visually it depicts (Figure 3.9). However, the complete reading of pictures that will eventually be keyworded is only possible with the help of captions. So, with the help of the caption, the editor realizes that those people depicted in the picture are, in fact, protestors demonstrating against the potential bankruptcy of the Swedish ‘Saab’ car company. Then, a few additional keywords are added, which cannot in any way be thought of only from the ­visual elements of the picture: keywords such as ‘Protestors’, ‘Swedish’, ‘­Redundancy’, and ‘Car factory worker’. Quite similar to the categorizing process on the magazine desk, two semantic exchanges that happen simultaneously are performed here as well (Frosh, 2003b): First, words anchor the image to the connotations of certain keywords (‘Swedish’, ‘Protestors’, ‘Car factory worker’). At the same time, those same keywords are also ­naturalized, as they are now visually verified: this is how ‘Swedish’, ‘Protestors’, and ‘Car factory workers’ look (Frosh, 2003a). Since what is ‘naturally’ ­depicted by the image is, in itself, a sophisticated system of ­connotations, we might say that the agency’s keywords (here performed as ‘subjects’) come from ‘outside’ the image, and yet they are strongly attached to what is within it (Frosh, 2003a). Of course, keywords are used to enhance picture sales and are t­ herefore, in a way, also conceptually oriented. To start, editors on the Keyword Desk will go for pictures that will be used by clients in six months’ time and ignore pictures which often carry a very specific news value for a particular day. Quite similar to stock images, the pictures that are eventually keyworded are thus those which can easily be stripped from their context, so they can be used by various clients for different purposes, time and time again. These pictures should carry certain vagueness in them, but just enough that they can still count as ‘worthy’ news pictures and so

The Production Process II  115

Figure 3.9  T  he keywords commandments: From image to text (Singapore, 2010).

can be reused by clients. Concepts take the form of words (Frosh, 2003a), and so the selected pictures will also be attached to ­keywords that are more conceptual than subjectual, such as ­‘Redundancy’ or ‘Swedish’. Similarly, some keyword commandments will point a keyword editor to rather conceptual keywords: “Is their social class important?”; “Prevalent sociological or ideological background?”; “Travel picture?”; and so

116  The Production Process II on. In that sense, the agency’s photographers, keyword editors, and picture editors at the client’s end are what Heron (2001) describes as “visual translators”, as they can find “the symbols inherent in the subject” and finally end up “with the expression of a concept” (Heron, 2001, p. 28). Keywords at the agency, in their rather conceptual form, are therefore similar to the use of ‘concepts’ in stock; they are “both the particular keys to highly charged connotative domains and yet felicitously vague” (Frosh, 2003a, p. 251). Mitchell’s observation in his “Ekphrastic and the other” (1994) provides an additional layer to the analysis, as he observes three moments in the realization of ekphrasis: an ekphrastic impossibility, where words can never represent an object in the way an image can; an ekphrastic hope, where a certain ‘sense’ in language that can make us ‘see’ is found in imagination and metaphor; and an ekphrastic fear, when the difference between the verbal and the visual may collapse and the visual is then realized “literally and actually” (Mitchell, 1994, pp. 152–154). In the agency’s keyword process, it thus appears that both the ­moments of ekphrastic impossibility and hope are performed at various levels in the production line, where the gap between image and text is constantly fought against, and settled, by the editors’ daily practices and routines. To begin with, keywords’ most basic role in the process, then, is to ‘perfectly’ represent pictures, to make a client ‘see them through’ – an ekphrastic hope. As such, they acquire a unique status within the arsenal of language and play a key role. They are thus required to fulfil a particular duty: they need to represent, to reflect (but can words reflect the image? And can they reflect at all?), in which case keyworders are told to comply with a ‘golden rule’ of categorizing. At the same time, however, keyworders are told to avoid an ‘exact’ representation of the image, to ensure their keywords are not ‘too specific’. Keywords should therefore ‘keep a certain distance’ from their visual subjects (but can words be close or far from the image? And is it simply a question of distance that is between them?), so the same keywords may also represent other pictures. Yet, no special textual features can be assigned to ekphrasis that distinguish between paintings, sculptures, images, and other objects. Put simply, there are no more or less valuable words, semiologically speaking, in terms of their representational value, even when they are, much like keywords, used for description. When the head of the team describes how he asks his editors to tell a story with keywords, an ekphrasis ­impossibility is then in play – narration instead of description. Similarly, ‘popular’ words that appear to pop up in the analysis of data searching by the head of the department are therefore preferred, as these facilitate searching with little consideration for their descriptive values. Finally, the keywords process also demonstrates a unique aspect of the ekphrastic encounter, as keywords are thus used at the agency to ‘clarify’ pictures, but, eventually, to help sell them to clients. In that

The Production Process II  117 sense, they are signs that are used “to lie” (Eco, 1975, p. 6). Their production processes therefore involve a unique relationship between the speaker and the audience of the ekphrasis: The keyword editor (the poet) stands between the image and the client (the listening subject), who will be made to ‘see’ the object (the image) through the medium of the editor’s voice (words).27 During the keyword process, ekphrasis is placed between what Mitchell (1994) calls two “othernesses” and two forms of (apparently) impossible translation and exchange: the image is first converted by the editor into a verbal representation in the form of keywords. Then, if keywords are successfully selected (as is ekphrastically hoped for), the reader (the picture editor at the client’s end) will search for an image using these keywords and reconvert the verbal representation back into an image. Advertising clients were therefore those who were most often in the minds of keyword editors during the keyword process (although newspaper editors who like to write commentaries and illustrate their stories were another considered audience). Until recently, editors could also print a report in which data with figures of specific words and their numbers, as they were used by clients in their archive searches, were available and occasionally analyzed. Sometimes there was an unexpected cross, and some of the Top Pix selected by Paris were also selected by the keyword editor (about 20%). But whenever keyword editors selected a picture already dealt with, they simply moved on to the next one, and the next one, and the next, for there were many pictures to enhance, so that they would get selected by clients. Sometimes words made searching easier; at others, it was graphic design. Global Graphics The bulk of work that was done by the graphic journalist on the global graphics desk was on breaking news or on upcoming big events, such as the Olympics, whereby a designer would be dispatched to the scene itself. When graphic journalists started their shift, they were usually updated with the recent news stories going over the agency’s Kobra (3000x of Text) or the Coyote, both showing the latest stories (Coyote could go back for 24 hours, Kobra for an entire year), and watched the news on a small TV set placed on their desks (CNN). What did graphic journalists do? On regular days, graphic journalists preferred to focus on stories that were related to a preselected field of interest, since, as I was told by one graphic journalist, it was always better that people worked on graphics they had a certain passion to work on, one that is within their personal interest. At the time of my observations, for example, these meta-fields of interest were “Sport”, “Technology”, and (the least preferred) “Environment”. Then, whenever particular ­stories seemed to be having some potential to be ‘improved’

118  The Production Process II by graphic design, graphic journalists usually pitched their ideas to the graphics editor, who helped get things in motion or decided to ‘kill’ these early in the process. Good ideas, however, did not always end up as graphic designs as well; graphic journalists did not always know in advance whether they would find good materials to use as references for their designs or not, and thus there were many times when they started working on a design and decided to drop it and move on to something else. The graphics department itself was relatively small and worked in a rhythm of its own, having an entirely different workflow from that of the global pictures desk. Usually, there was no daily traffic between graphic journalists (as they were titled on the desk, even though their work was similar to that of graphic designers) and the global pictures desk. Two shifts of 9:00–17:00 and 17:00–1:00 were divided between seven graphic journalists, a graphics editor (one was located in Toronto), and five additional editors from financial graphics (two in Singapore, one in London, one in New York, and two part-timers based in Chicago and Washington. They were also in the process of creating graphic designs based on breaking news at times). All and all, the graphics department usually used pictures either as part of the actual designs or simply as references for the drawing of others. In most cases, however, graphic journalists did not use the agency’s pictures at all, but rather pictures received from other sources (e.g., a picture of a space shuttle taken by a NASA photographer). In fact, pictures were not used at all for half of all the designs here, as these usually ended up in the form of maps or charts. During breaking news events, however, pictures were quite often found extremely useful on the graphics desk. Example: After a plane had crashed in an airport near San Paulo in ­Brazil a few years ago, and while watching the news reports on the incident, a graphic journalist had already received a picture of the airport from the global pictures desk just a few minutes after the crash. Shot from a high angle, she thought the picture could be quite useful for the drawing of a graphic design; her design, she thought, would be based on a pinpoint of the exact point of the crash, which could also be used as a good reference for a 3D drawing of the building that the plane had crashed into. Since the picture was taken from the other side of the building, it was hard to locate the exact angle of the crash, although it was still a relatively good reference for the location of the runway in r­ elation to the building (­apparently, as I was told by the graphic journalist, this happens very often with breaking news; they cannot know for sure). Whenever a story broke that inspired the graphic journalists, they received pictures directly from the global desk via mail or simply downloaded them from the Media browser. Whether pictures were found suitable for the work of graphic journalists or not depended mainly on how well they could help illustrating specific events. For, say, a head shot, a

The Production Process II  119 graphic journalist would look for a clean picture with no other figures in the background. However, as I was told by a graphic journalist, ‘clean’ pictures having no reflections or other figures in the back are very hard to find. As a result, graphic journalists often ended up drawing new pictures themselves – a highly time-consuming task, since designs that were based on pictures needed to be highly detailed (Figure 3.10). Graphic journalists often used a wide range of sources while conducting research on a single design (e.g., Google maps or Google earth) and often gathered information from websites such as the Financial Times or Google News. A simple graphic design might take an hour to complete (e.g., a spot map of the location where a certain fire or accident took place), or it might take days, or even weeks, if it was a complicated design (e.g., covering the Olympics. In the papers this might even take months to compile). As a first priority, graphic journalists usually had to work on designs that were based on breaking news first. Graphic illustrators usually utilized Adobe Illustrator, Photoshop (although mainly for the use of basic tools, such as Crop and Silhouette), and Excel, which was mostly used for data collection (Word or PowerPoint, as I was told by a graphic journalist, were apparently considered less friendly for the daily work on the desk). Once a design was complete, it was stored on the graphic journalists’ computers and was sent to the global pictures desk’s MED in five

Figure 3.10  F  rom a picture to a graphic design (Singapore, 2010).

120  The Production Process II different copies: a small JPEG thumbnail of the design and a color and B&W EPS files (Encapsulated Post Script. These could be edited and changed at the clients’ end) that would appear on the Graphics browser on the web and could be accessed by clients. Two more JPEGs (color and B&W) were also sent to the Picture browser in the way the pictures were presented. Once transmitted, and after they were uploaded to the pictures MED via the FTP, the design would appear on both Pictures’ and Graphics’ browsers and was ready to be selected by clients. Even though both desks were located within shouting distance, Pictures and Graphics hardly seemed to be working together, and some of the graphic ­journalists often found this slightly disturbing. One graphic journalist, for example, described to me during an interview how it always struck her as a surprise that they were not working closely together. In the newspaper, where she was working in the past, she continued, there would have been far more collaboration between graphics and pictures: In the US, for example, whenever there was a breaking news, the photographers were usually sent out with the reporters and would then come back to the newsroom and insist on having graphic designs attached to their pictures. Or, it might be that reporters would come back with photographs, stating that they have pictures that were perfect as references for a graphic drawing. “The painter maintains in his work a certain distance from reality”, while the cameraman “penetrates deeply into its web”, compared Benjamin between the two, There is a tremendous difference between the pictures they obtain. That of the painter is a total one, that of the cameraman consists of multiple fragments which are assembled under a new law. Thus, for contemporary man the representation of reality by the film is ­incomparably more significant than that of the painter, since it offers, precisely because of the thoroughgoing permeation of reality with mechanical equipment, an aspect of reality which is free of all equipment. And that is what one is entitled to ask from a work of art. (Benjamin, 1992, p. 227) Much like painters, graphic journalists can easily be seen as Benjamin’s “magicians” who keep a certain distance from reality (Benjamin, 1992): Their designs are total, existing in an entirely different terrain from that of the reality they are required to represent. The creative liberty permitted by the field of imagination exceeds the strict boundaries of the real world; their artistic designs are an (apparently) constant challenge to factuality and newsworthiness. At the same time, it is reality that feeds the very work of both painters and cameramen, and that which allows Hogarth (1986) to treat artists as possible reporters, since, “[…] the very act of drawing forced artists to see things and make decisions and

The Production Process II  121 judgements about what they saw” (Hogarth, 1986, p. 7). A dialectic is in play: Much like artists, graphic journalists maintain a certain distance from reality. However, as reporters, they are subordinated to its strict rules. They are permitted creative liberty and are yet confined to the highly organized and demanding routines of news-making. And whenever their designs are used to represent real occurrences (as it is often required in the newsroom), they are asked to ‘see’ when their eyes are ‘shut’. When graphics are incorporated into the daily routine of the news pictures’ desk, that very dialectic is settled as a form of productivity: Graphic designs become an extraordinary tool, yet not as the means of challenging the testimonial status of news pictures and news-making. Rather, they are used as the means to get ‘closer’ to the scenes of events, thereby increasing their representational value.28 Such fluidity allows journalists to realize that words are only one way of telling a news story and that graphics can eventually “[…] let us see the unseeable” (Evans, 1997, p. 290). Designs are divided into “Illustrations” (single drawings) or “Graphics” (“whenever sign systems or words or symbols are made an integral part of the drawing or photograph”. Evans, 1997, p. 289). Those designs come in the form of either ‘facts’ (concerned with ‘information’) or ‘flavor’ (and are essentially decorative). The graphic artist absorbs the spirit of journalism, and the photograph can be seen to “tell more” with the help of a graphic design (Evans, 1997, p. 291). Designs can therefore tell stories on their own right or simply help verify others (as Evans’ diagrams should) and emphasize analysis and accuracy and not simply excitement and color (p. 318). Hence, it is the work of Graphic Journalists that is done on the global graphics desk, not simply graphic designers. As journalists, they are constantly updated by breaking news stories. They are dispatched to the scenes of events when big stories occur, to experience things as they truly are. They rely on pictures as visual references and believe the work should be far more collaborative between the different pictures departments. Yet as graphic designers, they would work on preselected themes, and some of their designs might take days and days to complete, unlike hard news reports (see, e.g., Lehman-Wilzig and Seletzky, 2010). Half of all the designs on the desk were therefore not based on pictures, turning into maps or charts, while some diagrams (e.g., the plane crash in San Paulo) turned up to be ‘not exactly’ similar to the turn of events (since this is a common problem with breaking news on the graphics desk, and one can never be sure). When graphic diagrams were eventually packaged together with pictures, they served as an ‘extension’ of the visual story (its representational status acquired more value as it was juxtaposed with illustrations within a given package) and illuminated a new, more detailed story (it was a combined, ‘heavier’, package of images and diagrams), but also one which might attract new clients searching for diagrams and that is

122  The Production Process II more attractive and easier to sell. The working practices of graphics are an additional example of the complex bidirectional connections taking place in the newsroom at different levels of operations: between creativity and commercialization; text and image (both as separate systems of representation and as a combined image-text system of signification); stories and facts; reality and imagination. Yet the machine maintained by the editors on both the global pictures and graphic desks did not ­operate properly if it not for the labor invested by those whose work was often hidden in the shadows. Pictures Administration Right next to Asia’s chief photographer sat the global pictures desk’s administrator, and although her title suggests that she was not at the front line with the ‘warriors’, her daily job was highly significant to the daily routine on the desk. She worked from 9:00 to 17:00 and had been working on the global pictures desk ever since it started properly in 2005. She dealt with mails and invoices; these were mostly invoices of satellite phones that were used in Asia. Since the number of photographers working in different countries varies, there was a different number of satellite phones that were in use in each country, and so the administrator often checked the monthly bills from each country to see whether these did not exceed their limits. The administrator was also in charge on contacting Canon in regard to problems with cameras or lenses that required cleaning, and arranging the payments when warranty was over. She had the information on sick leave and holidays for all the desk’s personnel and took care of new employees (e.g., bank slips or a new e-mail accounts, etc.). She booked flight tickets and hotel reservations for photographers flying in and out (sometimes, as I was told by the desk’s administrator, they would ask for accommodation in the last minute and cheap rates, and she would try to do her best to accommodate). In addition, she also arranged visa applications to enter ­Singapore and dealt with governmental authorities, booked meeting rooms, got the post, dealt with travel costs, and received tickets for big events (e.g., the Olympic Games or the World Cup football tournament). One of the more interesting daily assignments the administrator was given was handling the daily Impact request received from the international desk and thus reviewing the coverage of preselected stories in the Financial Times, the Singaporean Straits Times, and the I­ nternational Herald Tribune papers accordingly: Based on the dominant stories ­selected by the international desk, she went over the published pictures, filled in the statistics (i.e., how many published pictures were the ­agency’s, how many were its rivals’) and sent the results back to the international desk whereby data was calculated into a percentage that

The Production Process II  123 helped improve the process in the future (more on the Impact process in my analysis on the international desk later in this chapter). When photographers and editors fight for success at the front, someone has to make sure everything is working properly at the rear; a mishandled visa application, flight tickets that were not booked on time, accommodation, damaged equipment, and a holiday schedule that is not organized would all hold up the work on the desk. Successful news is clearly the result of team work: reporters, photographers, editors, and administrators alike; it is the output of functional considerations dictated by the news organization’s need for routine, its structure, and working pressures (for a useful review on news organizations and routines see Shoemaker and Reese, 1996; Becker and Vlad, 2009). Once these are sorted and the machine is working properly, its outputs are good to go and are ready to be sold to clients. Sales About 20 staff sales representatives – pictures specialists – were s­ elling the agency’s pictures as part of a larger number of sales personnel working for the agency’s media services (these were named accounting managers), who were spread around the world as followed: 10 specialists were located in North America; two in Asia; and eight in Europe.29 Most of the agency’s pictures specialists had previous sales experience, working for different pictures or news agencies in the past, and even though the job did require some interest in pictures and photography, ex-photographers or ex-picture editors working in sales were a rare sight. In fact, as I was told by the agency’s head of pictures sales in Europe, the Middle East, and Africa during an interview, an ex-photographer sales specialist, for example, would probably interfere with the daily work of the department; photographers, he continued, usually see things from an entirely different perspective, and it is therefore unlikely that they would excel in a selling position. Sales were considered a separate division within the agency’s organizational structure alongside the editorial marketing divisions (although it was clearly described to me by the head of pictures sales in Europe, the Middle East, and Africa as the most significant division, simply since they were making the dollar). The two divisions worked closely together, yet the separation of editorial from sales was seen to be vital for the overall daily process; perhaps the remains of the agency’s historic struggle between the company’s business and news divisions throughout the years of its operations. Thus, explained to me the head during an interview, such separation was absolutely crucial, primarily in order to make sure that sales personnel were not telling the editors what to report or what to do, so they were totally independent. Otherwise, he continued, sales was instructing editorial to only focus on entertainment.

124  The Production Process II The training of a new salesperson was relatively simple: From the minute they joined the sales team, new sales personnel were trained by experienced specialists and were acquainted with representatives from the editorial division. The connection with editorial was crucial for the training of a new salesperson, and new sales personnel would join hands with representatives from editorial early on, during their first meetings with clients; it would be the agency’s editorial perspective that eventually set the tone for new sales personnel’s daily routine throughout an entire career in sales. The idea that news is a business, a commodity, is not new, and much has been said about the economics of news: the role of news in promoting the interests of the corporate owners to fit the demands of the market, or how newspapers play an important role as facilitators of commerce and encourage consumption, having news emerging “[…] not from individuals seeking to improve the functioning of democracy but from readers seeking diversion, reporters forging careers, and owners searching for profits” (Hamilton, 2004, p. 6. See also Herman and Chomsky, 1988; McManus, 1994; Picard, 2004). In the agency’s Pictures Sales, this was manifested in the work of those whose sole purpose was to sell the news. Sales representatives were therefore considered part of one of the most important divisions in the overall production process of the agency’s news pictures (since they were making the dollar). They also worked within a separate division alongside editorial and marketing and were taking it rather seriously that their colleagues required complete independence (hence the news editors were not told what to report or what to do, otherwise they were instructed to only focus on entertainment. On the other hand, no pressure was put on Sales from editors in the news division so as to pursue the making of ‘strictly news’, since the agency is a business that thrives mostly on the selling of non-news products). Thus, the classic conceptualization of news-making was strongly felt even when it came to sales representatives (e.g., when the relationship with editorial was seen as crucial for the training of new sales representatives and the agency’s news spirit was deemed important to inspiring the work of Sales). To that end, Sales was not in any way perceived as a threat to News (even though Sales is ­fundamentally about selling), even at times when ‘good’ pictures selected by a certain photographer were not necessarily good enough for Sales. Rather, it was taken as a necessity in order to allow a more liberated, non-constrained making of news (although how is it that selling news is separated from its making?), and that which its values should be incorporated along the daily routines of sales.30 Training would take three to six months, depending on the new sales personnel’s selling skills, during which time they would study their clients and their regions. They would go over magazines, websites, and newspapers daily, talk to clients and try to grasp their daily particular

The Production Process II  125 needs. The learning process was based on practice, and it was extremely important that new sales representatives felt the ‘cold waters’ of the pictures market as soon as possible, to start selling in order to realize what it is that sells. After six months of training, sales representatives were familiarized with the organization and its structure, the production process, and the agency’s overall system of manufacturing. And after a year, they acquired specific details about other picture professionals (e.g., the background of certain photographers or chief editors and their histories in the organization), so they could communicate with clients more professionally. The agency serves an international market, yet some local markets are stronger than others, and some are less accessible, and so these factors eventually affected the overall organizational structure of Sales as well: Thus, in countries with a strong demand for the agency’s pictures (e.g., Germany or France), the company had its own sales representatives working from the agency’s bureaus. In countries where markets were considered relatively weak (e.g., Sweden), however, pictures were usually sold by agents. At the time of my observations, there were about 30 agents spread worldwide in local markets such as in Sweden, South Africa, Spain, Italy, or the US. Some of these agents were big pictures agencies (e.g., Corbis stock agency, which now provides its imagery and video content via Getty Images’ platform) that operated their own line of pictures apart from trading with the agency’s pictures operations; some were smaller local agencies; and the agents were selling the agency’s pictures under their own sales schemes. While some agents traded the agency’s pictures directly to clients in the local markets, others traded with additional and smaller local agencies – local picture agency partners – that specialized in fields such as Sports or Fashion. In the Nordic countries, the agency worked with Scan Pix that sold the agency’s pictures in Denmark, Sweden, and Norway and represented the agency both in newspapers and in the magazine market. In the local markets in the US, UK, and Germany, the agency traded with Corbis and sold directly to the market as well, while Corbis also had its trading agreements with other agencies (e.g., EPA). Having agents integrating the agency’s pictures services into their own selling apparatuses (i.e., in their archives), the pictures were then pushed by the agents’ sales representatives to the local markets, allowing the agency to enjoy a far larger number of sales representatives selling its pictures worldwide. In some countries the agency operated certain regional offices (e.g., in Paris, Dubai, or Moscow) whereby the agency’s picture sales specialists were selling to clients and supporting the local sales representatives as well. The hierarchal structure of Sales was organized in four main subdivisions: the local, the regional, the ‘super-­ regional’, and the global. Thus, reports from sales representatives in, say, Hungary were first sent to the Eastern Europe branch (the regional),

126  The Production Process II then to Europe (the ‘super-regional’, combined with Middle East and Africa as one ‘super region’, alongside Asia and the Americas) and then either to London or to New York (the global). Sales personnel were required to know the pictures’ File; understand who their clients were and their particular needs; try to make offers; help out with specific requests (e.g., pictures requested in a higher resolution); and, quite simply, push pictures to clients. Reading pictures from the File was not as simple as it may sound, since, in Sales, it required a delicate process of pictures selection specifically tailored to the needs of ­particular clients (e.g., websites or magazines), from particular fields (e.g., sports or fashion), and certain regions worldwide (while the global desk worked globally, Sales were required to think locally). Occasionally, a sales personnel thought a picture was not potentially saleable, although one of the basic rules in Sales was often to let the clients be the judges. Thus, explained to me the head of picture sales in Europe, the Middle East, and Africa during an interview, there are very high standards in the agency, and so when they, in Sales, believe certain pictures are in bad quality, many clients would in fact decide to use them. This is simply because there are different interpretations to the very notion of ‘quality’ out there, particularly in photography, so he would always leave the final decision to be made by clients. Of course, different clients come in different forms and have various standards, and so special regional considerations were taken in the agency as well. France, for example, was deemed by Sales a ‘high-knowledge’ pictures market, whereby pictures were carefully selected in order to keep a high standard. However, pictures that were not used in France, for that matter, were targeted to other markets around the world where they could be sold more easily. As a result, certain pictures were not pushed into the French market in the first place, since these would probably not be used by French clients. Sales representatives also needed to come up with different solutions in order to help make the agency’s pictures services internationally appealing, yet at the same time tailored for the specific needs of particular clients from various local markets. These solutions that were applied in Sales came in the form of various glocal mechanisms that were operated both in structure and in process: The agency’s sales representatives were operating in strong markets while external agents were operating in weaker markets; the international market that was divided to local, regional, super-regional, and global divisions; a selection of pictures that was based on local demands, particular clients, and specific fields of interest; or clients making the final decision based on their own ‘quality’ scale of pictures. Communications with clients was done via e-mail, phones, chat, and sometimes in person, and it was usually made by pictures editors at the clients’ end (or those who had first made contact with the agency pictures

The Production Process II  127 service in cases whereby clients were non-media, e.g., a charity organization). A client interested in a certain picture received a link (a Light box) to a specific page on the agency’s pictures archive website, where pictures could be downloaded directly. Clients who received the Light box were usually subscribed annually to the agency’s pictures service, although in some cases (e.g., in the French or German markets) access was given to clients and payment was only done after receiving the high-resolution picture files.31 In rare cases, and often as part of a traditional business relationship with certain clients in Spain, pictures were printed by an agency’s partner and only then were these delivered to clients, although most of the pictures were sent digitally by satellite or via the web.32 All of the agency’s pictures could be accessed via the internet, and these were monitored by Sales personnel from the agency’s offices or personal laptop computers at all times, while all pictures were sent to clients in a JPEG format. All and all, the agency’s pictures service dealt with approximately 25,000–30,000 clients worldwide at the time of my observations, although the numbers were constantly changing, as clients varied from newspapers and websites buying hundreds of pictures weekly to, say, a single charity organization in Slovenia purchasing a single picture per year. The agency’s pictures archive was free to access, although, at the time of my observations, it was not accessible to all people; only professional media organizations, or companies serving the media market, were registered and were thus granted access, and the registration of new members was strictly monitored due to legal rights33: An agency picture of Madonna, for example, could not be purchased by just any interested customer, since a company printing Madonna’s posters would have a rights agreement with Madonna (as would Madonna herself). On the other hand, an agency picture of, say, dolphins could be potentially purchased by private customers without special legal restrictions (that is, of course, if they were business users), although this would rarely ever happen, simply because it was not worth it for the agency. Clients paid for an annual subscription, although in the field the payment system was often in the pay-as-you-go format. With a vast number of pictures agencies in the market, clients, at the time of my observations, preferred not to commit annually to just one or two picture suppliers but rather to receive pictures from a variety of sources to choose from daily. On the other hand, the pay-as-you-go system was relatively more expensive and allowed little control when it comes to managing the ­annual expenses; it was thus less favorable in times of financial uncertainty. Either way, payment was based on the particular use of a single picture, its circulation, and form of publication. Time magazine, for example, would pay for the rights to publish a picture in the magazine and would have to pay an additional fee for extended rights in order to publish the same picture on, say, the magazine’s website. If, however, an

128  The Production Process II advertising agency wanted to use a picture for a certain campaign, the payment calculation would then be based on the number of countries it would run in, the number of papers it would be circulated in, and the picture’s size. The price of the agency’s pictures was confidential. Then again, since the agency is working internationally, and since the business of selling pictures to an international market is highly complex, it was hard to name the price of a single agency picture, since prices significantly vary: A newspaper with a circulation of 100,000 copies in, say, Romania might be charged about €2,000 but the price would probably be quite different for London’s Times. In Nigeria, the cost would be considerably smaller, while in Japan it may rise up to 10 or 15 times more, and there is also the issue of currencies. While Sales agents were signing contracts with clients, payment was monitored via the company’s bookkeepers. Clients subscribed annually received a monthly invoice as if it were a cell phone company’s. Clients paying per picture, however, received an automated invoice via the archive once a picture was used. Sales were keeping records as well, but mostly focused on the revenues received from each picture: how many pictures were sold; which ones were sold well; or simply information on a specific picture that was sold to several magazines. All and all, in Pictures Sales, the moto was quite straight forward: It was either looking for new clients to sign or keeping the business flowing with existing ones.

Final Stop (II): The Client’s End, The Case of The Guardian “We’re on!” said Roger, head of photography, to his deputy Greg as they walked into an icy boardroom surrounded with glass walls and sat amongst The Guardian’s heads of departments. Greg immediately started working on the flat screen so it would not crash on money-time. A few minutes later, the editors would start pitching their stories for tomorrow’s paper one by one as they all took a peek at the “Guardian’s news list – Monday for Tuesday 13” and looked at the next day’s “flat plan”. A few potential stories appeared under breaking news (e.g., “The ­government publishes radical NHS reform plan” or “Police hurt in N Ireland clashes as marching season ends”), and the list was covered with possible angles on how to deal with these in the next day’s paper. Under the NHS story, for example, it said “Key points, scrutiny on patient death rates, case study from US experience, FAQ – what does it mean for doctors”, and under “Crunch day at Synod for women bishops deal” it said “FAQ? Case study?”. In the 10:00 meeting, the news list was covered with question marks, and signs were showing that this was going to be a busy day, but it was still early.

The Production Process II  129 Roger seemed highly focused but also relaxed; he had been around, and when it was time for Pictures to do their magic he was quiet, letting the pictures do the talking. Besides, at that time of day, he already knew this hardly made any difference. With the live pictures’ bin updated by the minute, most of the pictures that would be pitched at the meeting would soon be forgotten and not make it to the paper – perhaps two to three out of about 15, a double-spread if they were really lucky. The next day it appeared their hunch was right: The double-spread was taken by a picture of six-year-old boys and girls racing horses in the Naadam festival in Mongolia, which was shot by The Guardian’s Dan Chung and pitched the day before. Sometimes great pictures were identified early in the morning; at other times, they were not. By 15:45, just when things got serious, the Mongolian picture was already ancient history, and Fiona, the paper’s picture editor for that day, was looking for something “fantabulous” for the next one. Unlike Roger, she seemed nervous, and for the 16:00 meeting, when the editor gave his queue, she rushed in thinking out loud “I’m not ready!”. Roger watched from the side and seemed to know exactly what she was going through. Unlike the case in most jobs, he explained, it is the weaker days, when nothing happens, that are feared the most on the pictures desk. A new building welcomed The Guardian and the Observer. Both papers had been operating for some time (the Observer since 1791, The Guardian, 1821). Although stemming from slightly different perspectives in their early years (promoting a liberal interest in Manchester and maintaining a radical editorial tradition ever since for The Guardian; the Observer was originally conceived as a way of making a fortune for its founder), the two slowly became the representatives of Britain’s liberal voice while facing similar financial concerns. With The Guardian struggling against the Daily Telegraph and the Times, and especially after the launch of the young and innovative Independent in 1986, the British quality press market has been through rocky grounds over the last few decades, and during the 1990s the four (including the Observer) battled to survive a price war launched by an aggressive News International. The Guardian has managed to maintain a relatively steady income from elsewhere, although it was hit by the successful Independent as well, and has increased its circulation with apparently strong marketing. With the Observer pressured by the Independent, particularly by its Independent on Sunday paper, and with the lack of resources to compete, a potential merger was already in the air only to get picked by The Guardian in 1993; the benefits of having a Sunday paper of its own were probably realized by its managers. Nonetheless, the merger was said not to have affected the Observer’s editorial independence, and its liberal tradition was unharmed.34 Apart from the common ownership, the two papers were entirely independent in terms of operations and were placed in two separate

130  The Production Process II buildings up until a few years ago, when pressure on revenues and the move to a new building had led to a stronger integration of the papers and the website. While in other departments the process of integration was rather complicated, the new structure of the papers’ picture management was decided pretty quickly, partly because of a strong personal relationship between the two heads – Greg Whitmore and I sat down and decided that I would be the head of photography and he would be deputy [...] I suppose that’s because I had been here longer and seemed to be in a more senior role to him, being on the daily paper [...] other departments, like Sports or City, had to sort out who’s going to be the top dog because there’s a web editor, a newspaper editor, a Guardian editor and an Observer editor for all those sections [...] in our case we just went down to the pub and decided that’s what we would like to do [...].35 The Observer was supposed to feed into The Guardian’s website, although it was said to have very little separate online identity left. Both papers were completely separated in terms of production, but this did not reflect the situation in terms of news stories daily. If, for instance, a foreign story got commissioned on a Monday, it might end up on The Guardian on Saturday or on the Observer on a Sunday, so there was constant sharing of pictures and stories between the two. The Observer’s pictures operation, for that matter, ran a completely independent process as well, although both branches used the same pictures’ live resources and shared their own shot pictures daily. And even though the new building was meant to bring everyone closer, the Observer’s pictures operation was located at the end of a long corridor away from The Guardian’s, and I was told it would have been more reasonable if all Pictures personnel sat together daily. On the other hand, at the time of my observations, the managing director positioned at the top was ex-Observer, and she was described to me as bringing some ‘Observer baggage’ with her. Merging clearly takes time. At the time of my observations, the pictures operation was run by the head of photography and his deputies (one from The Guardian and one from the Observer). Then, on The Guardian’s side, the daily work was divided between senior picture editors (one for the paper, known as g1, and one for the website); several picture editors (working for the paper, for the website, for features, for sections g2 and g3, Arts, Sports, the Guide, and the weekend Magazine); several assistant picture editors; and several picture researchers. Apart from the editors, there were five staff photographers working for the department daily (four located in London and one in the Midlands) and about 20 freelance contract photographers working both for The Guardian and the Observer.

The Production Process II  131 Most of the editors’ daily routine was based on live pictures flowing in that were browsed in a bin. These got updated continuously and added up to about 15,000–20,000 pictures on a regular day – from agencies’ pictures to pictures received from freelance photographers and staff. Although received from several agencies, all the pictures appeared in the bin as one big group, and it appeared there was no concrete information on exactly how many pictures were received from each agency, simply because this was irrelevant for the daily routine – We don’t have any idea […] how many [pictures] we receive from each [...] what’s slightly worrying is that when one of the agencies goes down, we don’t realize because so much other stuff is filling in [...].36 About 70% of the pictures published daily by The Guardian were agencies’, and about 30% were received from commissioned freelance photographers (with a very small percentage of pictures taken by the paper’s own staff photographers). The paper had different contracts with each agency, although there was also a certain amount of mutual collaboration involved ‘under the table’. When the department had major cuts in its budget, for instance, it decided not to renew the subscription with EPA (the European Pressphoto Agency).37 Eventually, EPA agreed to postpone the payment for six months if only to keep The Guardian on board and its pictures in the paper. At the time of my observations, the paper’s circulation was about 300,000 on a regular day (and kept “dropping”), and about 500,000 on a Saturday. In 2010, it went even below this, partly because management decided to stop giving away papers; these were called Bulk sales, such as free papers given to different flight companies, and I was notified that some papers added those giveaways to their daily circulation (e.g., the Telegraph, which, as I was told by The Guardian’s people, apparently added about 60,000 of these for its daily circulation numbers). The department’s financial condition was said not to have been deeply affected by the recent credit crunch (apparently the budget has even slightly increased). However, the department did not commission pictures as much as it used to simply because these were no longer required, having agencies’ pictures constantly flowing in. In addition, the paper was edited in a very short period of time during the afternoon, and, as far as editing a paper was concerned, there was really no sense of loyalty to commissioned photographers – [...] We haven’t got much time to react to different things. There’s also the issue over loyalty and wastage. Even if we commission something, the guys downstairs don’t really give a damn where it comes from. If they really like something and it happens to be from an agency they’ll use it.38

132  The Production Process II At the time of my observations, there was an ongoing debate in the ­department about how necessary commissioned assignments really were. For if individual photographers were said to have little contribution to the daily volume of pictures, and agencies’ pictures were usually ­preferred (the photographers would then receive an apology the next morning), commissioned pictures seemed pointless to some on the desk (even though these were still used daily in Features). Some of these contract photographers would probably be laid off very soon, although, if the budget permitted, they might be used for other things in the future as well (e.g., video and multimedia), since the paper was heading online and a whole range of new possibilities were heading its way – The paper is just a paper; we already know how to do that for the past 200 years [...] the website is about different things. We need video, we need to author our own video; we would like to see more slide shows, and there will be much more space to fill [...] the website is just infinitely big.39 The fact that The Guardian was mostly using agencies’ pictures in its daily operations comes to show how important is the role played by the agencies along the worldwide circulation of pictures, and their unchallengeable dominancy over the pictures market. At the same time, however, clients are still playing an important part in the entire production system and would surely continue to influence the process as well: The Guardian, as it was demonstrated, was subscribed to the services of a number of agencies and thus retained control over the ability to select the best pictures available, regardless of whether these were, say, ­Reuters’ or APs, and such was the case with EPA. A circular process with bidirectional relationships of cause and effect between clients and agencies is in play. Pictures were selected because they were ‘great’, but because they also matched certain layout requirements. The paper’s pages, for instance, were designed to have several ads in a page rather than a full page dedicated to a single advertisement. In addition, the department was also forced to have its pictures in certain designs and shapes so that these would fit perfectly with the paper’s design – its “flat plan”. Thus, the front page’s picture, for example, would quite often have an upright shape and in many cases would have a figure on it as well. These were preferred since they allowed for a lead story on the sides, which appeared to be taken ‘quite strong’ in terms of design. In addition, so I was told, it would also catch the eye when the paper was folded in two as it was sold in the stores, and a person on the front was also found to make it easier for people to engage with. In Pictures, however, things were seen differently, and upright-shaped images were found less interesting (“we get a bit bored with this shape [...]”).40

The Production Process II  133 Overall, the design of the paper (g1) was made in blocks – a particular structure of slots whereby the pictures were plugged into daily, as long as they fit the section’s theme and applied for the specific requirements of design (e.g., if there was an upright picture on a certain page, the one on the next page would have to be in a different shape). The selected news pictures were often the result of functional ­considerations dictated by the organization’s need for routine and its impact. Sometimes it is about the strict rules of design in order to encourage commerce (attract advertisers, catch the reader’s eye) for the sake of profit (Picard, 2004). Not long ago, the rationale behind the arrangement of pictures in the paper was that the reader would go ‘up and down’ the volume scale. Thus, whenever there was a big story, it was also emphasized by the size of the picture on the page and used as a contrast to smaller stories with small sized pictures on others. For example, there used to be a “bigish” displayed general news feature picture in page 3; then the first National page (4) would have a picture with a “fairly big” display; then a few “quiet” ones and a “big” one in National 9. However, ever since the new editor was in position, the rules were changed and so was the paper’s design structure. Thus, under the previous g1 editor, for that matter, there was a “light & shade” or “vanilla & display” concept, whereas the new editor of the paper apparently preferred big displayed pictures on every page. Newspapers are perhaps important for the existence of democracy, but this does not necessarily mean that they are run like one – What you need to remember is that newspapers are run by dictators. There’s a big dictator who’s the editor, there’s a slightly smaller dictator who’s the deputy editor who runs the paper and what they say just goes.41 The complex selection process of visuals to include in the paper, pointed Pogliano (2015), is an interpretive operation that expresses contested points of view between the paper’s editorial board and its head of ­photography, and so is the pictures’ form of display. The organizational structure also had major effects on the daily routine of pictures. Thus, for example, one of the things that bothered the pictures editors was the absence of an art director. Not long ago, the position was cut, so there was no one from above who looked at things in a creative way, while the head of photography did not poses enough political power upstairs. Once again, the struggle over status and control in the name of taste within the organization and differences between varying occupational communities come into play: The Guardian’s head of photography longs for how things were done not long ago instead of the current model that was pushed by the new editor. Now it is the “dictators” (i.e., the editor and his deputy, representing the higher levels

134  The Production Process II of management) versus the commoners (he was only the head of photography) who lost power ever since the ‘middle man’ (the art director) was gone. The smaller pictures on the paper were called Mods and the really tiny ones – Gizmos. Sometimes Gizmos appeared as pictures, but in many cases, they simply ended up in the form of graphic figures alongside a story. Quite often, the decision on whether to put a graphic figure instead of a picture Gizmo was a financial one, simply because pictures cost money to publish and graphics were free (e.g., a live news picture received by the paper from a non-subscription source, say from South West News that is placed in Bristol, would cost a minimum of £150 to use). Cost was therefore taken carefully into account when deciding which pictures to use. The rationale in Pictures was to save money whenever possible in order to have the option to pay more for important stories and commission necessary assignments in the future (Figure 3.11). The decision over which pictures to put in tomorrow’s paper was based on a number of factors: A hard news event obviously required a picture, and the best ones were described to me as those having a rare combination of news value and aesthetics. Aesthetically, a ‘great’ Guardian picture, according to its head of photography, was that which was more graphic and clean, with no text in it – “square on”, like, for example, the picture showing just the hand holding the famous red budget briefcasewhen the new national yearly budget was announced (“we did that 15 years ago [...]”).42 Or, when the story on the Church of England moving closer to ordaining women bishops broke, and a full shot upright picture of Archbishop Rowan Williams while he was walking was eventually chosen for the front page. Although an additional picture showing only the Archbishop’s sandals was said by the head of photography to have been a better Guardian one – “clever”, making the reader intrigued, amused (since “there’s something really odd about seeing an Archbishop wearing leather sandals [...]”).43 Such features, so I was told, reflected the old days, when reproduction was not that good and the old design had harsher rules. Graphic pictures were then often preferred in order to cope with the strict rules of design. Nonetheless, often there were disputes on which pictures to select for tomorrow’s paper. Quite similar to how things were done on the agency’s global pictures desk throughout the selection of Top Pix, The Guardian’s pictures style too came in different shapes, sizes, and colors, and it was up to the editors’ taste to make the right choice (which was quite often struggled over) throughout the selection process (“it used to be more simple, we used to be just three [picture editors], now we’re like thirty [...]”).44 On the website, however, things were different, mainly since, on the web, the pictures were constantly changing. Thus, the web picture editors would put in pretty much whatever they liked without having

The Production Process II  135

Figure 3.11  Gizmos: Pictures cost money, graphic figures are free.

to negotiate with other editors. Picture editors for the website mostly focused on creating different picture galleries and making audio slide shows, while single pictures attached to the text stories on the web were actually chosen and pinned by subeditors, who dealt with caption corrections and text (i.e., making sure it was The Guardian’s style, or put a link sentence to a story) and were not part of the pictures department at all (although, whenever subs were busy, picture editors chose the pictures for the web themselves). This was because the website grew up without pictures people on it, but also because it was much faster since the process did not have to go through the pictures department first.45 A good Guardian caption that was created by the web picture editor was said to be able to, [...] Add something extra to the story, not just repeat what is on the headline or repeat some text, and there is the strong linking part between the visual picture and the text as well.46 While the busiest time during the day for the paper was in the evening and closer to the deadline (about 20:30), on the web it was the other way around. The main volume here was during morning time and the work

136  The Production Process II then peaked again after lunchtime. Furthermore, while the pictures eventually chosen for the paper were there to stay, the pictures on the website were constantly changing given the possibilities on the web, and so the same news article on the website would probably be accompanied by different pictures during the day, since the live bin was constantly updated and better pictures would turn up. During a regular shift, the web picture editor responded to e-mails and requests for specific galleries. At about 9:15 there was a news meeting with all the different editors working on the web (site editors), ­making sure there were no clashes, and requests came up during the meeting as well (e.g., ideas for picture galleries, which might be suitable for a certain section on the web). Picture galleries were usually based on live news pictures flowing in, although some were part of ongoing projects. On a regular day, a picture editor created three to four galleries and up to about six galleries on a busy one, with an average of 15 pictures to work on each. Live news galleries were based on the news stories of the day and were chosen during the morning meeting. Some news stories were left without a picture gallery attached to them since they were not that ‘visual’; because there were no pictures to work with; or simply because web picture editors found them boring. Picture editors are also picture consumers, and while some pictures were found visually captivating and made an agency’s editor go “wow!” (e.g., the editor selecting Top Pix for the agency on the global pictures desk), others were spiked simply because they were ‘boring’ to a Guardian’s eye. Galleries pictures were usually selected from the daily live pictures arsenal. Using a gallery building tool (an internal addition for the software), the pictures were then dragged, captioned, and added to a gallery with a ‘stand first’ as well (a kind of a headline for each picture). Then they were sent to the subeditors (about 300 from both papers, including web and paper) whose job was to make sure there was nothing wrong with the text in the captions and also to keep it consistent with The Guardian’s way (e.g., written in a different spelling style or dated differently by the agencies).47 If a picture was ‘flat’, required cropping or color adjustments, these could be done straight from the software. Finally, in case a picture from a gallery was picked later to become a standalone picture attached to an article, it would probably go through a set of crops within the limits of a predefined set of sizes. As in the paper, agency pictures were also preferred for the website’s daily use. However due to a strict online budget limit, and apart from rare occasions, the web’s picture editors were limited to use pictures only from the following agencies: Reuters, AP, AFP, EPA, PA, Getty, Corbis, Rex, and Alamy. Pictures were chosen for the web usually when they stood out, caught the eye, and their selection was usually based on the limits of display on the web (i.e., pictures that were not too messy, as a paper’s senior picture editor on the website explained to me during an

The Production Process II  137 interview, mostly since, in a gallery, the images were not in a huge size). Similar to how things were done in the paper, where pictures had to fit the strict rules of design, on the web desk it was all about the demands of the web platform. Some editors worked on specific sections both in the paper and on the web. A features picture editor, for instance, was responsible for the feature section (g2) and its main story with pictures, as well as every weekly feature section of the paper, such as Women, Food, Health, or Games. All of these pictures were chosen from a wide range of sources (e.g., agency pictures, commissioned pictures, a certain publisher, even a PR company). And even though the editor mainly worked for the paper, she often tried to make sure each picture could be used by the website as well, and she sometimes worked on live news pictures and tried to choose different pictures from the ones used by the g1 section. During the day, she received e-mails and requests from departments (e.g., a story someone saw online). Then she would contact the photographers and explain that she liked to use their pictures both for the paper and for the website. She also dealt with payment, and even though the paper had strict rates, occasionally individual photographers might not be satisfied, and so she also negotiated over a fee if it was necessary. ­Pictures were usually paid for by size, and so every picture up to five inches in size would cost about £150, and its price would rise depending on the size of reproduction. A commissioned assignment made by a freelance photographer, for instance, might cost about £180. A picture received by an agency of which the paper was not subscribed to its services might cost about £68 per picture, and the price would rise up to about £600 per picture if, say, it was a studio shoot of ‘A list’ celebrities who did not want to have their picture taken (in which case the editor would try to persuade them) and even more. Although, photographers were usually not able to sell their pictures to The Guardian for huge fees, as I was told by the paper’s features picture editor, simply because The Guardian was not considered that kind of an organization and had little resources at hand. Apart from daily requests, the features editor also worked on future projects, like special issues, for which she had about two weeks to think of the most suitable pictures. Working on a special issue, as I was told by the features editor, was just like creating a storyboard in the editor’s head, thereby having to think on how to address the structure that is based on particular themes and plan in advance. At about noon, a quick production meeting usually took place, during which the editor of the section, the subeditors, and the picture editors went over the pictures flowing in that day. On a regular day, these might be several stories for which the features and section’s editors had to decide what pictures to use (e.g., a cover story on the Gates foundation, South Africa, and the World Cup and what its legacy would be, or a regular arts section). For

138  The Production Process II a features story on a regular day, the features editor might present a selection of about 40–60 pictures to the designer and the editor, although for a major news event she might end up with a selection of about 200 pictures altogether. Communication between the departments was done electronically. After receiving the story, the editor would peek at the ‘visual design plan’ in order to understand the design requirements for a page or a section (although these might also change during the day). She then decided which pictures might be perfect to go with them, created a selection of folders accessible to the editors, the subeditors, and the designer who worked on the page, and dropped her choice of pictures’ selection in the particular folders based on the particular demands of the editors; they would then choose from her selection. Sometimes the editors might not like the pictures they were offered, and then the features picture editor either looked for new pictures or negotiated if she thought these were the best ones available. Putting the story aside, the features picture editor explained to me during an ­interview what her idea was for ‘great’ pictures – simple, clean, and elegant. These, she continued, also need to be relevant and, at the end of the day, look good on a page or online (Figure 3.12). The numbers between commissioned pictures and agencies’ that were eventually chosen in Features were equal, leaning slightly in favor of the latter (mainly because commissioned pictures were used in bigger sizes). And apart from creating galleries for the editors and the designers, and working on the different sections to choose from, the features picture editor also took care of little things (“housekeeping”) later during the day: making sure the credits were correct, that cropping was done properly, and more.

Figure 3.12  T he visual design plan for g2, The Guardian (London, 2010).

The Production Process II  139 The desk also used archived pictures, particularly in the Arts ­section. ­ rojects, Most of the work in Arts was based on illustrations, ongoing p and events known in advance. Even though the arts picture editor and her team in both papers might use pictures that just came in (e.g., looking for a relevant picture to go with a book review on, say, the war in Iraq or Afghanistan), most of the materials could easily be traced in the archives. During her daily work, The Guardian’s arts pictures editor organized photo shoots, dealt with pictures related to the critics sections and reviews of both The Guardian and the Observer (about 3–4 per day), and had a number of ongoing projects to work on in advance. She also handled the books sections of The Guardian and the Observer and commissioned portraits of actors, artists, and musicians. Each day, several hundred pictures were browsed through the archive, and while most of the published pictures were commissioned (when only some were archive pictures or photos sourced from photo libraries and PR companies, e.g., from films or plays), only about 8–12 pictures eventually made it to the g2 arts pages per day and about 12 to the reviews page per week (or two per day at the back of the main section of the paper). Different pictures are required for particular assignments. With books, it was about choosing the right illustration, depending on the subject of the book. A history book, for example, might be accompanied by a historical or a commissioned picture, and at other times a more abstract picture might do the trick. In order to organize photo shoots, the editor mostly dealt with PR companies and theatres or museums over issues such as access or even copyrights (e.g., if it was a shoot of a Picasso painting). Commissioning a photo shoot for the arts was usually not that difficult to execute in terms of preproduction, since, unlike the case with hard news events, most of the information was known in advance (e.g., a new gallery opening, a play, or a concert), and some were usually done by specific contract photographers who happened to have very strong connections in the business (e.g., with theatres). In many cases, the photographers were often invited before the event had begun and had enough time to prepare for their shoot; these were known as ‘photo calls’. However, at the time of my observations I was told by an assistant picture editor that many institutions were less fond of ‘photo calls’; they preferred to have their own photographers do the shoot, thereby retaining more control over the final outcome despite the papers’ view (“we usually like to have our own mark […]”).48 Struggling over who controls the production process takes place between departments and personnel inside the news organization, but also between the news organization and public institutions, each fighting to have its mark. When the daily live bin was constantly updated and editors had no way of knowing whether the best pictures were yet to come, the editors relied on stored pictures and could easily circle an entire theme browsing through a number of archives. Unlike the live bin where all the daily

140  The Production Process II pictures were received, here the editor could make a search using keywords and thus locate a particular picture within seconds (e.g., slicing a search while defining specific regions such as Europe, or pictures only from particular countries around the world). Whenever she needed to broaden her search in order to look for a particular picture, the editor searched in a number of archives the paper was subscribed to apart from The Guardian’s (often in the Reuters, AP, Getty, Corbis, and Rex’s archives). Having the option to choose pictures while browsing in a number of major archives was useful, for they all seemed to complete each other and provide a broader arsenal of pictures to choose from on a variety of subjects and themes. The Guardian, for instance, did not find the agency’s archive very useful when pictures from the UK were required apart from London, and these were often tracked down in other archives and vice versa. At the same time, however, some archives (e.g., the agency’s) were seen to be having similar aesthetic standards as The Guardian’s and were thus found useful for an assistant picture editor on the arts section – With The Guardian we don’t just want a straight forward photograph […] say, for instance, of a certain politician. We would like an angle on it […] when Tony Blair was the prime minister, for instance. I mean he was the prime minister for ten years, so you had to think ‘ok kind of a new and fresh way’ [...] the use of hand, a certain relation with space, or you just shot him from behind because he is such a familiar figure that we didn’t really need to see his face and I think they [the agency] understood those sensibilities […] they have got a similar aesthetics to The Guardian.49 Editors at the client’s end were shown to have control over the selection process. When glocal mechanisms were applied at the agency’s side in order to make its pictorial products internationally appealing and yet tailored for the needs of particular local clients, some of these were effective (e.g., when the editor refined her search using the agency’s favorite pictures of the week, or when she found the agency’s pictures ‘aesthetically similar’ to The Guardian’s view). The inside of The Guardian’s building and the meeting rooms, where editorial meetings took place, were dominated with glass and could be observed from the outside. Clearly, transparency was highly valued here, and this was also strongly felt with the accessibility of the archive. Thus, ­personnel working on the paper, whether from pictures or from other departments, could therefore easily access the live pictures bin and The Guardian’s ­pictures archive. Although, in order to archive new pictures, access applications applied to particular usernames were required, and ­information on who exactly had such privileged authority remained obscure.

The Production Process II  141 The computerized archive was established here in 1998 and has been building up ever since. At the time of my observations, it contained an entire range of pictures stored in it – whether taken by the papers’ own photographers, contract freelance photographers, or simply ­agencies’ pictures that were received on the live bin and were then ‘secretly’ archived (I was informed, for example, that the paper was holding lots of agency pictures in its archive that it should not have, because it is against its contracts). Clearly, secretly storing agencies’ pictures in the archive was not favored by the agencies; it meant the paper could use them in the future without having to pay an extra fee. At the same time, however, I was notified that this kind of archiving system in the paper was in fact very useful: Choosing a picture from the paper’s archive and having it published was often much quicker than having to search and download one from an agency website and then having to deal with payment procedures for its use. Apparently, this was also useful for certain legal reasons. In the past, there used to be people whose job was to maintain the archive and add keywords, but such a position no longer existed; this was mainly due to cost, but also since keyword labor was found useless on the desk. How were pictures categorized and stored on the paper’s archive? All and all, there was not really a well-structured system for archiving pictures in The Guardian; pictures were stored on the basis of personal taste, their categorizing was based on their captions alone, and they were all placed in a single bin. Searching pictures from, say, “9/11”, a picture editor would probably plug in “September 11” or simply “New York”. Surprisingly, such an ‘unorganized’ archiving system of pictures seemed to be making perfect sense on The Guardian’s desk, simply since this was found to be more efficient for the desk’s daily routine – [...] You need a really general look; because there could be things which are excluded whenever you restrict your search with a specific keyword, and you don’t want to exclude anything [...] you may get new ideas from those pictures you see. 50 Indeed, browsing through 500 pictures instead of just a couple would certainly take more time, but it could eventually turn out worthwhile after all.51 At the same time, archiving was not taken very seriously here, mainly since the business was said to have slightly changed; whenever a current event required the use of pictures taken in the past (e.g., when certain politicians had died and a story required pictures of them from the past), these usually turned up by the agencies on the live bin anyhow. Whenever an agency picture was located in the papers’ archive and was then published, as I was informed, the agencies, on their side, tended to ‘turn a blind eye’ (since, apparently, all the papers do it, and the agencies know it). This was because the papers’ annual subscriptions included

142  The Production Process II the possibility of downloading pictures from their archives and so, in a way, reusing these pictures was already paid for. Also, monitoring such a process from the agencies’ side was almost impossible to execute. So, creative solutions were necessary in The Guardian to fight cuts and losses, and these were applied at the pictures operations as well: Gizmos graphic figures, for example, were often preferred over pictures simply because these were free; and no one was left to handle the archive, categorize pictures, or create keywords because searching was said to be working better when it allowed a more ‘general look’, but also since archived pictures were received from the agencies anyhow whenever such images were required.52 Agencies’ pictures were archived here without permission and could therefore be used time and time again, simply because it was extremely difficult for the agencies to monitor the process and since all the papers were doing it. Having the agencies ‘turn a blind eye’, on the other hand, may suggest that this bidirectional relationship was fruitful for both sides and shows that clients were constantly fought for in this highly competitive market because agencies eventually need clients in order to survive. The International Desk: How Well Did We Do? Amongst the crowded agency news room in London, hidden between the different stations of Text and TV, was the agency’s pictures’ International desk. Although relatively small in size, and not really operating as a department (it was called a “management desk” by its operators), the desk’s daily routine was extremely significant for the overall process; its editors dealt with quality control and made sure the different bureaus around the world were internationally synchronized. The work on the desk was executed by several editors: the global pictures editor; the senior editor-in-charge; the global sports editor; the EMEA (Europe, Middle East, and Africa) assignments editor; the chief photographer for Africa and the Middle East; the production editor; and the magazine editor, who had recently joined the desk after working from Paris. Even though the work of some editors on the desk was regionally focused (those responsible for Europe, the Middle East, and Africa), the main task on the desk was to monitor the international daily work of the pictures service, and therefore most of the service’s ‘global’ positions (e.g., the magazine editor, the global sports editor, and the global pictures editor himself) were positioned here as well. The work on the desk, put simply, was aimed at keeping things in order, to make sure the ‘global’ machine was working properly. The editors were in charge of planning the coverage of global sports events, logistics, and negotiations with the events’ organizers. They were accountable for speed and efficiency, focused on new equipment and technology globally and contacted the different companies in case certain problems occurred

The Production Process II  143 on international scale. They made sure the electronic diary was updated with the different events that were covered by the different bureaus and that it worked properly at all times. They dealt with delicate matters (e.g., pictures that were unacceptable in certain countries and could therefore cause some problems if sent directly to clients in particular regions; a problematic caption in terms of legal issues; or a spiked picture that accidentally went through) and bureaucracy, and regularly updated the guiding books. Overall, the main goal on the desk was to make sure clients received the best product. Thus, on a daily basis, the editors browsed through the pictures’ File, went over the Singapore reports made by the EICs, and contacted the global pictures desk in case a certain picture looked a bit unusual or was simply sent to the wrong place. In addition, the editors also went over a variety of daily papers (from tabloids to quality papers) and made a daily list of all highlight events – “Highlights” (e.g., “Iraq-deadly attacks”), which were expected to be covered by the agency during the day (although here the list was only based on events occurring in Europe, the Middle East, and Africa; similar lists were compiled in Singapore for Asia and in Washington for the Americas). The news stories that appeared on the outlook were listed in an order of importance; Entertainment or Sports stories appeared in a separate group. And while a similar list was compiled in TV and was also sent to clients, the pictures’ Highlights list was distributed to particular agency bureaus only, simply because not all listed events were eventually covered by the agency. Thus, explained to me one of the international desk’s senior EIC’s during an interview, if, for example, the Paris bureau said they were covering a demonstration by the Eiffel tower and then something else would occur, they would change their original plan and cover it. All and all, he continued, the idea here was that they, on the desk, did not want clients to think they were definitely covering the particular events on the list since, at the end of the day, it is all moveable, and that is really the whole nature of news.53 The list of the day’s events was based on raw information flowing in from the bureaus – from the bottom up – which, in turn, was sent back to the bureaus in the form of ‘big stories’ to cover, the dominants (Gürsel, 2016). Sometimes desk editors decided a story was worth covering – say, the prices of gold going through the roof. In such cases, then, the story was immediately pinned on the international outlook, and requests for pictures of, for instance, gold, of people selling gold, or of gold dug out of the ground were sent to the local bureaus as well. And even though ‘big stories’ occur in particular regions, the list was primarily aimed globally. Thus, explained the desk’s senior EIC, those editors who were putting that list of stories of what they wanted to report on together had to think not too locally. Rather, they were told to think about ‘big world stories’, even when these did not have much play in the UK or in Europe, as ‘global’ as possible.

144  The Production Process II Nonetheless, some stories did not get covered after all, even if they were deemed important to the international desk’s editors. This was mainly due to the daily schedule of the picture departments at the local bureaus. And, of course, there were also certain limitations that had to be taken under consideration in a given day (e.g., insufficient man power). Thus, a discussion between the international desk and the local bureau about which daily ‘big’ events required coverage and which could be ignored was often conducted. The needs of the international market were thought of at all times: Editors monitored the traffic of possible ‘sensitive’ pictures, problematic captions, or ‘unusual’ pictures sent to the ‘wrong place’ as part of their daily routine. At the same time, they tried to hit ‘big stories’ which might work better internationally and not to think too locally when the daily list of stories to cover was compiled. Apart from the Highlights list, an additional list of yesterday’s biggest stories – the Impact, was also compiled. These stories appeared in the form of a short header (e.g., “Conflict in Sri Lanka”; “Elections in India”; or “Elections in South Africa”) and were chosen by the editors on the international desk, although the list was flexible and therefore changed according to the information received from the local bureaus: Certain events, for that matter, could have seemed irrelevant to the international desk’s editors, even though these were considered rather big on local scale, for example, and so these were added as well (e.g., an important local football match). Once the daily Impact list was compiled, it was then sent directly to the following bureaus around the world: L ­ ondon, Paris, Madrid, Berlin, Moscow, Zurich, Jerusalem, Dubai, Cairo, ­Beirut, Tokyo, Beijing, Singapore, Seoul, San Paulo, Buenos Aires, Mexico City, Johannesburg, Washington, and Sidney. The reason why the list was sent only to these particular bureaus was mainly because they were taken to be ‘good’ world representatives, and so the Impact information that was gathered from them was seen to provide a relatively good impression on how the agency did worldwide. Moreover, at the time of my observations, many newspapers did not bother to credit pictures at all in certain countries (I was informed, for example, that this was the case with many papers in Italy that were well known for this), thereby making the Impact process extremely difficult to execute and also highly time-consuming in such countries, and so that is why these were also not included in the list (Gürsel briefly describes a similar process to Impact – “play reports”, at AFP. See Gürsel, 2012, 2016). The Impact process was done from Monday to Friday and whenever major events occurred, such as the Olympics or the World Cup, in which cases it was extremely important to know how well the agency did on, say, every single day of the event. The list of the bureaus was fixed, and the Impact information was received only from about seven to eight bureaus on the list. This was interesting: While some of the stories might have had greater impact in specific regions given their local affiliation

The Production Process II  145 (e.g., the baseball World Series in the US), other bureaus would probably come up with no pictures at all from these kinds of events. In a way, it might have worked better if the Impact information was gathered from all the selected bureaus daily, although this was mainly an issue of staffing. How did the Impact process work? Once the list of yesterday’s big stories was received locally, the local administrators or local picture editors went over the list and the main local papers and plugged in the numbers in a simple Excel table, whereby they compared how the agency did as opposed to its rivals. In the London bureau, for example, the Impact was based on the information gathered from four newspapers: the Telegraph; the Financial Times; The Guardian; and The Sun.54 Then, the editors simply plugged in the information on pictures that were attached to ‘big stories’ (as marked by the international desk) in the Excel table under AFP/Getty, Thomson Reuters, AP, EPA, and Other (e.g., if a picture that was published in, say, The Guardian that was attached to the “Conflict in Sri Lanka” story was one of the agency’s or perhaps taken by a different agency). When all the daily information was finally gathered, each Excel table was then sent back to the international desk and was published daily on the agency’s SharePoint software, whereby it could be accessed and reviewed by all of the agency’s photographers worldwide. Once a month, this information was then processed by a department whose job was to measure the successes and failures of the agency’s TV, Pictures, and Text services, and it was then calculated into a certain percentage to draw conclusions from.55 On average, the numbers were usually split equally between Thomson Reuters, Getty/AFP, and AP (about 30% each and 10% for Others); a bad percentage immediately required an internal inquiry. Quite often, during ‘big’ stories, the Impact was strongly felt on the desk even before the actual tables were received, and so resulted in a quick response. In cases when the agency did not do well on a particular story, a chief photographer (either local or regional) was immediately contacted. Chiefs were often the experts when it came to the coverage in the field within their region. They were also the first to know whether something was missed; whether things went wrong at the scene of events (which might have affected a particular shooting); or simply that the agency did not perform well in the coverage of a particular event. Even though the Impact information was only gathered from newspapers and not from other clients, such as websites, it still provided a relatively good impression on the spot and allowed for fast changes in the routine to take place. Thus, explained to me one of the desk’s senior editors during an interview, while the newspapers were only part of the agency’s client base, they were taken by the agency as the most immediate vehicle for the presentation of the agency’s pictures, so this

146  The Production Process II gave the agency a rather clear view on things: If, for example, their pictures were on the front page of every UK newspaper, he continued, this was clearly a good day. On the other hand, if it was a picture of one of their rivals and a huge story, say a bomb blast in Madrid, and a competing agency had every single picture in a front page, then they would want to know what made them lose the daily competition – ­perhaps their photographer arrived a bit late, maybe their pictures were not very good, etc. Losing out to other agencies in the daily coverage of events might be a matter of a millisecond, or sometimes even because a photographer had simply chosen a bad location. Example: A few years ago, the late pop singer, George Michael, appeared in a London court after he was accused of crashing his car into a London shop. The next day The ­Guardian published an AFP’s double spread picture of Michael stepping out of his car surrounded by a group of photographers and TV crews. Even though the agency’s picture of the event seemed promising to the international desk’s editor, he was surprised to find that the paper eventually decided to go with AFP’s picture. As it happened, one of the agencies’ pictures was indeed sent from the scene, but even though it was taken at the same time, the picture was shot from a different angle and so was found less suitable for The Guardian. In some cases, certain events that were ‘tested’ for Impact (e.g., a beach volleyball match) might have received zero results from all agencies, in which case this resulted in a decision to stop covering the event completely due to the lack of interest. The circle of production and its bidirectional connections also comes into play at different levels of operation – both within the organization and between its clients. To that end, the Impact list is also a good example of how news pictures are not only produced for publishing and are then left to ‘die’, but rather gathered back by pictures personnel – both by administrators and editors at the local levels of operations and by editors at the international desk – in the form of data on how well the service did ­compared to its rivals; these pictures are the footprints of future moments of production. There was a close relationship between the international desk and TV, and a daily meeting led by the international desk’s TV colleagues was shared with Pictures in order to exchange valuable information. Information was also provided by the TV personnel in Singapore via teleconference, and they all discussed the different stories of the day in turn. In fact, it appeared Pictures quite often had very little to contribute to such discussions, simply since they were said to be following TV. During the daily meeting, for example, the picture editors updated their planner on future dates and events and found out whether they could use potential grabs from the agency’s video footage. 56 And yet, some information from pictures was still found useful for TV as well every once and a while, as interesting information on particular events to cover was often

The Production Process II  147 gathered by TV as well (e.g., an air guitar championship in Finland, which might not be a big story but was considered a nice light one in the silly season, with possible good visuals). Sometimes pictures were received as handouts during the night and these were also shared with TV, having the potential to lead to a new story or simply to be used by TV as single pictures (e.g., a satellite image taken before and after the Pakistan floods that could be easily used in a particular TV feed). So sometimes news pictures were simply the result of collaboration with TV, whether in the form of information received on new events to cover or grabbed video frames. Then the daily work was updated with new stories that were delivered to the different bureaus around the world, and the agency’s local picture departments would start working on their execution. From product back to story, new visual ideas would soon be transcended into life (Figure 3.13). So, on the international levels of pictures operations, several forces seem to be governing the overall process: The international stages of production are pressured by functional issues and technical aspects

Figure 3.13  T  he agency’s pictures production cycle: From story to product, from product to story.

148  The Production Process II as dictated by the news organization’s need for routine. Working in a complex business environment, the agency had to adjust its process by producing glocal mechanisms, which, in turn, also reflected greatly on the overall organizational structure. Signs of struggle over power and control between different occupational communities and organizations are a significant factor. There is evidence of various circular structures with bidirectional connections of cause and effect. And the audience of consumers also plays a key role here. The two preceding chapters conclude the entire production cycle of the agency’s news pictures based on the daily routines and norms of practitioners at different moments and sites of production. How exactly these modes of production, norms and routines, pressures and conflicts, come into play in the coverage of particular news events is demonstrated up next, with an analysis of four particular events and their photographic coverage.

Notes 1 All but pictures that were taken in Germany, Austria, and Switzerland; these were sent to the Western Europe pictures desk located in Berlin during day time. In less ‘complex’ regions, or in countries with a ‘low working flow’ (where sometimes only a single agency photographer covered the entire news flow of events), certain photographers sent their pictures directly to Singapore. In somewhat ‘volatile’ regions (e.g., Israel and Palestine), pictures from big events went through the local bureau first, as did pictures taken by photographers with ‘poor’ caption writing skills. 2 Naming the desk ‘the Global pictures desk’ might suggest that it was meant to serve the international market (although, in terms of operations, certainly not more than the local sites of production), yet it is based on pictures flowing in from the local bureaus. The case is similar, both in structure and in process, with the International desk, which I also discuss in this chapter. 3 Surprisingly, a physical presence in an event, as it was seen by the editors at the global desk, could actually interfere with the witnessing experience; now that its ‘copy’ (the picture) is handled by a distanced editor, both in time and in space, it therefore receives more credibility and its witnessing value is increased (see Peters, 2001). 4 More on this in my analysis of Sales. 5 The sending procedure was based on regional locations, particular restrictions, and clients’ requests. See my discussion later in this chapter. 6 Some subeditors, however, did not move pictures at all and had different job descriptions given their particular positions (e.g., working on the magazine desk or the keyword team). 7 In 2010, AOL was also preferred as the best way to communicate with photographers since some were stringers/freelance and did not have access to the agency’s own application. 8 The PSED is an agency development used by its photographers for some time. In 2004, a new software called the Photomechanic was released and has been used by most of the agency’s photographers ever since, although the PSED was still used by photographers working with older laptop computers.

The Production Process II  149 In both cases, once a picture was sent by the photographer, it was transferred via the FTP into a huge server located in Singapore and was then automatically pushed to the MED and was ready to be checked and moved by the global pictures desk. 9 Paneikon clearly allowed the agency to have better temporal and spatial control (see Irby, 2007). In that sense, the development of Paneikon and its uses is also a good glocal mechanism in order to overcome the difficulties dictated by the needs of an international market and the inevitable limitations forced upon the industrial production of news pictures at its local sites of production. 10 Many of such pictures were received from North Korea, although quite often these were ‘badly photoshopped’ and were thus joked about on the desk. 11 “One person’s enhancement is another person’s alteration” (Cartright cited in Ritchin, 1999, p. 15). 12 See, for instance, its Neutral point of view (NPOV) as the guiding principal in Lih (2004). 13 More on these issues in Chapter 4, second event. 14 As part of the application process for new openings at the agency, language requirements are also serving as political tools. A position published by a certain head of bureau in a certain country, for instance, might seem as if it is open for all applicants, when it is, in fact, tailored to a particular candidate, should a certain manager wish for a particular staff position to be held by an applicant from his/her bureau, and might then use the language qualifications as leverage to pursue such a scheme. A position in the Jerusalem bureau that requires fluent Hebrew skills, for example, immediately eliminates non-Hebrew speakers and at the same time gives Israelis an advantage. However, some applicants might also be selected for a certain position despite their ‘poor’ language skills (office politics), while some employees are often required to study the local language after they have been selected and are sometimes being paid to do so by the agency. English speakers working in English speaking countries who only speak English are often considered good enough. However, should they desire to transfer to different positions in other countries, they would have to learn the local language (at least up to the level their job requires, depending on the particular position they have applied for). 15 Appadurai (1996) accepted the idea that there are indeed “stable” communities, but that the “warp of these stabilities is shot through with the woof of human motion” (p. 34). 16 Since clients were usually subscribed to the services of several agencies, they would receive up to 4,000 pictures per day. However, with the new option of Sup. Top Pix (added in 2009), ‘great’ pictures were thus easier to find, so the searching process was done faster at the clients’ end. 17 Photographers, it appears, are also aware of the Top Pix selection process early in the field. During my observations, for example, I was told of a photographer located in Gaza once, who joked with his fellow photographers at the fact that he was just about to shoot a ‘Top Pix’, by which he referred to a picture of a sunset. 18 In fact, Frosh mentions how, even in the case of stock images, the “repression of the indexical” is not entirely successful and that the dominance of generic encodings is threatened and challenged by the singularity of the referent (Frosh, 2003b, p. 98). 19 Although, like many other ‘professional’ photographers, the agency’s photographers always created series of pictures while covering a single event and

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20

21

22

23 24 25

26

27 28 29

30 31 32

thus can be seen as maintaining archiving techniques in the field at a very early stage of production. Barthes (1977a) refers to additional meanings once an image is juxtaposed with others as well. Nonetheless, weaving a story with the help of multiple pictures instead of a single one might also create an opposite reaction, hence forcing, to an extent, a rather closed and ‘individual’ reading of stories thereby turning them to be less appealing. These were considered relatively rare on the desk. In such cases, the restrictions would appear within the picture’s caption in the archive as well and would be removed once the period of exclusivity was expired (with, of course, a removal notification to Sales). Certain pictures were paid for their exclusive use by specific clients (e.g., a particular bank), and so their restrictions were renewed annually. Even though the MED was easy to view, editors on the magazine desk were sometimes not aware of certain restrictions attached to specific pictures (e.g., “No Archive” or “No Sales”), in which cases they were useless for the magazine’s use. Such restrictions often appeared on handouts (e.g., pictures received by the desk from certain organizations and national agencies) and could not be sold by the agency to clients. A picture shot from the back of an overweight woman sitting on a chair was the “Overweight”’s thumbnail; apparently it was the most sold picture on the agency’s archive. Sekula (2003) defines the taxonomic order as one which “[…] might be based on sponsorship, authorship, genre, technique, iconography, subject matter, and so on, depending on the range of the archive” (p. 446). Thus, demonstrates Frosh (2003b), “the photograph of a man proposing marriage to a woman on bended knee can be made to signify ‘romance’, ‘commitment’, ‘formality’ or even ‘courage’, depending on the context” (pp. 100–101). Planted pictures, explains Azoulay (2008), are those which cannot be e­ scaped and play an important role as part of the construction of our social experiences, for they are “[…] planted in the body, the consciousness, the memory, and their adoption is instantaneous, ruling out any opportunity of negotiations as regards what they show or their genealogy, their ownership or belonging” (p. 13). A successful keyword process depends on a common cultural background between the keyworders and their audience of clients (Kress and Van Leeuwen, 1998. See also Mitchell, 2003). This accords with the idea of news as sometimes being based on non-real occurrences (see, e.g., Seaton’s discussion on “Pseudo-events” in Curran and Seaton, 2003, pp. 336–337). Unlike pictures specialists, who were strictly responsible on the selling of pictures, accounting managers – the agency’s sales representatives – were mostly dealing with the selling of other agency media products and only occasionally sold pictures. Pictures specialists were therefore required to ­react far more quickly to daily news events around the world, and they would often ‘cover’ a number of countries in several regions in their daily routine. In that sense, sales representatives considered news similar to how it was perceived to newsmen – namely, a pure unbiased pursuit for facts in the search of some universal truth (Schudson, 1989). Certain clients in France and Germany did pay before receiving the pictures, depending on the nature of the business relationship between them and the agency. Although, since printing pictures is extremely expensive these days, this, I was told, would probably not last for long. Up until several years ago, printed pictures were also requested by several clients in Italy and France, although they have all switched to digital ever since. Given that special requests were

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33 34 35 36 37 38 39 40 41 42 43 4 4 45

46 47 48 49 50 51

52 53 54 55 56

still made by clients every once and a while, the agency still printed certain pictures as a matter of courtesy. Some individuals did receive special access, although this rarely happened and only in very rare occasions and under specific circumstances. See www.guardian.co.uk, 2010. Roger Tooth, Head of photography, The Guardian, a record of conversation, July 2010. Ibid. More on EPA in the concluding chapter. Ibid. Ibid. Ibid. Ibid. Ibid. Ibid. Ibid. The Guardian’s paper and website were only integrated a few years ago. Before that, the web had no room for picture editors on its budget. As a result of the integration, the contracts of many Observer’s and Guardian’s photographers were changed so that their materials were available for the website as well. Jonathan Casson, Head of production, The Guardian, a record of conversation, July 2010. Most of the editors’ queries were answered on “The Guardian writing style guide” that was available on the paper’s website. Helen Healy, Assistant picture editor, The Guardian, a record of conversation, July 2010. Ibid. Roger Tooth, Head of photography, The Guardian, a record of conversation, July 2010. There were, however, several themes which appeared to be slightly problematic in the archive. Plugging in “Tony Blair”, for instance, one would come up with about 5,000–7,000 pictures. This would obviously become a problem, since these pictures would have to be broken down to, say, specific years. Yet, as I was told, this rarely happened. When I mentioned once the operations of the agency’s keyword team, I was given the impression on the paper’s desk that this was simply a waste of money. A highlights list was sent to clients by the global pictures desk in Singapore, but only a small sample of events listed in the outlook by the international desk appeared under Singapore’s highlights. At the time of my observations, the local pictures department in London was based in a different building from where the international desk was operating. Apparently, there was a very good way of measuring the timing of text stories; competing neck to neck with other agencies, certain events (e.g., “Barak Obama wins the elections”) are highly time sensitive. A ‘grab’ was the term used to describe a single frame that was taken from a video footage and was then sent to clients as a single picture.

References Appadurai, A. (1996). Modernity at large: Cultural dimensions of globalization. Minneapolis, MN: University of Minnesota. Azoulay, A. (2008). The civil contract of photography. New York, NY: Zone books.

152  The Production Process II Barthes, R. (1977a). The Photographic message. In S. Heath (Ed.), Image, Music, Text (pp. 15–31). New York, NY: Hill and Wang. Barthes, R. (1977b). The third meaning: Research notes on some Eisenstein stills. In S. Heath (Ed.), Image-Music-Text (pp. 52–68). New York, NY: Hill and Yang. Becker, L. B. & Vlad, T. (2009). News organizations and routines. In K. Whal ­Jorgensen & T. Hanitzch (Eds.), The handbook of journalism studies (pp. 59–72). London, UK: Routledge. Benjamin, W. (1992). The work of art in the age of mechanical reproduction. In H. Arendt (Ed.), Illuminations (pp. 211–244). London, UK: Fontana. Bourdieu, P. (1986). Distinction: A social critique of the judgment of taste. ­London, UK: Routledge. Bryson, N. (1981). Word and Image. Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press. Cheeke, S. (2008). Writing for art: The aesthetics of ekphrasis. Manchester and New York: Manchester University Press. Curran, J. & Seaton, J. (2003). Power without responsibility (6th ed.). London, UK: Routledge. Deleuze, G. (1988/1986). Strata or historical formations: The visible and the articulable (knowledge). In: S. Hand (Ed. and Trans.), Foucault (pp. 47–69). Minnesota, MN: University of Minnesota Press. Eco, U. (1975). Looking for a logic of culture. In: T. A. Sebeok (Ed.), The Telltale sign: A survey of semiotics (pp. 9–17). Lisse, The Netherlands: The Peter de Ridder Press. Evans, H. (1997). Pictures on a page: Photo-journalism, graphics and picture editing. London, UK: Pimlico. Foucault, M. (1982). This is not a pipe. Berkeley, CA: University of California Press. Frosh, P. (2013). Beyond the image bank: Digital commercial photography. In M. Lister (Ed.), The photographic image in digital culture (2nd ed., pp. 131–148). London, UK: Routledge. Frosh, P. (2003a). Industrial ekphrasis: The dialectic of word and image in mass cultural production. Semiotica, 147(1/4), 241–264. Frosh, P. (2003b). The image factory: Consumer culture, photography and the visual content industry. London, UK: Berg. Gregory, K. (1983). Native-view paradigms: Multiple cultures and culture conflicts in organizations. Administrative Science Quarterly, 28(3), 359–376. Gürsel, Z. D. (2016). Image brokers: Visualizing world news in the age of digital circulation. Oakland, CA: University of California Press. Gürsel, Z. D. (2012). The politics of wire service photography: Infrastructures of representation in a digital newsroom. American Ethnologist, 39(1), 71–89. Hamilton, J. T. (2004). All the news that’s fit to sell: How the market transforms information into news. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press. Hampton, K. & Wellman, B. (2002). The not so global village of Netville. In B. Wellman & C. Haythornthwaite (Eds.), The Internet in everyday life (pp. 345–371). London: Blackwell publications. Heffernan, J. A. W. (1993). Museum of words: The poetics of ekphrasis from Homer to Ashbery. Chicago, IL: Chicago University Press. Herman, E. S. & Chomsky, N. (1988). Manufacturing consent. New York, NY: Pantheon.

The Production Process II  153 Heron, M. (2001). How to shoot stock photos that sell. New York, NY: Allworth Hogarth, P. (1986). The artist as reporter. London, UK: Gordon Fraser. Irby, K. (2007, February 3) “Super bowl XLI coverage: A new era with all the comforts of home”. Poynter. Retrieved from http://www.poynter.org/ uncategorized/80603/super-bowl-xli-coverage-a-new-era-with-all-the-comfortsof-home/#. Kress, G. & Van Leeuwen, T. (1998). Front pages: (The critical) analysis of newspaper layout. In: A. Bell & P. Garrett (Eds.), Approaches to media discourse (pp. 186–220). London, UK: Blackwell. Krieger, M. (1998). The problem of ekphrasis: Image and words, space and time – And the literary work. In: V. Robillard & E. Jongeneel (Eds.), Pictures into words: Theoretical and descriptive approaches to ekphrasis (pp. 3–19). Amsterdam: VU University Press. Lehman-Wilzig, S. N., & Seletzky, M. (2010). Hard news, soft news,’general’news: The necessity and utility of an intermediate classification. ­Journalism, 11(1), 37–56. Leong, S. T. (2009). A picture you already know. In A. Klein (Ed.), Words without pictures (pp. 250–262). Los Angeles, CA: Lacma. Lih, A. (2004, April 16–17). Wikipedia as participatory journalism: R ­ eliable sources? Metrics for evaluating collaborative media as a news source. ­Proceedings of the 5th International Symposium on On-line Journalism. Austin, TX. 1–31. Retrieved from http://online.journalism.utexas.edu/2004/ papers/wikipedia.pdf Mäenpää, J. (2014). Rethinking photojournalism: The changing work practices and professionalism of photojournalists in the digital age. Nordicom Review, 35(2), 91–104. Maynard, M. & Tian, Y. (2004). Between global and glocal: Content analysis of the Chinese web sites of the 100 top global brands. Public Relations Review, 30(3), 285–291. McManus, J. H. (1994). Market driven journalism: Let the citizen beware. Thousand Oaks, CA: Sage. Mitchell, W. J. T. (2003). Word and image. In: R. S. Nelson & R. Shiff (Eds.), Critical terms for art history (2nd ed., pp. 51–61). Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press. Mitchell, W. J. T. (2002). Showing seeing: A critique of visual culture. Journal of Visual Culture, 1(2), 165–181. Mitchell, W. J. T. (1994). Picture theory. Chicago, IL: University of Chicago press. Peters, J. D. (2001). Witnessing. Media, Culture and Society, 23(6), 707–723. Picard, R. G. (2004). The economics of the newspaper industry. In: A. Alexander, J. Owers, R. Carveth, A. C. Hollifield & A. N. Greco, (Eds.), Media economics: Theory and practice (3rd ed., pp. 109–126). Mahwah, NJ: Lawrence Erlbaum. Pogliano, A. (2015). Iconic photographs in the newsroom: An ethnography of visual news-making in Italy and France. Sociologica, 9(1), 1–50. Rafaeli, S. Hayat, T. & Ariel, Y. (2009). Knowledge building and motivations in Wikipedia: Participating as “Ba”. In F. J. Ricardo (Ed.), Cyberculture and new media (pp. 51–68). Amsterdam, NY: Rodopi. Ritchin, F. (1999). In our own image. New York, NY: Aperture. Robertson, R. (1992). Globalization, social theory and global culture. London, UK: Sage.

154  The Production Process II Robillard, V. & Jongeneel, E. (1998). (Eds.). Pictures into words: Theoretical and descriptive approaches to ekphrasis. Amsterdam: VU University Press. Schudson, M. (1989). The sociology of news production. Media, Culture & Society, 11, 263–282. Sekula, A. (2003). Reading an archive: Photography between labour and ­capital. In L. Wells (Ed.), The photography reader (pp. 443–452). London, UK: Routledge. Sekula, A. (1986) The body and the archive. October, 39 (Winter), 3–64. Shoemaker, P. J. & Reese, S. D. (1996). Mediating the message: Theories of influences on mass media content. White Plains, NY: Longman. Tuchman, G. (1976). Telling stories. Journal of Communication, 26 (Fall), 93–97. Tomlinson, J. (1999). Globalization and culture. Cambridge: Blackwell publishers; Polity. Wellman, B. & Hampton, K. (1999). Living networked on and off line. Contemporary Sociology, 28(6), 648–654.

4 An Analysis of Significant Events and their Coverage

The observations of four events covered by the agency’s Israeli photographer were chosen for an interpretive analysis: the firing of Israeli ­cannons from an IDF (Israeli Defense Forces) artillery base near kibbutz Nahal Oz on November 3, 2005; the scene after an attack of a suicide bomber near the city of Tulkarem on December 29, 2005; the funeral of an Israeli ­officer in the city of Haifa on December 30, 2005; and carrot picking near the Israeli border with the city of Gaza on May 11, 2006. In addition, four particular pictures that were selected and then sent to the local bureau in Jerusalem by the photographer were also analyzed (all but the picture of the Israeli cannons, which was sent directly to the ­agency’s global pictures desk in Singapore). All pictures were published by a number of the agency’s clients (e.g., the Yahoo website and The Herald ­Tribune newspaper) with the exception of one which was chosen by the photographer from the carrot picking event and was eventually spiked (as was decided by the chief photographer in Jerusalem at the time). The decision to add a semiotic analysis of the pictures that were taken during the coverage of the four events is not a coincidence; these were all carefully selected as part of four specific and highly significant occurrences that demonstrate – taken together and each on its own – the complex articulation of news pictures’ cycle of production along its meaningful moments and key sites in the field and beyond. What emerges from a semiotic analysis, combined with an interpretive analysis of the events in which the pictures were taken, are the different ways the entire production process of news pictures and the international process of news-making are put in motion. The analysis in this chapter is done in somewhat of a nonorthodox method: It is focused on the events and on the pictures as texts produced within those events. But it also depends on the biography of the different pictures taken within those events, supported with their semiotic analysis. With a combined analysis of text and work, this is an attempt to render visible how different factors govern the daily production processes of news pictures; how those pictures eventually work as news products; and how their processes of production in an international news agency represent the international process of news-making.1

156  An Analysis of Significant Events and their Coverage

First Event: Israeli Artillery Base, November 2005 During the preparations of the tenth anniversary of the assassination of former Israeli Prime Minister, Yitzhak Rabin, the photographer was given instructions to report the next day at the Rabin memorial in the city of Tel Aviv. A public meeting should take place between religious and secular Israelis as part of the ongoing events planned for the ceremony. When we arrived at the scene, the photographer realized the event was not taking place as planned, and after a brief conversation with one of the city councils’ representatives he learned the event was cancelled. He then recognized two other news photographers at the spot: a male Getty Images photographer and a female photographer working for the popular local newspaper Yedioth Ahronoth. After a short exchange of information, the three decided to ‘stick around’, just in case the event would take place as planned. As the photographer prepared to leave, he was then paged and notified of an Israeli soldier who was injured after a bomb shell had landed in an IDF artillery base near kibbutz Nahal Oz in the south. The photographer verified the details of the event with the pictures editor in Jerusalem and decided to leave right away so that he would be able to get to the army base in time. The event itself, so he said, was not unusual; the army base near the kibbutz had been frequently bombed before, and many soldiers were injured in the past. However, based on his experience, he knew that such an event – especially one in which a soldier was injured – would most definitely lead to the firing of the IDF towards Gaza in response. Should he decide to cover the event, he would only be able to do so if he left right away. Besides, the sun was just about to set in a few hours, and it would be better for us to arrive before sunset. A drive from Tel Aviv to the southern region takes an hour and a half, and we were in a rush. The road to the army base was so familiar to the photographer that he practically knew his way by heart. We arrived at 16:15 and the photographer seemed satisfied; the Israeli cannons had yet to start firing, and it looked as if the natural light caused by the sun was satisfying. Five cannons were spread over the field with approximately 60 meters separating between them. We were welcomed by two other agency photographers (AFP and EPA) already at the spot; all three photographers knew each other and often met at previous events. They exchanged information about the upcoming event and positioned themselves near one of the cannons. The Israeli soldiers seemed excited to see the photographers: They were comfortable with their presence since they were photographed in the past, and so such coverage was not new to them. There was still time before the firing began, and the photographers used this break for ­small-talk conversations with the soldiers. The soldiers moaned about their short vacations (yeziot in Hebrew) or how the work wore them down (“We did not stop shooting for almost a week now. Do you know

An Analysis of Significant Events and their Coverage  157 how hard it is to pull a mishcholet [cleaning rod] in a cannon’s barrel?” said one of the soldiers and everybody started laughing), and they were interested in the photographers’ work (“Where is it going to be published? […] You are working for whom? For a news agency? […] What kind of lens is this?” etc.). The photographers, on the other hand, used these conversations to gather important information. They were interested in details about the event: the shooting order (“who is firing first, is it your cannon or the one next to it?”); the firing procedures; and more. During the ­conversation, a commander verified his cannon was the first to fire and added he did not mind having the photographers at the scene. The timing was excellent, and the photographers made their final adjustments before the firing began and waited with anticipation. Meanwhile, as the photographers were waiting for the firing to begin, a number of atmosphere pictures were taken: a soldier cleaning a part of a cannon’s barrel; a few soldiers pulling a cleaning rod through the barrel of another; or one soldier placing bomb shells in order. A few other photographers (female UPI and an AP TV camera man preparing his camera stand) also arrived and prepared for the shoot. The photographers placed themselves in the exact spot and gazed suspiciously at their colleagues’ preparations. The agency photographer, for instance, pulled away a little to improve his angle, and a group of photographers seemed to imitate his movements. Timing was of the essence in these kinds of events, and this was strongly felt by the photographers’ anxiety; nobody wanted to miss the picture and end up being left behind. Each cannon fired three to five bomb shells during a single firing set, after which the photographers changed their position and ran towards the next firing cannon. As the sun was setting, the natural light was extraordinary, and the photographers chose to use it as their background. During their preparations for the last set of firing, and as evening was falling, the photographers became restless. With the last light slowly dissolving into the night, they had very little time left and gathered around the same spot in order to capture the fire splashing out of a cannon at the exact second of firing. Standing nearby, and after observing a number of firing sets, I found this shoot extremely difficult to execute: First, the photographer had to place himself in the perfect position, and he had to precede his colleagues in doing so. Second, he had to figure out the exact millisecond of firing in order to ‘catch’ it with his camera. Finally, he had to release the shutter at the exact millisecond; not too early, and certainly not too late. After a number of unsuccessful attempts made by the photographers, the soldiers’ firing procedures were finally revealed: Whenever a cannon was ready to fire, the gunner reached out from the cannon and shouted to his fellow teammates, “be careful, we are firing!” He then rushed in, went out again, shouted, “be careful, we are firing!” one more time, and right after his second warning the firing occurred.

158  An Analysis of Significant Events and their Coverage After several attempts, the photographer showed me the picture he was so eager to capture with satisfaction: A picture of fire splashing out of a cannon’s barrel in the exact second of firing, with the lights of the city of Gaza and the sunset at its background. The job was done, although the photographer kept on with his work, sensing, perhaps, he could get an even better shot. The tough competition took its toll, and when the night fell, the photographers seemed extremely stressed, especially when the commander of the fifth cannon announced they were preparing for the last set of firing. This was strongly felt, for example, just when the final set began, when an EPA photographer suddenly asked the agency photographer which level of exposure he should use for the picture ­(extremely unprofessional, as I was told later by the agency ­photographer). The final set ended, and so did the entire event. It was 18:00, and the photographers prepared themselves for the pictures’ sending process and agreed on the perfect meeting spot for the task. There was a nice coffeehouse near kibbutz Kfar Azza just a short drive away which was used by the photographers many times in the past, and they favored it because it was close and quiet. Also, it had many electrical outlets and a number of photographers could use it simultaneously. Its main flaw, however, was that it was not, at the time, connected to a wireless network. During the sending process, the four agency photographers (AP, AFP, Reuters, and EPA) sat side by side. From that moment on, their work ­became technical and highly structured: (1) Copying all the ­pictures from the cameras’ memory cards on to their computers, (2) Basic filtering, (3) Fast editing, (4) Getting online, (5) Trying to look for a story ­already written by their text departments (this was made in order to speed up the writing of captions), (6) Writing the captions, and (7) S­ ending the selected pictures. It was getting late, and all the photographers were extremely focused, knowing that the timing for sending the pictures was of the essence. The photographer told me it was most important that he send the first and second pictures as soon as possible; these would be the pictures of the event, while the others would be the atmosphere pictures which he could send a bit later. The photographer chose to focus on 15–20 pictures selected out of about 200 that were taken and started working on the picture of the event. We both examined the pictures selected after the first process of filtering, and the photographer explained that in many cases, during the selection process, he might ask for the opinion of an external viewer – a waiter, or perhaps just someone who happens to sit next to him in a coffeehouse. I pointed at a picture of soldiers pulling a cleaning rod out of the barrel of one of the cannons, which was spiked by the photographer, and he explained that this specific picture was problematic; it seemed to him as if one of the soldiers was smiling. At that point, the

An Analysis of Significant Events and their Coverage  159 photographer decided to focus on the firing picture, and with the help of Photoshop made a few ‘minor adjustments’ (cut; saturation; contrast; cleaning ‘dirt’ [it was from the camera’s lens, as it was pointed to me by the photographer, and not from the scene itself]). Surfing the agency’s website, he found out the event was already covered by the text department, and with the help of the written story he typed the picture’s ­caption ­(although not before checking with the Babylon online dictionary to look for any spelling mistakes). The EPA photographer walked by to check up on the agency’s photographer’s work, and when he noticed the photographer’s picture of the event he then looked away with disrespect (thinking out loud that this was actually not such a great picture). The first picture was sent to Singapore after 35 minutes from the minute we sat down at the coffeehouse, and all other pictures – 14 altogether – were sent within the hour. The photographer then chatted with a Singapore editor about his photos via AOL (America Online). The editor wanted to know whether the cannons’ shells were of 155mm’ or 180mm’ and was also concerned about a blur in one of the pictures, asking whether it was the result of dust caused by the firing itself or not. The shells, replied the photographer, were of 155mm’, and the so called ‘stain’ was the result of his camera. While chatting with Singapore, the photographer surfed Yahoo’s website. On the net, so he said, the pictures were published right away, ­having the exact time of publishing attached to them. This way, he could see whether his picture was published before or after his colleagues’ and its exact time of publication. He then located a story written on the event on Yahoo news with his picture of the event attached to it, and exactly two hours after we had arrived at the coffeehouse we then packed our things and left. First Event: An Analysis Sending the photographer to the Rabin square a few days before the national ceremony was the result of vast international interest in the tenth year memorial for the assassination of Rabin. The murder of an Israeli prime minister is a meaningful event with many sociopolitical consequences. It is also an event connected directly to similar assassinations of national leaders around the world – a media event that echoes at the annual Rabins’ Memorial Day, and one which therefore requires the coverage of related events (Katz and Dayan, 1985). But ‘events’ are not the only condition for the production of news ­pictures (see, e.g., Harcup and O’Neill, 2001; Curran and Seaton, 2003), as, sometimes, it is only the presence of other photographers from competing agencies at the scene of events that might imbue a possible scene with a level of newsworthiness. From that point of view,

160  An Analysis of Significant Events and their Coverage the event at Nahal Oz clearly demonstrates the unique relationships between the different photographers: To begin, they are photographers working for competing agencies. Thus, they struggle over the ideal spot to take their pictures from; they are highly aware of their colleagues’ movement at the scene, worried whether they would accidentally miss the ‘decisive ­moment’; they compete over their pictures’ time of publishing; and they often comment (disrespectfully, in this case) on their colleagues’ pictures. Yet, as much as they compete with each other, they also share mutual respect and are also close friends. That is why they exchange information at the scenes and sit together at the same coffeehouse once they have collectively agreed that it is, in fact, the best location to send their pictures from. It is that relationship between the photographers – ­colleagues and rivals – that binds them as part of an extraordinary occupational community (Gregory, 1983): a ‘pack of lonely wolves’ fed by each other during the production routine in order to defeat their colleagues with the quality of their products, the perfection throughout their execution, and fast distribution. An additional relationship that is, to an extent, similarly complex is also demonstrated by the photographer’s willingness to ask for the advice of an external spectator during the editing process; a ‘witness’ that is taken by the photographer as innocent, unbiased, and detached from the event, with no hidden agenda, unlike his fellow photographers. 2 At the same time, however, it is also the stranger’s eye to which the pictures are addressed – the consumer that is given the position of an external editor and one whose final choice represents the audience’s taste. And so, both relationships – between photographers and between them and external participants – are therefore good examples of the production ­cycle’s open routine at the very early moments of execution: one ­entwined with parallel external circles of production and practices of consumption in a constant relationship of cause and effect (Frosh, 2003). 3 Both the shooting event and the sending process demonstrate the effect of technical limitations on production. Capturing the splash of fire coming out of the cannon’s barrel forced the photographer to release the shutter in a fraction of a second. Since the act of firing is faster than releasing the shutter in the camera, there is almost no chance to capture the splash of fire with a set of a few pictures taken by the photographer (when the shutter is released separately in each). Moreover, he would also have to substantially decrease his shutter’s speed in the hope that it would be ‘caught’ in one of them. At the time, a long exposure in a digital camera enabled the photographer to take approximately 20 pictures in three to four seconds in a rate of five to six frames per second. Using an analogue camera, however, would only enable the photographer to take the same number of pictures (or more, depending on the length of the film), yet in a slower rate of approximately three to four frames per

An Analysis of Significant Events and their Coverage  161 second. With a digital camera, the speed would be multiplied, enabling new possibilities to capture such unique fractions of time with the help of digital technology (those fractions have now been ‘stretched’). It is this special capacity of digital photography that provides a greater arsenal of pictures to choose from later on, and that which gives better control over time (Ritchin, 1999). For the firing act in the picture is a “photographic ‘shock’” – a rare surprise – where the extraordinary movement of fire was caught, and it is one which could not be simply frozen by the human eye (Barthes, 1984, p. 32). The editing process allowed a greater range of options with the help of computerized editing tools. Using Photoshop, the photographer could ‘redesign’ the limitations of time and space and liberate his pictures from their realistic constraints, thereby creating a ‘new document’ (Robins, 1995; Ritchin, 1999). Yet, during the editing process, the photographer would, at the same time, avoid making any ‘meaningful’ changes in the ‘original’ document. It is then that different dimensions of aesthetics and news, photography and journalism, are intermeshed in the process of editing: The photographer’s first obligation was to preserve the p ­ hotographed – its analogical perfection (both as photographer and journalist). Thus, the act of editing was then taken by the photographer as a way of getting the picture ‘closer’ to the photographed reality by erasing the noise that disturbed its lucid mediation. At the same time, however, and while carefully trying to preserve the realistic borders of the photo (is the field in the photograph’s depth more ‘real’ than its ‘dirt’?), the photographer used digital editing technologies so as to improve the picture’s aesthetics, for it was the dirt that ‘stained’ its aesthetic reflection. Here is photography’s powers in its digital form revealed in the early execution moments of news pictures: Using digital technologies (both in the process of shooting and editing), the photograph’s body was carefully ‘cut’ by the photographer with a scalpel; he touched its delicate secret particles and thus shattered its mystery (as was perceived once in its analogue form), but at the same time gave birth to a new document in the form of the digital image (Frosh, 2000). To the eyes of the photographer, the new document was ‘improved’ – it was fixed by digital ­editing technology, and would therefore function better aesthetically and ­become more newsy.4 Atmosphere pictures and the picture of the event are good examples of how the agency coped with stock agencies and their competition (see also my analysis of the fourth event later in this chapter). If in the past the agency’s photographers looked for that one picture from an event, at the time of my observations they were delivering many more pictures. First, because it was cheaper (a memory card was able to contain a larger number of pictures than film and could also be used time and time again). Pictures on a memory card could be erased and

162  An Analysis of Significant Events and their Coverage added without the additional cost of film. But, more importantly, this also illustrates how news agencies attempt to enter the vast market of stock photography by pushing some of the pictures to different non-news clients and provide more pictures per event to newspapers around the world. The photographer explained this to me during an interview in detail: Atmosphere pictures, he said, are less strong, less ‘hard news’, and so are used to decorate the event. Some magazines or newspapers, he ­continued, are not interested in the trivial picture [the picture of the event], thereby looking for other pictures from the same event. ­Moreover, concluded the photographer, since pictures are often attached to articles, the picture of the event might appear on the front page, while other pictures will be published from the same event along the article. As pictures addressed to magazines and different papers, for front pages and alongside articles, atmosphere pictures must therefore be versatile; they need to be easy to decontextualize from their original temporal and spatial formations, so they could be used in a variety of platforms by different clients (see e.g., an excellent discussion on the temporal affordances in the news in Tenenboim-Weinblatt and Neiger, 2017). They are aimed at a wider circle of clients, news and non-news, and need to be easily stripped from their newsworthiness (if it is found necessary by clients) in their moments of execution, and early at the scenes of events. 5 When a large and diversified collection of pictures from each event is aimed at a wide and diversified circle of news and non-news clients and delivered by the agency’s photographers, boundaries of photography genres collapse. Photojournalism appears not as an autonomic unit of operations (as it was perceived in the past. See Rosenblum, 1978) but rather a color in the ­palette of ­photography, and revealed as a complex site of visual signification. It is then that photography exists as a rainbow of genres whereby news, art, and advertising are interwoven together with their audiences and ­additional forms of visual representation at key moments of production. The picture of the event, on the other hand, might represent the opposite process. For the production process of a sole picture representing the entire event points towards a procedure of differentiation, placing the news picture within highly strict temporal and spatial boundaries. These boundaries define the news event’s unique status of singularity and its picture of the event as its sole unique representative – a unique evidence of a ‘here-and-now’ event (Barthes, 1984), distinguishing photojournalism from all other photography genres (both visually and as news evidence). As atmosphere pictures and the picture of the event are produced during a single agency event, a dialectic is in play: On the one hand, they are the products of a manufacturing routine that serves as part of a wider regime of signification, which is therefore affected by

An Analysis of Significant Events and their Coverage  163 all genres of photography. On the other, it is an extraordinary process, one like no other, responsible for the production of rare singular visual documents, of news in its photographic form. Throughout the execution of the picture of the event, one that is produced locally and yet is eventually targeted in its final form to the international market, other meanings are acquired, and an additional dialectic is formed. To begin, such unique production requires a high level of local orientation and cultural knowledge, putting the photographer’s cultural identity into play at the privileged moments of e­ xecution – whether as an Israeli, a journalist working for an international news agency, or both.6 Moreover, many of the Israeli photographers working for the agency in Jerusalem have served as soldiers in the past.7 They can, therefore, easily find common ground in conversation with the soldiers at the scene, and their informal language becomes their ticket to enter the event as participant observers. Familiar with the particular meanings of different army expressions – the hidden codes and innuendoes; the language and habit of soldiers – they can smoothly enter into the soldiers’ arena as if they were unnoticed and turn their appearance from complete strangers into allies.8 The soldiers’ behavior demonstrates how well they were with ­journalism. They were aware of being subjects of a news coverage (“you are ­working for whom […] where is it going to be published?”) and were ­familiar with their social obligations and responsibilities (as can be demonstrated by the commander’s approval for their presence at the scene). Here is the civil contract of news in its photographic form: photographers turn into soldiers, and soldiers into journalists (Azoulay, 2008). To an extent, this new virtual space signifies the merger of two ­completely separate occupational communities, soldiers and photojournalists, as members of one local community in which both soldiers and photographers cooperate and share their professional knowledge and authority at key moments of production. But the agency photographer also performs in a different spatial platform, one which exceeds the boundaries of the local. Thus, when he was sending his pictures, for example, he was acutely aware of how late it was for international deadlines. He had no time to waste, for he had to send his pictures before the deadlines around the world had passed; he had to compete locally with his fellow photographers and be the first to send his pictures, and internationally in order to make the deadlines around the world on time. Torn between his national and professional identities, the photographer would then struggle over the pictures’ various levels of neutrality and objectivity: He was obligated to his journalistic professional conduct (and thus avoided making ‘forbidden’ changes during the process of editing). And he was also obligated to a ‘higher’ level of neutrality, on

164  An Analysis of Significant Events and their Coverage

Figure 4.1  Israeli soldiers pulling a cleaning rod through a cannon’s barrel ­(Israel, November 3, 2005).

international scale, for he was a photographer working for a prestigious international news agency (and thus selected internationally appealing pictures on the account of others). That is why, for instance, when asked why the picture of the group of soldiers pulling a cleaning rod through the barrel of one of the cannons was not acceptable to him, he explained that one of the soldiers looked as if he was smiling. The so-called smile immediately made the picture unreliable to the eyes of the photographer and could be interpreted in the light of indexical objectivity (was the picture altered by the photographer, making the soldier look as if he was smiling, or was he really smiling?) and a representational one (if he was smiling, does his smile represent the event as a whole?) (Figure 4.1). The photographer’s own national identity was also in play here: A smiling Israeli soldier preparing a cannon to fire at Gaza could ­perhaps represent Israeli soldiers as having the upper hand and carry ­political meanings as part of the Israeli-Palestinian conflict – a kind of ­representation which might sabotage the neutrality that is expected from a respected international agency (for the agency cannot afford to be ­represented as taking sides in the conflict. See Goodman and Boudana, 2016). Or, if he decided to spike the picture, the Israeli photographer could be seen as unwilling to take part in the production of a ‘negative’ representation of his country (now the smiling soldier would represent the vicious Israeli army in the act of combat).

An Analysis of Significant Events and their Coverage  165 This was also expressed in the captioning process. Thus, the captions were required to represent the picture verbally, but needed also to be written in an ‘international’ language, forcing the photographer to write in ‘perfect’ English while checking his spelling.9 Writing his captions the ‘right’ way, the photographer adjusted his writing skills to a ‘higher level’ – an ‘international’ style (both in the use of the English language, but also according to the agency’s ‘high’ standards of English writing style). It was then an event that occurred in a local setting, but its visual coverage was aimed at the international market – a glocal exemplar of constant conflicts between different temporal and spatial, national and professional dimensions. All these conflicts are visually rendered in the picture of the event itself. With the sunset in the background, minutes before the night falls, a cannon is firing. The fire splashed from the cannon’s barrel is emphasized with the darkness around it. The firing is aimed nowhere and beyond the picture’s frame, with city lights at the distance but away from the aim of the cannon, draining the picture from its conflictual context. It almost implies that the firing is not aimed towards a populated area (which it probably is). Behind the cannon are the shadows of four soldiers (with helmets and weapons). They are looking straight at the cannon, but the dark space in between makes them appear slightly detached, as if they are in a different dimension from where the cannon is located. With the natural light and the picture’s unique angle, the lower part of the frame turns black, loading the actual place in which the firing event occurs with mystery and secrecy. Both the soldiers and the cannon are revealed only by their shadows, disembodied, making it impossible to identify the cannon and its operators as part of a particular army or force based solely on the visual elements. The fire splashed out of the cannon’s barrel could be from anywhere, aimed somewhere, and is seen by soldiers from an unidentified army operating on a mysterious field. The picture’s aesthetics gives a sense of universality; it is dislocated, can be easily recontextualized, and is therefore perfect for multiple uses. It is a local event visually packaged with universality – a picture that has no face. As such, it represents the existential dilemma that is embedded deep within the production processes of news pictures in an ­international news agency – a visual production of universal particularity (see Robertson, 1992). It places the agency’s processes of execution as ones that hover between the local and the international and between different genres of photography, having its pictorial products appeal internationally and yet, at the same time, tailored so as to meet the particular needs and demands set by local news and non-news clients alike (Figure 4.2).

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Figure 4.2  A cannon firing in Nahal Oz (Israel, November 3, 2005).

Second Event: Bombing near Tulkarem, December 2005 At exactly 13:00, the photographer was informed via his pager device of an explosion that occurred near the Israeli settlement, Avnei Hefetz, close to the city of Tulkarem: A suicide bomber en route to the center of Israel had caused the blast upon being stopped by an unexpected IDF barrier. It takes about 40 minutes to drive to the Tulkarem area from the city of Modi’in, where the photographer resides. He called to tell me about the event on his way to the scene, where I arrived about half an hour later. There, I identified him and other media representatives who were being held back by an IDF barrier 200 meters from the scene. Having arrived quickly, the media representatives appeared to have been detained so security forces could enter first to keep the scene unaltered. The photographers seemed not to approve of this and took advantage of the chaos to move toward the scene. At the epicenter were the military and the police: Several soldiers ­commanded by a colonel, soldiers from the dead officer’s platoon, Israeli Disaster Victim Identification Unit workers (ZAKA), Israeli paramedics, the Division of Identification and Forensic Science, and the Israeli police. There were many media representatives: photographers and TV crews,

An Analysis of Significant Events and their Coverage  167 and reporters from local news outlets and major international agencies. At the scene, the photographer exchanged information on the event with M., another one of the agency’s photographers, who lived nearby and had been first on the spot. Aware that M. had forgotten his laptop in his rush to get to the scene, the photographer, as the veteran, immediately sent M. to the agency office in Jerusalem with his pictures. He explained to me that having been first on the spot meant that M. might have some exclusive pictures. If he did, it was all-important to send them immediately. Once the news event ended, he would also start sending his pictures; by then, M. would surely have made it to the office, so they would probably not lose valuable time. A soldier from the IDF Press Unit briefed the photographers in detail about the event: The suicide bomber had been riding in a yellow taxi on his way to the center of Israel when the vehicle was stopped at an unexpected IDF barrier. The civilians in the taxi were ordered to get out to have their identification papers checked. At that point, the suicide bomber detonated his device, creating a major explosion that killed the officer and bomber, and injured two Israeli soldiers and several Palestinian civilians. When we arrived, the bomber’s body was lying near the taxi. Nearby, a group of soldiers had begun picking up the injured soldiers’ gear while a line of kneeling soldiers in white gloves collected what appeared to be small pieces of the dead officer. Because of the extent of the destruction, the scene was divided into three: the taxi and the suicide bomber’s body, the injured soldiers’ gear, and the line of soldiers. The scene was chaotic, the photographers unfocused and highly stressed. They had to act quickly, as it was a major event, but they all feared missing the picture of the event. As a result, they all moved in a slow cluster to each of the three scenes, trying to carefully analyze the event and its pictorial potential. After a while, they separated to the different scenes. Within an hour, they all agreed to leave and meet at a nearby gas station and coffeehouse to edit and send their photos. Throughout the sending process, the photographers seemed relaxed and cooperated happily with one another – so much so that the international agency photographers who were present at the scene ­(photographers from two international agencies and a local newspaper photographer selling his pictures to AP) collaborated on each other’s captions (“What is the soldiers’ unit?”; “Who was the officer who was killed?” etc.). During this process, the photographer showed me his ­picture of the event: It was a picture of a close-up of a kneeling soldier, flanked by his colleagues, scouring the ground for body parts. During the editing, the photographer explained that in such events it is important to send pictures in a highly organized manner. The agency’s procedure for “big” events is that photographers send their pictures to the Jerusalem office to be carefully selected, screened, and approved by the

168  An Analysis of Significant Events and their Coverage chief photographer. The resulting images are sent to the global pictures desk in Singapore. In events like this case, the agency might also purchase pictures from non-staff photographers; it is important that these too are organized at the local bureau before being sent to Singapore. The photographer added a short “one line” caption, saying the editor in the office would make the captions ‘thicker’ before sending them on. He also told me the “big events” procedure of sending pictures to the local bureau first is not always good practice, since he, as the one at the scene, is better positioned to choose the best pictures from the event than an editor in the office. However, he said, this is how they work, and he plays it as he is told. Within half an hour of arriving at the coffeehouse, the photographer had sent 12 pictures and we were ready to leave. Second Event: An Analysis The suicide bombing was an exceptional news event that highlighted the agency’s unique set of considerations and regulations. Recognizing it as an act of terror immediately empowered its news value, since, as a direct consequence of the Israeli-Palestinian conflict, it was part of the main story the agency covers in Israel. Moreover, it killed an Israeli ­officer and the Palestinian bomber, and injured several Israeli soldiers and ­Palestinian civilians. These unique newsworthy circumstances, whereby the agency was obliged to send a photographer to the scene, also demonstrated the daily difficulties an international news agency faces locally. Its daily filtering of news events, for example, is an important task, since, at the time of my observations, the agency employed about 15 photographers in Israel, the West Bank, and Gaza. Whenever a big event (e.g., a suicide bombing) occurs, covering it requires quick, spontaneous reorganization of the coverage areas, often at the expense of coverage of other events. The photographer I accompanied usually covered both north and central Israel, so he was sent to the scene even though he lived 40 minutes away. His presence at the scene eliminated his availability to cover other events, which may have forced the agency to use freelance photographers for other, contemporaneous events. A big, unexpected event compels the agency to make on-the-spot adjustments to ensure the most socially ­stable arrangements possible (in this case, shifting a photographer to a distant site). These decisions are based on the event’s unique circumstances, level of importance (prioritizing it as a “big spot” news event typifies its importance for coverage), and the bureaus’ allocation constraints. As a major incident, the bombing created a site where agencies’ ­photographers competed for exclusive coverage. When the two agency photographers met at the scene, for example, they immediately focused on the possibility that the first to arrive might have taken some exclusive pictures. Exclusive pictures of big events taken early on may prove

An Analysis of Significant Events and their Coverage  169 valuable by giving the agency an advantage over its rivals. The production routine of news pictures works in an open cycle of cause and effect, and parallel production routines constantly resonate. Cooperation between the agency’s photographers at a given event is rare. Usually a photographer is the sole agency representative on the scene, barring coincidence or a planned big event to which two staffers are assigned. This unique meeting redefined the professional boundaries of the agency’s photographers and authorities: The young photographer was reduced to a subordinate position when the senior photographer arrived, and the latter became the only agency authority on the spot once the inexperienced photographer left for Jerusalem. Operating far from the office, and often on their own, photographers are small, autonomous organizational units at the scenes of events (they simultaneously fulfil several roles: photographer, editor, technician, driver. I was often told that this affects the quality of pictures taken in the field). When two meet at a scene, seniority plays an important role throughout the shoot, unlike in independent field operations where the photographers have more ‘liberty’ to pursue coverage as they see fit. Yet despite seeming to run their own routines at the scenes, they are always part of a larger system with strict rules and regulations. Here, the photographers are only minor players at key moments and sites on a vast line of production, which dictates the standards that eventually determine a ‘successful agency picture’. Photographers are becoming agency photographers by absorbing these standards early in their training. Thenceforth, the successful agency picture is therefore a conceptual formula guiding the photographer through a production of pictures disguised as a creative process – a “corporate form of creative control” (Ryan, 1992, p. 389). But certain events can sometimes complicate things by suddenly stirring the photographers’ sense of national identity and disrupt their daily production routine from within. Then, deviating from their roles as employees subordinate to a powerful international business, they become torn between their national and professional identities, and their pictorial products reflect this conflict. In the event discussed here, a photographer’s battle for identity reached a peak in the execution of the picture of the event. At the divided scene, the photographer chose to focus on the group of soldiers collecting the remains of the fallen officer. In the photo, an unarmed soldier kneels to search for body parts. He wears a pair of white gloves; another pair hangs from his right pocket. He holds a white plastic bag printed with the Hebrew words number, date, team, and the abbreviations for catalogue number. Underneath, the printed Hebrew letter  ‫  צ‬designates the bag as army property, as the circled  ‫  צ‬is a well-known local symbol for the IDF term ‫( צבאי‬Army property). His fellow soldiers kneel in a line behind him, their weapons on their backs. They too wear white gloves and hold white plastic bags (Figure 4.3).

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Figure 4.3  Israeli soldiers picking up body parts near the city of Tulkarem ­(Israel, December 29, 2006).

The angle invites viewers to take part in the macabre process. Their gaze is level with the soldiers’ line of sight, forming a relation of s­ ymbolic equality (Jewitt and Oyama, 2001). The close-up of the soldier in front, empowered in this perspective by the line of fellow soldiers behind him, shatters the boundaries between the distant soldiers and the viewer, who now shares their experience as though he or she is one of them ­( Jewitt and Oyama, 2001). The Hebrew on the bags (‫ צ‬and ‫[ מקייט‬Catalogue number]) immediately identifies them as IDF property. Lined up in the background, the kneeling soldiers appear in their local identity as IDF troops. Their formation is a familiar military act known as “forming a line” (‫ – )יישור קו‬an oft-used expression in IDF combat units that former IDF combat soldiers even joke about in everyday banter. It alludes to the act of lining up to cover a certain area in a group as the best way to gather or look for something on the ground. Gathered into a collection of contradictory elements, all these signs suddenly reveal the picture’s power. The soldiers at the scene are not in combat. Their weapons are on their backs, not carried as they would be before battle or in training, and the soldier at the front has no weapon at all. Their kneeling is an unusual posture, less ‘army-like’ and thus disturbing. Instead of weapons, they hold white plastic bags that look

An Analysis of Significant Events and their Coverage  171 much like garbage bags. Their white color contrasts with the soldiers’ olive green uniforms and loads the situation with awkwardness, draining the ‘combat-like’ quality of the hostile environment suggested by helmeted heads and the armored vest worn by the soldier in front. The white bags  – here visually connected to the white gloves – change the soldiers’ activity into an almost sterilized, delicate, medical procedure. The picture plays on a binary juxtaposition: The intertextual relation between colors (white and camouflage green) and contexts (combat and casual) creates a stronger effect, adding additional layers to the reading of the picture (Werner, 2004). Tiny pieces cover the ground between the soldier in front and the group at the back. The soldiers will pick them up as they progress. Compared to their smallness, the size of the plastic bags inspires awe, suggesting that a horrifying act has taken place. There is flesh and there is blood; it is a “bad” death (a “publicly” violent one and thus highly newsworthy) and a “hot” one (as flesh and as news), and the photograph as a news document is there to cleanse it all (Seaton, 2005). The combination of the writing on the bags and the fragments of a person to be collected in them adds another tragic dimension: The pieces will eventually be placed in the bags and categorized by the date of collection, the collection team, and their catalogue number, as though they were military items slated for storage in the army’s warehouse. Yet by no means do all viewers share the horror reflected in the picture. The visual signifiers are “localized, in certain parts of the analogon” (Barthes, 1977, p. 29) and its (complete) reading requires that readers have particular knowledge of the world. Thus, as already mentioned, lining up like the soldiers in the picture is a very familiar act embedded deep within the daily routines of Israeli combat units and Israeli society. The letter  ‫  צ‬on the bag marks it as IDF property, and the abbreviations are part of a familiar written and spoken IDF jargon loaded with additional meanings known only to Israeli soldiers and those who have previously served in the Israeli army. The olive-colored IDF uniform is proudly presented in the close-up of the soldier at the front. A visual example of how IDF soldiers look in the field, he represents his fellow soldiers, who are secondary ­participants (Kress and Van Leeuwen, 1996). He wears red shoes, informing many Israeli viewers that he may be a paratrooper, which loads the picture with the weight of historical significance: An Israeli paratrooper – a mythical symbol of the Israeli army’s strength and ‘greatness’ evoking the ‘liberation’ of Jerusalem in the Six-Day War of 1967 – now kneels without a weapon, gazing submissively at the asphalt road as he collects the remains of his comrade-in-arms. No longer just a soldier (of course, he never was), he is at once a symbol of tragedy and bravery: His posture symbolizes the defeat of the Israeli army by enemy malice and the forces of terror – and of an army with high values and outstanding norms, whose own soldiers,

172  An Analysis of Significant Events and their Coverage dead or alive, are its top priority (now the group action of the soldiers represents military solidarity, with IDF values as its code of honor).10 Finally, the picking up of body parts acquires a religious dimension, as the soldiers involved in it are committed to it by their Jewish origin. It is not only part of an army routine but part of Jewish tradition. The act of carrying body parts is described as a commandment (Mitzvah) to bring the dead to burial (Kvura), as stated in the Book of Deuteronomy: ­“Lo-talin nivlato al-ha’ets ki-kavor tikberenu bayom hahu” (The remains of the deceased should not be left outside, and should be buried the same day) (21:23). The gloves worn by the soldiers protect them from becoming impure, for the Code of Maimonides (Mishneh Tora) says under Tum’at Met (corpse impurity) that a piece of a corpse larger than an olive can transmit impurity. The Deuteronomic commandment also e­ xplains why ZAKA, whose volunteers are mostly Orthodox Jews, gathers body parts at different scenes. Thus, an additional intertextual ­relation forms: The religious text anchors the image, and the image frames the text for the religious Jewish reader. The image is a visual exemplar of a moral duty under Jewish law (Halakha), carried out as the Code of Maimonides instructs for matters of corpse impurity (Werner, 2004). The picture’s local meanings are also heightened by ‘activation’ of a different news picture from the past. In May 14 2004, Barkay Wolfson, a former Israeli photographer then working for the Israeli newspaper Maariv, received access to IDF forces on their way to the Philadelphi Route, which separates Gaza and Egypt. A few days earlier, a roadside bomb had killed some Israeli soldiers and destroyed an armored vehicle. Wolfson was the first to photograph Israeli soldiers digging through sand in search of dead soldiers’ remains, and his picture immediately became famous. It appeared in all the Israeli newspapers and won first place at that year’s annual Local Testimony competition (Figure 4.4). Read together, the visual elements in both pictures suggest that Wolfson’s picture might be interpreted as a basic intertext that the agency photographer misread in an attempt to imbue his picture with local particularity (Bloom, 1975). At the front of the picture, a group of soldiers crawl in the sand searching for body parts with their bare hands. Wolfson chose to position himself above the soldiers, creating an oblique, high angle that makes the soldiers appear lower than the camera lens, belittling their presence; they are not part of his world (Kress and Van Leeuwen, 1996). Thus, Wolfson detached himself from the group. He was a neutral news photographer shooting Israeli soldiers. In contrast, the agency photographer stares right at his subjects. He knelt as if he were one of them to place his camera on their line of sight and he directs his gaze at his ‘comrades’ in action. The resulting frontal angle connects the photographer with his subjects. They are part of his world and he is involved with them, taking pictures from within (Kress and Van Leeuwen, 1996; Collier, 2001).

An Analysis of Significant Events and their Coverage  173

Figure 4.4  Israeli soldiers picking up body parts near the Philadelphi Route (Barkay Wolfson/Maariv, Israel, May 13, 2004).

Wolfson’s soldiers crawl in sand, and their objective seems almost impossible. Their weird walk, and the way they turn the sand, seems to belittle them and identifies the situation as a senseless performance. Some crawl and some stand; their appearance is sloppy, their form broken. The solid line of their movement is shattered and disorderly, as if their act were being carried out wildly. The soldiers in the agency’s picture, however, kneel yet seem almost to be standing. They are all lined up and identical in uniform. They wear white gloves. Their discipline is strongly expressed in the person of the soldier at the front. His shirt sits on his body with straight creases. His shoes are firmly tied, and his bulletproof vest fits perfectly. His appearance is appropriate to the delicate event he is partaking in, and he stands as a magnified exemplar of the group’s appearance. Wolfson documents great confusion. His soldiers turn the sand as though their act is primal and unregulated. Any body parts found in the sand would have been gathered individually in whatever container was available at the scene (their pockets, perhaps, and with just their bare hands). The act is visually stripped of Jewish context because collecting body parts barehanded conveys impurity in Jewish law. They thus look like they are searching for some sort of object lost in the sand, and the body parts become things at the end of an objectifying process that transforms living human organs into a pile of silent particles.

174  An Analysis of Significant Events and their Coverage In the agency picture, meanwhile, the soldiers’ act seems a strictly ­ rchestrated operation: Their straight line and the gloves and white o plastic bags given to them in advance indicate that they are following a particular military, religious procedure (perhaps even a written one) for such horrifying events. The white gloves imply a medical, delicate act, an act by the living that, in Jewish law, honors the dead. The white plastic bags (perhaps manufactured especially for such events) demonstrate the sanctity of the situation. As a sensitive matter, it should be kept as clean and sterile as possible (Figure 4.5). So, through their intertextual dialogue and visual similarities and contradictions, the two pictures represent an endless conflict and negotiation. The high angle capturing undisciplined movement by sloppily uniformed soldiers in an unregulated search in endless sand loads Wolfson’s picture with a sense of defeat. His confused soldiers can be seen to represent a weak, disordered army. They crawl like defeated animals to search for the body parts of fellow soldiers killed in a horrific explosion, their heads lowered to the ground. They are faceless and silent. Now look again at the agency’s picture: Although it can be seen as a misreading of Wolfson’s, this does not drain the picture of its local color; rather, it glorifies its sense of particular place and belonging. The well-organized routine, the soldiers’ neat appearance, and the close-up of the soldier in the foreground endow the picture with the scent of a particular ­personality, one pleading for empathy. Unlike Wolfson’s picture, the other photograph documents a sense of heroism – visual evidence of sanctity. This is not expressed in the mere military assignment to simply collect body parts by searching for them on the ground. Here the gaze is pointed upwards, instead implying a religious ritual: the mission of the living to gather the particles. They are gathered by delicate tools and held by extraordinary containers – ­medical, pure, virginal white rubber gloves and plastic bags. The white color permeates the event with a sense of sanctity and purity. The agency photographer is a Jewish Israeli, and his picture is of Jewish Israeli

Figure 4.5  Text and intertext, nation and profession.

An Analysis of Significant Events and their Coverage  175 origin. Its visual elements are footprints that reveal the photographer’s local identity, inviting only a select group of spectators – a Jewish Israeli audience – to participate in a privileged dialogue through which their cultural identities will be molded. To “fill in the gaps” in the pictorial text, then, one must “invite” Wolfson’s picture as an intertext (Riffaterre, 1990; Perminger, 2001, p.  411). Discussed as a creative text that exists as part of a dynamic, creative system of production, the agency picture is interwoven with all the creative forces that surround it (and, assisted by the intertextual exchange, would also allow for a closer reading of Wolfson’s picture, taken here as an intertext; see Perminger, 2001).12 It becomes a reaction to combined forces, and an outcome of a unique relationship (whether in the form of struggle or acceptance) between different texts (Bloom,1975). The ‘new’ picture – now a revision of the ‘old’ one – then becomes an expression of a “misreading” (Bloom, 1975). However, the struggle discussed here is not at all between big artists and giant ones from the past (and thus representative of Bloom’s anxiety). Rather, it is a struggle over the territory of place and belonging. Depicting the Israeli–Palestinian conflict through the eyes of the agency ­photographer, it is a rare document that visualizes the photographer’s torn identity as a local photographer at the service of an i­nternational news agency. When events are a matter of national security, his national sense of belonging overcomes the objective values required by his ­profession: He is no longer just a photographer working for an international news agency, but rather a Jewish-Israeli working for a foreign news agency. Now, his occupational and national communities are entwined (Liebes, 1992; Zelizer, 1993; Nossek, 2004; Zandberg and ­Neiger, 2005). This ongoing tension is also evident in the transformation of the picture’s caption as it goes from the field to the local bureau in Jerusalem, then to Singapore, and finally into the publications of the agency’s ­clients. In many ways, it demonstrates the problematic of ekphrasis – the verbal representation of visual representation – through the ways that various players deal with the image-word problem and use it at different stages of the production routine, from soothing the anxiety of the torn photographer to making the picture internationally appealing and thus a better commodity for international clients and consumers (Mitchell, 1996; Krieger, 1998). In the caption written by the photographer in the field, the event carries a national connotation: “Israeli soldiers search and collect part of the bodies of Israeli soldiers. December 29, 2005.” Apart from mentioning the Israeli soldiers searching for body parts, it gives the victims’ bodies a nationality, to some extent at the expense of ‘dry’ information about the event itself (e.g., where and how it occurred). A decontextualization process is in play: A one-time traumatic Israeli event in which Israeli

176  An Analysis of Significant Events and their Coverage soldiers played a substantial part is stripped of its historic significance as part of the ongoing Israeli-Palestinian dispute. The text here is clearly detached from the image and therefore, in a sense, “produces an entirely new signified” (Barthes, 1977, p. 27); an ekphrastic impossibility is at work (Mitchell, 1994). This caption can be seen as a way to soothe the photographer’s torn identity – but his words certainly do not represent the event as image (e.g., based on the visual elements of the picture, it is not clear whether the body parts are Israeli or Palestinian, and do body parts have a nationality at all?). The editor at the local office added some details and changed others on the agency’s pictures’ internal editing software: “Israeli soldiers collect and search for body parts following an explosion close to an army checkpoint near the West Bank city of Tulkarem, December 29, 2005.” At a basic level, the editor used the caption to ‘clarify’ the image. It is now a picture of a scene after an explosion that occurred somewhere specific. An ekphrastic hope is in play in the editor’s attempt to use the caption to make the viewer see clearly (Mitchell, 1994). The main goal in the office, however, is ultimately to make things easier for international clients, whereby the caption helps the picture become an international commodity by placing it in a wider context that may sell better to an international market. Thus, it ­describes an explosion near a military barrier in the vicinity of the city of Tulkarem. Yet the explosion has no ‘face’, for there is no sign of the suicide bomber or the unexpected army barrier that forced the taxi to pull over (apparently leading to the explosion). Instead, it is an explosion, perhaps an accident that occurred when Israeli soldiers simply happened to be nearby. Changing “search and collect” to “collect and search for” maintains a ‘proper’ English style, and the latter phrase may be easier to read and understand on an international scale. Stripping the body parts of their Israeli nationality forces the photographer’s national identity into the shadows again, as his professional codes require. For his choice of words (which now seem like ‘bad’ English) would most certainly reveal his own nationality (an Israeli? a Palestinian?) and might even indicate a political affiliation adopted by the local bureau. The picture made it to the left-hand side of the front page of the ­International Herald Tribune, where it was given the status of factual information. The combination of the picture and caption treats the ­visual elements of the picture as obscure pieces of information that are explained by the text, and it is less obvious than other elements on the page, being reduced in size and placed at the bottom left of the page. The main picture, located at the top center, is twice its size. The black frame around the picture and caption separates the combination from other informational elements on the page, thereby empowering its awkwardness (Kress and Van Leeuwen, 1998) (Figure 4.6).

An Analysis of Significant Events and their Coverage  177

Figure 4.6  Front page, International Herald Tribune, December 30, 2006.

Transformed one last time, the caption, as published on the front page of the International Herald Tribune, read: Suicide Bombing in Mideast Israeli soldiers collecting and searching for body parts after an explosion close to an army checkpoint in the West Bank on Thursday.

178  An Analysis of Significant Events and their Coverage The army had been on high alert after reports that a suicide bomber was trying to enter Israel. (International Herald Tribune, Front page, December 30, 2006) Finally, on the front of the International Herald Tribune, a sense of ekphrastic hope appears even stronger, as the text here seems ‘closer’ to the image (Mitchell, 1994). The photo’s visual elements are shared with the verbal message, and “the connotation of the language is ­‘innocented’ through the photograph’s denotation” (Barthes, 1977, p. 26). With the caption’s help, the document becomes a glocal sign: It aspires to perfectly depict an event as part of the Israeli-Palestinian conflict, a globally scrutinized struggle that, at times, involves Israeli soldiers fighting suicide bombers in the West Bank. The explosion is now classed as the deliberate action of a suicide bomber trying to enter Israeli territory, making the picture and its caption a combined visual–textual attempt to represent a well-known conflict in which both sides endure sacrifices. This startling event (one does not often encounter people picking up body parts) carries a powerful local scent. Its position marks its secondary importance compared to photos that depict other, more ‘comfortable’ events in more familiar places – snow-dusted Florence in the main picture, or the head shot of the Italian central bank’s new chief in the center – and are thus more easily read by an international audience (Kress and Van Leeuwen, 1998).13 Intertextuality across pictures is also in play here, as the pairing of pictures on the front page encourages the viewer to notice similarities and differences between them, inviting a deeper reading of the picture, given its unusual theme and visual landscape (Werner, 2004). Since the pictorial coverage represents a strange event that is hard to understand through its visual elements alone, its caption becomes inseparable from its decoding process, as though it were a comic strip (Abbott, 1986). The picture and caption are transformed into a combined system of visual and textual signs that require an integrated reading (Barthes, 1977; Werner, 2004).14 On a deeper level, then, the power of this combined system of signs is revealed one last time: It is an inseparable synthesis of word and image in which the visual aspires to represent the local and is thus detached from the international spectator’s world, whereas the verbal represents the international and thus becomes closer to it (Holtzman, 1997). It is, in other words, the visual–textual language of glocalization. Published on an agency client’s front page the transformation is complete, and the picture is therefore easier for international spectators to digest.15 Once the picture is published, the photographer encounters it on the International Herald Tribune’s front page, just as the audience of spectators do, as well as his colleagues. Publication on the front page of a prestigious international newspaper is evidence of a photographer’s

An Analysis of Significant Events and their Coverage  179 success overseas. The published picture becomes an incentive to the ­photographer and his colleagues and will inform the production of similar pictures in the future: Once viewed by other personnel on the production line and beyond, it reasserts the agency’s brand as having high standards, with production lines and final outputs designed for perfection. It is therefore part of the organizational meta-format of s­ uccess – a sign among other signs bound together as a set of unwritten instructions to help reproduce successes and avoid failures (Frosh, 2003). This set of instructions is ingrained as an essential learning process and part of the work experience acquired by photographers, editors, and managers who work for the organization. These instructions account for the organization’s experience in producing success, for the success of the cultural industry in which it operates, and eventually for a cultural sense of comfort and confidence. And when the news picture is published (and is therefore successful), it becomes a form of existential security – a cultural mechanism for soothing the existential experience of the spectator (Giddens, 1991). Only then do the horrifying visuals in the picture of soldiers searching for body parts become a place of comfort, one that “delineates the dangerous territory outside order, and throws into sharp relief the proper limits of that which is ordered” (Seaton, 2005, p. 32).

Third Event: The Funeral of an Israeli officer, December 2005 On one occasion, the photographer was sent to cover the funeral of an Israeli officer who was killed in a suicide bombing near the city of TulKarem a day earlier. We headed toward the military cemetery located in the city of Haifa. The photographer asked around for the exact location and we arrived at 11:00. There was a huge crowd and the ceremony was just about to begin. As we entered the cemetery, the photographer took his two cameras and a hat and joined a group of photographers standing next to the officer’s grave. When the ceremony began, the noise made by the huge crowd descended into the sound of tears and grieving. Covering an occasion such as this is demanding: The photographer and his colleagues were positioned very close to the dead officer’s grieving relatives. Behind the ­family was a large group of people who did not appear to approve of the photographers’ work. Strong sunlight poured onto the photographer’s camera, forcing him to try to block the light with his left hand during the ceremony. A stranger complained to the photographer about where he was standing; trying to get a good spot, he had stepped on one of the gravestones next to the officer’s open grave. The photographer shifted immediately. A car stopped at an inner road near the grave and out came former Prime Minister Ehud Barak, a family friend according to whispers among the crowd, although the photographers were unimpressed by

180  An Analysis of Significant Events and their Coverage his presence. Half an hour after we had arrived at the cemetery, we left and headed to a nearby coffeehouse. On the way, the photographer described the difficulties he had encountered. Events such as military funerals are highly sensitive but, ­unfortunately, happen often in Israel, and even though the photographer had covered many in the past, they were still tricky assignments. In ­order to get the perfect picture from this particular funeral, he had to get extremely close to the grieving family and yet keep enough distance to be respectful, not to be too obvious or vulgar, and minimize his already disturbing presence as much as possible. Once this kind of event comes to an end, he usually experiences enormous mental stress; he feels for the families’ grief but is determined to excel in his job. This specific funeral was extremely hard for him. Throughout the editing process, the photographer claimed he had many strong pictures. Which ones should he submit? When asked why he did not send them all, he explained to me that this would be unprofessional. Instead, six ‘extremely good’ pictures were chosen out of a total 120 and edited. I interrupted, asking whether there is actually a good reason for editing, and he then explained briefly about the editing process. He said changes could be made to compensate for distortions caused by the camera, but the content of the picture could not be altered. He showed me how, for instance, the soldiers’ uniforms turned bluish instead of olive green in one of the pictures. However, he said he would not hesitate to crop a picture – framing it better. Within an hour, and after sending six pictures to the pictures department in Jerusalem, we were ready to leave. Third Event: An Analysis News events such as military funerals are the result of former occurrences, an extension of a story – a follow-up. After the explosion, the photographer could predict a funeral would take place the next day and prepared for it: He knew exactly what special gear he should take (a hat for example) and what he was expected to produce under the agency’s supposedly good pictures formula, that conceptual formula existing in the head of the creative photographer implementing the organization’s standard for a creative shoot (Ryan, 1992). Funerals make similar images, and the photographer would try to focus on the ‘strongest’ ones and give these some thought even before arriving at the scene. Thus, the photographer pointed out to me during an interview, when covering events that are somewhat similar to events he had covered in the past, he would usually look for certain ‘squares’. In funerals for example, he continued, he would usually first look for the facial expressions, the body, pain and tears, etc. Funerals require decent dress and restrained behavior (unless one is close to the deceased, in which case emotion is supposedly forgiven and almost obligatory), and the photographer thought of this before going;

An Analysis of Significant Events and their Coverage  181 he is aware of the obtrusive nature of his profession, particularly in events such as funerals. A photographer finds it difficult to blend into a funeral’s crowd since funerals are not events it is usually appropriate to take pictures at. A journalist would also struggle because their presence at the event shatters boundaries of privacy, violating the event’s intimacy. The news photographer represents both these professions and is doubly loathed and despised. He would therefore have to minimize his disturbing presence by wearing an appropriate hat or a modest set of clothing in an attempt to preserve the “choreography of the unobtrusive” (Rosenblum, 1978, p. 23). For photographers then, the best news pictures are taken when they manage to see and yet remain unnoticed. It is only then that their chances of capturing the events in their supposedly natural surroundings and in their purest untouched form are substantially increased. To the eyes of news photographers, the picture is therefore nothing but a clear window connecting reality with their documenting profession (as ­photojournalists) – a “perfect analogon” of reality, whose execution is dominated by their journalistic codes of objectivity (Barthes, 1977, p. 17). There is clearly some sort of a reality out there waiting to be ­captured (and its documentation should therefore be fixed – the color of the soldiers’ uniforms changed from blue to green as, supposedly, they truly are, for example), and journalists (photojournalists) aspire to its perfect revelation at all times (Schudson, 1989). In funerals, the so-called true nature of things is revealed to the photographer through the unprecedented exposure of emotions expressed by the crowd: It is a rare moment of truth – authenticity, as some might call it, in all its glory – and therefore one that screams for documentation. And that unique moment is apparently intimate, privately owned; it is the bedroom in the house of emotions that the photographer has violated in the name of testimony. Throughout the photographic event, an exchange has been made, and this purified moment (for this is life to the news photographer) is no longer a private experience (it never was) but one shared with the photographer in a rare combination of time and space; he has managed to stare at reality and capture it in its nudity. And once that moment is acknowledged, it is exploited to its full by the photographer who is no longer a participant observer trying not to be noticed, but over present. Yet the price paid by his disturbing attendance is small when compared to the immeasurable value of the piece of reality he has captured. The funeral was not simply a private closed event but rather an open one, allowing for all to pay their tribute. In fact, many people at the funeral were not at all familiar with the officer or his family (much like myself and the photographer) and came only to pay their respects. Those attending were therefore a small local community sharing a local grief. But at the same time, they were also part of a wider imagined national

182  An Analysis of Significant Events and their Coverage community, grieving for the death of the officer (Anderson, 1991). He is now a victim of the Israeli-Palestinian conflict, with Ehud Barak taking on a double role by being present: He was there both as a close friend of the family and as the former Israeli Prime Minister and thus the local community’s ministerial representative. Finally, the two communities become part of one international imagined community of emotions – an “imagined feeling community,” sharing the emotional pain of loss (Pantti and Wieten, 2005, p. 302). The funeral invites a crowd whose public identities are struggled over and yet simultaneously shared: It is a public physically present at the event, a local community that is also a part of an imagined national one (whose membership is acquired thanks to the national news coverage and through a national consensus), and finally part of a wide international imagined community of emotions (strengthened by the international news coverage of the event). This unique triangular relationship comes into play along the formation of a particular cultural identity: an Israeli local one whose boundaries are empowered by the political impact of the event and a hybrid one owned by the international emotional experience of loss. It celebrates the funeral as an extraordinary event connecting private and public spheres – a unique crossing through which the private becomes public and vice versa (Kitch and Hume, 2008). This relationship also demonstrates how emotions, and their exposure, are a complex cultural site through which the existence of the private in the public sphere is expressed as a “[…] psychological relationship between private and public spheres and the cultural/political necessity of managing individual emotional states […] At an individual level, and sometimes at a collective level, emotions leak out and disturb others” (Harding and Pribram, 2002, p. 408). This site in which identity is struggled over and shared at the same time is reflected through the photographer’s tormented self: He belongs to the occupational community of news-making (and thus a member of additional sub occupational communities – news photography, local and international news organizations. Sending all the pictures taken at the event is therefore taken by him to be unprofessional [Gregory, 1983]). He is a member of a wide imagined (and the physically present) local community of Israelis (a complex and unstable system of subcommunities in its own right). And his strong emotional reaction experienced at the event (as he confessed to me) connects him to an emotional international imagined community. These layers of identity contribute to the formation of the photographer’s cultural identity. They hover in an unstable spatiality, ­constantly shifting in a dialectic relationship of inclusion and separation; the ­photographer’s view is both from within – as an Israeli, a Jew – and from without – as a journalist working for an international news agency (Collier, 2001).

An Analysis of Significant Events and their Coverage  183 Such instability is expressed at different moments throughout the execution of the funeral’s picture – the decision to enter the Jewish cemetery with a hat and not with a yarmulke, for instance. For it is a Jewish custom to wear a yarmulke (or at least some sort of a head cover; many secular Jews often wear a hat) when entering a Jewish cemetery. And in this case, the photographer chose to wear a hat despite his religious beliefs as a traditional Jew. Thus, since the photographer was not familiar with the officer or his family, he could, at the first level, perform slightly in favor of his profession as a journalist (and as one working for an international news organization) and less as an Israeli or Jew (or both). The coverage of an Israeli soldier’s funeral is a highly sensitive event with major political implications; it requires a highly suspicious lens. But in funerals, as always, the photographer’s identity performs in all its colors. Sometimes different layers are more dominant than others, but all are present even when some are subtle. This was clearly expressed by a former chief of the agency’s Jerusalem pictures department and the photographer himself during the coverage of the military funeral of an Israeli soldier in the past. The event was seen in a documentary on the agency’s local pictures department that was shot in Jerusalem in 2005: “Covering funerals is always difficult for us. XXX [photographer] saw the destruction at the site, and now he has to cope with the funeral of the Israeli soldier who was killed there.”

[Former chief]:

[…] [Photographer]:

“I always think that it could be one of my friends, my brother […] it can be every one […] Last year one of my friends’ brother was killed in Bethlehem, and I came to the funeral – not to cover, only to be there, to be with him. And I looked at the ­photographers and what they were doing. It’s disgusting, and I know that I look exactly the same, but what can I do? It’s my job.”

[…] [Photographer]:

“The soldier is twenty years old. He didn’t start his life; it’s very hard to see. One minute changes all the life in the family.”

[…] [Photographer]:

“[…] At the beginning, when I started to work at this job and I covered the first funeral, I wanted to cry and I’ve stopped myself. Then I understood that I need to cry. I’ve also cried today. Not only me, but most of the photographers.”

This extraordinary struggle is expressed at its peak in one of the pictures sent to the local office in Jerusalem: The characters of three women appear in the center – probably members of the dead officer’s family. Two of them appear to be screaming with pain and point their gaze down the grave. The third one, the youngest among the three (perhaps the daughter

184  An Analysis of Significant Events and their Coverage of one of them), looks straight at the camera while grabbing the other two, as if she is trying to prevent their inevitable collapse. A young man stands next to her – he wears a red yarmulke on is head – screaming as if in pain, and at the back another man who looks at the grave with his hand covering his mouth as if he has experienced a horrific event of some sort. This is the “[…] empathic truth of gesture in the great circumstances of life” (Baudelaire in Barthes, 1984, p. 23) (Figure 4.7). The inner borders of the picture are defined with the help of two ­Israeli soldiers dressed in ceremonial uniforms (light green) with berets on their heads. Only half the body of one is visible, as the other half, along with his head, was cropped in the editing process. The visible soldier gazes, with an expression of restrained emotion, out of the photograph. A ­binary juxtaposition is in play between the emotionally restrained soldiers and the grieving crowd (Werner, 2004); they appear “terribly” unmoved and therefore emphasize “the grief of the moved” (Seaton, 2005, p. 188). This is a Jewish funeral, as clearly expressed in the picture’s visual elements: Three men who are present in the picture wear yarmulkes on their heads (one wears a hat in the shape of a yarmulke). In the center, a white napkin is held by an old man holding on to a screaming lady. Like in an act of magic, the napkin appears as if it is embraced by some sort

Figure 4.7  The funeral of the Israeli officer in the city of Haifa (Israel, December 30, 2006).

An Analysis of Significant Events and their Coverage  185 of light from up above. A symbolic attribute is formed with the napkin (Kress and Van Leeuwen, 1996): How is it that only the napkin is lit? Is it touched by a divine hand, imbuing the event with a higher providence? The officer’s funeral is a private event, and the pain of those present, judging from the facial expressions of the three women at the center of the picture, is their own private emotional experience. The photograph captures a visual representation of the hidden souls of the three: It is a cosmic moment – the melting of spirit and material, life and death, time and space; for the real, and what some might call truth, of life is fully expressed when it has physically and spiritually reached its end. And it is death that is the setting “[…] wherein the dull monotony of life is transcended to take on a true individuality: as if the approach of death somehow strips away the false trappings of sociality, to reveal the vital heart of an otherwise invisible truth” (Clark, 1993, p. 3). The youngest of the three women shares the emotional stress of the event as she holds the other two and stares at the camera; she is their last resort before they emotionally collapse and therefore guards the remainder of their dignity from the photographer’s greed (if she does not hold them, would they fall down, perhaps faint and get hurt? Would they embarrass with their unpredictable behavior if not for her grip?). There is action, a transactional process in play: The young woman is the actor/reactor as she keeps the two women from collapsing and at the same time reacts to the photographer, who becomes part of the scene as an additional actor himself (Kress and Van Leeuwen, 1996). Her facial expression is twisted with pain and she looks tormented, as if she is begging for her life and the lives of her close ones, for the dead officer. The camera is aimed at her as a weapon and she is nude and exposed. But they are not alone. There is a packed crowd behind them that appears to be greater than that which is contained in the frame. A public has come to pay its respect, even if the officer and his family are not at all familiar to most of its members. It is therefore an event representing a shared destiny – that of constant fear from terror – and therefore one that involves a sense of closeness, of unity, of a community. This unique communal relation between the participants is demonstrated through a number of visual elements: They belong to the same landscape that is visually defined by the two soldiers marking its borders. Also, there is movement in the picture, as a vector connects/separates between the gaze of the grieving crowd and the grave of the officer. Now the members of the crowd are also bound together in a conceptual structure – a unique group of living members who stare together (symmetrically) from above at the grave of a deceased one in the ground (Kress and Van Leeuwen, 1996; Jewitt and Oyama, 2001). The vector is also directed with the help of a triangular shape, as the hands on the face of the crying woman and the coif on her head form a shape of an arrow’s head pointing downwards. And a similar shape is

186  An Analysis of Significant Events and their Coverage revealed with an imaginary line drawn from the upper left border of the picture to the head of the crying woman next to her and then to the upper right border as well (Kress and Van Leeuwen, 1996). The communal connection between the participants is also empowered with a classification process, a covert taxonomy visually realized now as they become a group of subordinates whose connection is made through a visual symmetrical composition – there is an equal distance between them, and they appear to be the same size and seem to appear with a similar orientation toward the horizontal and vertical axes (Kress and Van Leeuwen, 1996). And in the picture, the main participants in the foreground are the face of the community’s members (most of them in the blurry background, secondary participants) – men and women, young and old, religious and secular, soldiers and civilians (Kress and Van Leeuwen, 1996). Here is a rare visual documentation of an imagined community: one whose members have nothing in common other than the feeling of unity (the two women at the front with their black coats, one with speckled spots and a coif on her head – are they even from Israel? Are they from ‘here’?). This is a local national community holding on to its communality as the means of maintaining an existential security, ontological, once the physical being of one of its members has ceased to exist (Giddens, 1991). This is the face of the “ambiguous myth of the human ‘community’”, and this is a great visual representative of “the great family of men” (Barthes, 1973, p. 107). For […] man is born, works, laughs and dies everywhere in the same way; and if there still remains in these actions some ethnic peculiarity, at least one hints that there is underlying each one an identical ‘nature’, that their diversity is only formal and does not belie the existence of a common mould. (Barthes, 1973, p. 107) And once portrayed as a form of (universally) familiar documentation, the picture of the community would then become an impressive document in its own right, for this is the “universality of human actions”, and this is no other than a glimpse at the human mirror (Barthes, 1973, p. 107). Once the picture is published, the boundaries between the private and the public are shattered one last time. The feeling of local communality would exceed its local boundaries toward a wider imaginative community, with the picture’s spectators as its additional members: First, an ­intertextual connection between the picture and the word (caption) will be in play. Thus, the picture invites the viewer to follow the gaze of the participants downwards (the vector, triangular shapes of an arrow’s head), where the caption is often located: “The death of an Israeli officer”. Here as well, the written text, like in a comic strip, becomes an essential

An Analysis of Significant Events and their Coverage  187 ingredient for a complete decoding process (Abbott, 1986). The caption forms an anchoring of the image; it encourages a desired reading, informing the nonlocal viewer it is a funeral (Barthes, 1977; Werner, 2004). Then, the picture frames the word – a visual evidence of a ­funeral, and one which is infused with emotion given the facial expressions of the main participants in the picture (Werner, 2004). With the help of such intertextual relation, the nonlocal viewer would become part of the imagined feeling community, as he witnesses the face of grief.16 Then a deeper visual reading process would take place: This is a close medium shot, where the facial expressions of the main participants are disturbingly clear as if it were a close-up. At the same time, a strong sense of involvement is created with the participants’ visual frontality (Jewitt and Oyama, 2001). These elements immediately connect the viewer of the picture to the members of the community, as “Every detail of their face and their expression is visible […] They reveal their individuality and their personality […] they are represented as though they belong or should belong to ‘our group’ […]” (Jewitt and Oyama, 2001, p. 146). As with pictures of presumed deaths, the picture is expressed in its dual performance, both constructing and representing a sense of unity, through which the locality of the imaginative community becomes ­abstract – from a community physically present at the event to a wider one present in its sense of belonging (Zelizer, 2010). And the same local community is then revealed as part of a universal one, celebrating the expression of feeling – that of loss, of suffering, of the perception of life, and of the human fear from its ending, having death remain as “the great extrinsic factor of human existence” (Giddens, 1991, p. 162).17 Death, therefore, appears here as a problem, and the collective fear from its occurrence operates as an existential mechanism essential for the existence of individuals in society. And the shared attempt to overcome the fear from death (it is well expressed in the picture through the petrified facial expressions on the women’s faces at the center, as they look straight at the face of death) is eventually that which maintains, among others, that same ontological universal security for the daily experience of life. Death is therefore […] always a problem for all societies, since every social system must in some ways accept death, because human beings inevitably die, but at the same time social systems must to a certain extent deny death to allow people to go on in day-to-day life with some sense of commitment. (Mellor, 1993, p. 13) The play between the private and the public, life and death, acquires additional meanings in an attempt to examine the life of the photograph itself. For the photograph is, by its nature, a sense of death; it is a frozen

188  An Analysis of Significant Events and their Coverage moment of time and space in the past that is never again and thus was never alive (Barthes, 1984). And it is up to the “(terrified) photographer”, therefore, to “exert himself to the utmost to keep the photograph of becoming death” (Barthes, 1984, p. 14). It is he who gives the photograph life and the photograph which makes the spectator animated and thus alive (Zelizer, 2010). And in the picture, life is no longer a matter of self but of a public, for “the ‘private life’ is nothing but that zone of space, of time, where I am not an image, an object” (Barthes, 1984, p. 15).18 The picture is an interesting crossing point: the officer’s relatives with their so-called private experience who are, at the same time, members of a physically present local public and an imaginative one (once the picture is published, they would share their sense of local communality with local spectators). Then they are also members of a universal community, representing both the experience of life and the emotional experience when they are close to death. And they are a public matter once they have turned from physically living private subjects into an object (they are now also part of an image). It also reflects the complex formation of the photographer’s identity – he becomes the work of the image (Butchart, 2011). He is a photographer (who is the producer of a picture that hovers between the international and the local), a local spectator (Israeli, Jewish), and a member of the national community and of a universal one, sharing the emotional experience of loss.

Fourth Event: Carrots Picking Near Nahal Oz, May 2006 It was a slow morning and the agency photographer made use of his free time to think of a feature story to cover; he did not receive any specific instructions from the office, just as long as he would come up with a story from somewhere in the southern region. There had been a lot of action near the southern border of Israel with Gaza at the time of my observations, including the firing of Qassam rockets and bomb shells from the city of Gaza to Israeli territory, and the photographer was advised to have his feature story connected to past events one way or another.19 We headed towards kibbutz Nahal Oz in the south and encountered a truck delivering carrots. The driver pointed us to where the carrot picking took place, and on our way the photographer told me he had an idea to make a story on carrot picking in the south for quite some time, and it seemed like a good opportunity to do so. Still, he wanted to stop at the artillery base nearby, just in case there was something worth covering there as well. There was no special activity in the army base, and the soldiers had already finished cleaning the cannons. Within 15 minutes, we headed towards the carrot picking area, where we encountered an extraordinary machine that picked carrots from the ground. After a short conversation

An Analysis of Significant Events and their Coverage  189 with the vehicle’s operators – Bedouins from the city of Rahat – we were surprised to discover a Qassam rocket had fallen right in the field not long ago. The driver told us he came to work in the field as usual and saw a huge hole in the ground with the metal wrecks of the rocket. He was not sure at first and called the police, and they immediately identified the remains of a Qassam rocket and closed the area. A few days later he came back, and he had been working there ever since. The photographer took pictures of the carrot field and the machine in action. Its operators were intrigued by why they were being photographed; they asked who the pictures were for and said they would like to have copies. The photographer explained he worked for an international news agency and that he would be happy to send them copies. Within a half an hour we left the field and returned to the army base. When we arrived at the army base, things seemed rather quiet as before; there was still no sign of action, and one of the officers explained it was indeed a quiet day. Nonetheless, the photographer took pictures of a few soldiers working on a cannon’s barrel, of a soldier with an army vest guarding, and another working with bags of explosives. We left again and entered Nativ Haasara, a small Israeli settlement located nearby. The photographer searched for interesting pictures of the Israeli West Bank barrier but moaned there was nothing worth covering there (at least if there was some sort of a car near the barrier, as he tried to explain to me, then this was worth a picture. But when there is no motion, he concluded, it is not worth shooting at all).20 We left the settlement and headed towards kibbutz Yad Mordechai, where there is a famous resting area for those heading south, to send the pictures. The photographer decided to spike the barrier’s and the army base’s pictures and focus on the ones from the carrot picking, particularly those containing some sort of movement in them – carrots falling from the vehicle, for instance, as a sign of some ‘liveness’, as he described it (unlike the pictures from the base, where there was no action). The best picture, so he said, was the one in which the driver accidentally looked at the camera and smiled, yet he decided not to send it since it looked as if it was staged. Finally, six successful pictures were selected and were then sent to the local office in Jerusalem. In a matter of minutes, the chief photographer at the time made contact via the AOL chat; he did not think they would use the pictures, since, as he explained, the world had no interest in carrot picking. The photographer was disappointed. He thought his carrots pictures were pretty good, and that the head of the department did not really know how to do his job. Pictures such as these, so he said, could be easily sold to, say, agriculture magazines or others, and this, to his view, was exactly what the agency needed. On our way back, the photographer described the organizational changes that were taking place at the agency. Getty Images, he said,

190  An Analysis of Significant Events and their Coverage was beginning to take over the market of news pictures as well, and this is mainly because their working practices were simply better: Its photographers were covering the same events as did the news agencies but were sending more pictures per event, since the company is more diverse in its targeted clients and markets (thus, pointed the agency photographer, a Getty’s photographer, for example, would probably take pictures of a cannon’s barrel from all sorts of angles). If it was a Getty photographer shooting the carrots picking event, continued the agency photographer, he/she would probably send 20 pictures from that same event while agency photographers would probably settle with five to six pictures. Moreover, those 20 Getty pictures would probably be sold for the same price as the agency’s. So, as a result, Getty had a wider and more diverse circle of clients (news and non-news) and was making profit at the expense of the international news agencies. In addition, its archive was accessible to all on the web, unlike the agencies’, and therefore it received greater publicity. The solution, said the photographer, was a complete makeover of the agencies’ daily routine, and the reason why the agency aspired to broaden and diversify its circle of clients. Nonetheless, the photographer believed his carrots pictures were in fact spiked because of personal issues between him and the chief of the department at the time, who, to the photographer’s view, was acting more like a photographer and less manager-like. We discussed the job requirements for the position of chief photographer – whether, above all things, it required being an excellent photographer to do the job of a manager. The chief, said the photographer, was envious of him and belittled his successes (much like other photographers who often resent the success of their colleagues). This kind of behavior is fine if it comes from other photographers, explained the agency photographer during an interview, as it is only natural. However, he continued, it is completely wrong when the department’s manager envies his photographers: Eventually it would backfire, since, at the end of the day, the success of the department’s staff is much like his own and certainly not at his expense. Fourth Event: An Analysis A feature story, expressed, in part, by the photographer’s jargon and as a portion of the department’s daily routine, is intriguing. Originally a French term (probably from the words Feture or Faiture meaning ­fashion or form), the concept became associated with the American film industry at the beginning of the 20th century. Short movies, at that time, were screened before the main film, and the term “Featured Presentation” (and simply “Feature” later on) was used in order to separate these from the main show (Bailo, 1985). 21 In the agency’s news routine, the term was also used so as to describe soft-news stories that were based on a wide range of issues whose successful coverage is not constrained by

An Analysis of Significant Events and their Coverage  191 immediacy (unlike hard-news or spot-news stories that are often based on unscheduled events, and therefore their publication is speed demanding [see Tuchman, 1973; Lehman-Wilzig and Seletzky, 2010]). A Feature picture story at the agency unveils other meanings in the overall process: To begin, as an expression borrowed from the world of film, it binds the production processes of films and news pictures together, thereby connecting the production processes of news pictures with a greater system of production and consumption in popular ­culture  – an open system of production in a complex relationship of cause and effect (which, again, does not resemble, for instance, a former clear distinction that exists between closed genres of photography [Rosenblum, 1978]). Second, the need to develop the rather exceptional feature story alongside the ‘regular’ news story (both as part of daily routine) that is provided to clients also demonstrates the significance of various market pressures on production: The high demand of the agency’s clients (which, of course, is calculated from the anticipation for particular stories that is expressed by their audience of consumers) for a more feature-like, perhaps even ‘stocky’, kind of news pictures suggests there is an elaborate system of cultural production that is in play here; it is one that is entwined with particular practices of consumption and that is responsible for the production of extraordinary cultural texts (­ photographs that are news), which are also consumed products (Negus, 1997). Of course, features also imply of strong competition with the agency’s rivals. Thus, with the help of features, the agency clearly aims at diversifying its line of products, thereby increasing its revenues in order to broaden its circle of clients which, in turn, would result in maintaining its powerful grip onto the international news photo arena. Getty Images plays a significant part in such business rivalry: The largest stock photography corporation in the world, and one of the agency’s pictures’ biggest competitors (more on this in my concluding chapter), Getty Images has been one of the agencies’ most stubborn opponents in the international news pictures market, partly given its Rights Controlled selling system (Frosh, 2000, 2006, 2013). In this rather traditional production model, Getty quite simply ‘rents out’ images, selling advertising, marketing, and other related sectors’ clients the right to reproduce images which the corporation itself has acquired from various freelance photographers. This means that photographers are getting a certain share of the revenue that is generated from these sales (below 50%). The images are then stored, kept in ‘stock’, whereby they are filed, duplicated, cross-referenced, and categorized based on various general forms of classifications (e.g., content and style, so each image might show up in a number of categories) before they are marketed through printed catalogues, CDs, and nowadays mostly through the company’s website (Frosh, 2013). Moreover, the prices are

192  An Analysis of Significant Events and their Coverage primarily determined by usage and are subject to negotiation with the clients, who can then purchase the rights for an exclusive use for preset periods of time, and private customers can also easily access these images on the web (see Frosh, 2000, 2013). Apparently, this system of production and marketing has proved itself worthwhile for both the company and its photographers: The photographers pay only for the materials and expenses of shoots and enjoy a solid income according to the (possibly multiple) use of their images by the company’s clients. The company, on the other hand, covers the expenses of marketing and distribution, but owns a huge stock of photographs for unlimited use and thus the potential profit with no additional expenses per picture (Frosh, 2000). At the international news agency, however, the selling system of ­pictures works differently, as I described in the preceding chapter, and so is its payment scheme: To begin, its photographers are mostly staff and their monthly salaries are fixed. 22 Regardless of the quantity of their delivered (and published) pictures, their earnings remain the same. 23 The agency’s pictures are usually sold on annual subscriptions that are tailored for the specific needs of its clients, and their prices are calculated on clients’ circulation, platform, and modes of publication. Moreover, the agency’s photographers are mostly covering news events, thereby tailoring their pictorial products to (mostly) various news providers; their execution is therefore coerced to the constraints dictated by the news discourse (e.g., codes of factuality, neutrality). In addition, they work under strict time frames, given the versatile nature of news events. But also, since the agency’s clients are spread worldwide, which forces agency photographers to work against different deadlines simultaneously, and so both the production and distribution processes of the agency’s pictures are, to an extent, rather limited. 24 Getty’s photographers cover a more diverse set of events, and their pictures are targeted at a greater, and more diversified, circle of clients (news and non-news). Unlike the agency’s pictures archive, which is accessible only to media organizations and institutions, Getty’s existing clients (as are potential ones) are exposed to its entire line of products, while the company’s archive is accessible to private customers as well. As a result, Getty’s photographers often send back more pictures per event in order to provide a more diverse coverage, which can then fit into a number of categories (that are eventually accessible to a far more diversified and thus wider circle of clients via the archive). Since they get paid per picture, that is also an incentive. 25 The agency’s production of features demonstrates a trend used as a business mechanism so as to enlarge the company’s revenues and strengthen its lines of production against its stock rivals. To that end, the international news picture can be seen as the outcome of an ongoing struggle between competing fields of photography (both stock and news), having the characteristics of both its ‘fighting parents’ embedded

An Analysis of Significant Events and their Coverage  193 in its DNA. These changes set the tone for the future international pictures market, as news pictures and their international processes of production, as pointed out by Frosh (2013) and as I demonstrated in the preceding chapters, are becoming more and more similar to stock’s (e.g., pictures in certain categories in the agency’s archive that are already programmed for decontextualization early in their making and are thus designed for multiple contexts, platforms, and modes of usage). At this point in time, Getty Images is clearly strengthening its grip in the global image industry and might soon turn into the most powerful player in the international news pictures division as well. “Do I add to images in movies? I don’t think so; I don’t have time: In front of the screen I am not free to shut my eyes […]” (p. 55), pointed out Barthes (1984) as to why he favored photographs over movies given their lack of movement, thereby inviting the spectator’s imagination to partake in their reading. For the agency photographer, however, it is a sense of motion that he mostly strives to find as he searches for something worth shooting. An elusive relationship of news pictures with film is formed once again: The photographer is the producer of pictures and the consumer of movies; and news pictures’ process of production serves as a form of visual production (film or video), governed by the dominant conventions of photography (Foucault, 1980). The photographer’s desire to capture movement also points to his dual and conflicting occupational identity – a photographer and a ­journalist – that is put into play when the photographer refuses to treat the photograph as a ‘dead’ object. In the field, the photographer therefore becomes an eyewitness of movement (an event that happened) which occurred in the past. But the frozen picture releases the testimony of movement (which indeed took place in ‘real life’) given its ontological nature (for  the picture is ‘dead’). Here is the existential dialectic of the news photograph: The photographed referent was captured by the camera but the motion is gone, turning the picture into a complete document of evidence, and yet one from which the movement of its testimony is missing (Sontag, 1979; Barthes, 1984). Obsessed by the photographer in him, he then struggles to bring his picture ‘back to life’ in a battle already lost given the photograph’s frozen nature (Barthes, 1984). At the same time, the photographer is also obliged to preserve the motion in his pictures, only this time as a journalist – not only does he aspire to maintain the photographic experience in full, but also given the codes of evidence and factuality dictated by the picture’s newsworthiness (for something had occurred in reality and thus has to be recorded in full) and given the code of the prestige international news organization he is working for (the  international news agency, which complies to a higher code than local news providers) (Figure 4.8). This conflict is eventually settled with the simulation of motion as an adequate replacement for the evidence of one: a car shot as if driving

194  An Analysis of Significant Events and their Coverage

Figure 4.8  C arrot picking near Nahal Oz: In search for some ‘movement’ (Gil Cohen Magen, Israel, May 11, 2006).

next to the Israeli barrier (although it was no longer driving in the p ­ icture) or carrots shot falling from the picking machine (even though, of course, they were no longer falling as well).26 Once photographed, they have become forever frozen, motionless. Now the photographer stands helpless as the docile servant of the photographic text, prioritizing his photographed ‘movements’ by their ‘stillness’ (does a picture of a car near the barrier have more motion in it than just a picture of the concrete barrier itself?). Once the picture of the carrot picking is chosen, the journalist overcomes the photographer; the coverage of the carrot picking is then taken as having more motion in it then the coverage of a silent concrete barrier. The photographer had witnessed such movement at the scene of events, and therefore, to his view, it is more newsworthy (as demonstrated in the preceding chapters, here too the photographer expresses a similar view to that of other professional photojournalists who see the truthfulness in photojournalism as a subjective matter. See Mäenpää, 2014). A similar conflict is expressed as the photographer decides to spike a ‘perfectly good’ picture, simply since the machine’s driver was caught smiling by the camera, thereby looking as if it was ‘staged’. Then the journalist takes over once again, for a staged smile necessarily reveals a photographer has been present at the scene, thereby contaminating the event with ‘unnaturality’. Unlike many photojournalists, who just recently were found not so strict about the staging of images (see

An Analysis of Significant Events and their Coverage  195 Hadland, Campbell and Lambert, 2015), the photographer’s presence, to the agency photographer’s view, was in fact seen to be draining the event from its newsworthiness. For his duty is to reflect a reality rather than to produce one, even during the coverage of soft news events. The term feature implies also the storytelling aspects of journalistic reports. This additional meaning comes into play when features are taken as part of the field of narrative and therefore can be explained on two levels (Tuchman, 1973): The first, considering feature pictures as news products delivered by the agency. Then they exist as stories, news stories, thereby leaning upon a great heritage of research focusing on the making of news as a form of weaving stories, and on its makers as storytellers (see, e.g., Tuchman, 1976). The second lies on the visual form of feature picture stories, hence leaning upon the very story nature of photographs. Then they are serving as texts – a collection of ideological signs made for reading and interpretation, whereby the photographer is seen as a meta storyteller (Wells, 2004). While both exist in a delicate and unstable web of dialogues, maintained both inside the organization and beyond. So, the feature story is fed by distinct and colliding dimensions of the photographed news story and its tellers: First, in a closed system of production – between those practitioners who contribute to the making of such stories daily inside the organization – and as the output of an international news agency (thereby maintained in a constant international dialogue of news storytelling). Then, as part of an open greater system, it also connects with news story characteristics as expressed in other news organizations (hence, the chief photographer’s decision not to move the pictures forward since the world has no interest in carrot picking [as a kind of story] would perhaps be different from, say, the opinion of an editor working for a local news organization, who might see this as a perfectly acceptable story). On a different level, the production of the photographic story is also a meta-story of production now tailored ­specifically for the demands of consumption (having the world’s lack of interest turning now into a matter of world consumption). Finally, ­features can also be seen as part of a larger narrative system whereby everyday products, the relationship between the spokesman and the audience, the traffic of information, and the very form of social experience serve as the very substance of language and of life in society (Labov, 1997). To that end, the photographer therefore went to look for a news ‘story’ (in this case the carrot picking), which, in turn, is packaged in its final form as a ‘news photograph’, which is then stamped as a feature story. And that story is weaved and designed in the very basic story-form – a speaking event with a beginning, middle, and an end (Labov, 1997). Features are therefore expressed here in an ongoing dialogue: a daily discourse that takes place between production and consumption;

196  An Analysis of Significant Events and their Coverage between news and photography (and between hard-news photography and feature soft-news photography); and between the chief photographer and the photographer. This dialogue is maintained between the agency and other news organizations, and between its cultural industry and other parallel cultural industries under the pressures of a cultural economy. It is therefore the photographer who plays the role of the storyteller in its purest form, having feature pictures demonstrated as the very basic form of story – The classic image of the story-teller is someone who can make something out of nothing, who can engage our attention with a fascinating elaboration of detail that is entertaining, amusing and emotionally rewarding. From the first lines of such a narrative, we know that we are in the presence of a gifted user of the language. Credibility is rarely an issue here. Tall tales, myths and outright lies carry the day, and we normally do not know or care whether the events as told were the personal experience of the story-teller or anyone else. (Labov, 1997, p. 2) Features are also intriguing given their unique relationship to news events and form of creative activity that is demanded from the photographer. As stories that are not required to be timely, features are treated as royalty. They are not based on events of the mundane (at least not like ‘regular’ news pictures that are produced by the agency), thereby varying in their forms of production. They are beyond temporal and spatial limits that determine ‘regular’ news events, and their quality rests upon their stories and their ability to become visually arresting. The photographer is given the liberty to look for a quality (although suitable) story to cover. He spends time researching, uses the best technology, plans his schedule carefully in advance, and edits in his spare time (the idea to capture the carrot picking in action, for example, which occurred to the photographer before even arriving at the scene of events, and once eliminating other possible options such as the artillery base or the barrier in Nativ Haasara) in a serenity which is not part of his daily routine. Superficially, features have creative potential, especially for those ­photographers who see themselves as having an artistic eye. But reality prevails, since the photographer works as a photojournalist at the service of an international news agency; he is not an artist, and the features cannot be a pure emanation of his imagination. They are the outcome of the work experience and the organizational history and therefore must be tailored specifically to the organization’s capabilities and standards and targeted at the client’s taste and demands (Gürsel, 2016). Thus, when the photographer sends his pictures and the chief photographer replies, the

An Analysis of Significant Events and their Coverage  197 latter’s response can be seen as a way of telling the photographer that his pictures are not made according to the agency’s standards (as pictures? as news? perhaps as news products targeted abroad?) and should therefore be spiked. Adorno and Horkheimer’s ‘pseudo-individuality’ helps explain this: The photographer is given the creative liberty to produce news pictures as he wishes, just as long as they conform to the organizational spirit of the industry in which it operates, for “[…] the constant pressure to produce new effects (which must conform to the old pattern) serves merely as another rule to increase the power of the conventions […]” (Adorno and Horkheimer in Negus, 1997, p. 75). Individuality and originality, therefore, receive their definitive meaning within the daily processes of industrial production. In that sense, features are an elaborate and sophisticated tool used by the organization in order to release the individual’s pent up frustration. It is a clever way to increase the organization’s revenues while taming the ‘wild’ photographer: Unlike his office’s bored colleagues, he is given the privileged liberty to pursue creative moments. Yet he is but a simple laborer helping to carry out and duplicate the organizational format of good products throughout his daily routine (Ryan, 1992). 27 The complex relationship between the photographer and his chief appears at its peak at this specific event: The explicit refusal to use the ­pictures on the chief’s side and the photographer’s protest upon the chief’s failing behavior as a manager all point to a delicate and volatile relationship between the two. From the photographer’s point of view, the chief (a veteran photographer), who was promoted and holds the position of a chief photographer, performs in two different occupational communities simultaneously (photographer and chief) and, unfortunately, does not act professionally in either one. Both the photographer and his chief seem to struggle over organizational and social power as part of an ongoing conflict whose seeds were planted long ago, illustrating how certain moments and sites of production often turn into an arena in which modes of power and control are contested between different occupational communities inside the organization (Gregory, 1983). Furthermore, the photographer pointed how the chief refused to use his pictures because of personal reasons, not professional ones (in fact, the photographer described how it was highly unprofessional, since, to his view, the pictures could be sold to different magazines around the world that do not necessarily focus on news). The two then appear as representatives of other additional occupational communities (a l­ocal photographer struggling with a foreign chief photographer), and their struggle turns into one of conflicting cultural backgrounds. It is the battle between the two that demonstrates a typical organizational behavior in which each organizational

198  An Analysis of Significant Events and their Coverage community aspires to position itself at the top of the organizational pyramid (Bourdieu, 1986), each striving to hold onto its high organizational status thereby forming an organizational standard (and thus to be able to dictate the ‘acceptable’ organizational behavior). Clearly, delicate micro-connections at specific moments and sites along news pictures’ production routine make a difference ­( Negus, 1997). So, while analyzing the making of feature pictures, other layers of news pictures’ international processes of production are therefore revealed: They exist under constant external pressures – whether by competing organizations and the consumer audience, or parallel processes of production. And they are influenced by the very organization and its daily practices, its practitioners, and their relationships from within. To that end, production is therefore demonstrated here as the outcome of complex moments and sites through which different occupational communities at the local bureau (chiefs, photographers), and specific organizational practices performed by an international news agency, are constantly interplayed. These forces, both within the organization and beyond, turn the production routine into an arena in which power is constantly contested: between discourses of photography and news, between local stories and meta-narratives; an extraordinary cultural process of production that is performed in the micro- and macro-levels of operation and pressure, structure and process. It is one that encapsulates the cultural worlds of those who put culture into work and work into culture, as these are compressed together in the economic structures of the daily routine (Jensen, 1984).

Notes 1 Since, at the time of my observations, news pictures were always selected from series, they were sent from the field as a group of pictures – whether to the pictures department at the local bureau or to the global pictures desk, where they were assessed, processed, and filtered once more. Even though it may appear, for a moment, as if the analysis of single pictures representing the coverage of each event is somewhat of a distortion of the overall process, the focus of the analysis here is on the events themselves. This, as I hope to demonstrate in this chapter, will hopefully be an important contribution to the intersecting fields of commercial photography, news-making and cultural production. An analysis of complete picture series taken during the coverage of each news event may be an additional angle to consider in the future and may provide important information on the production of pictures as well. 2 Sometimes, when there were no other options, he would ask for the advice of a fellow photographer, but would usually try to avoid it (mainly since, as he explained to me, they were at the event and were thus over-involved). 3 A similar circular structure emerges as the photographer-spectator checked whether his picture was published on Yahoo and therefore returned.

An Analysis of Significant Events and their Coverage  199 4 Of course, the ‘stains’ in the picture were not caused by the camera. Rather, they were marks on a document created by the photographer. Addressing the marks as signatures of the camera rather than his own, an interesting relationship between the photographer and his camera is then revealed, and one which seems to serve his journalistic practice. For, as a journalist, he did not violate the objective codes dictated to him by his profession, since it was only the camera that created the stains and thus interfered with his journalistic endeavor (see Schwartz, 1999). 5 The number of pictures sent from each event was not, at the time of my observations, a fixed number and would often change in a decision made by the chief of the department. The former chief, for example, told his photographers they should get the picture of the event and no more than two to three additional pictures. The acting chief during my observations, however, asked for a larger selection of pictures from each event. 6 Its code of connotation depends not only on the reader’s language, but on a shared one between the potential reader (the soldiers at the scene, in this case) and the photographer at the very early moments of execution (Barthes, 1977). 7 The army service is mandatory in Israel for both men and women. 8 Israeli soldiers often use the expression yeziot in Hebrew, for instance, which, in army slang, is used to describe their weekly vacations. A foreigner who did not serve the army and is not familiar with such meanings would probably not understand such codes and might find it difficult to participate, as is the case with the word mishcholet (a cleaning rod) and its deeper cultural meanings. 9 Of course, captions never simply represent the visual, and the words in captions can never “duplicate the image” (Barthes, 1977, p. 26). See also my analysis of the second event. 10 The small body parts in the picture imbue the forces of terror with a quality of ‘third-world barbarism’ as opposed to the Israeli forces and their ‘firstworld’ civilized behavior, as seen by first-world eyes (Pedelty, 1995). 11 Originally in Hebrew, my translation. 12 The intertextual relation between the two pictures therefore suggests a closer reading of both. Juxtaposed with their intertextual relation reflected by their visual elements, both pictures contribute additional layers to one another’s interpretation, as detailed in my analysis. 13 Kress and Van Leeuwen (1998) pointed to the importance of the audience’s common cultural background. In this specific case, a common ‘international’ background was essential to the unique reading of the International Herald Tribune’s front page. 14 Barthes refers to them as two separate structures – text and image – which must both be read completely and separately to understand how they complement one another. Nonetheless, here the text is seen not simply as a parasitic rationalization of the image, as Barthes suggested, but as two structures discussed in a complex bidirectional relationship (Barthes, 1977). 15 The newspaper’s name (here, International Herald Tribune) affects the reading of a photographic message and adds to (or even sometimes completely changes) a photograph’s meaning (Barthes, 1977). 16 The picture analyzed here is, in fact, in its raw form, as it was taken, selected, edited, and captioned in the field by the agency photographer and then sent to the local bureau in Jerusalem. As such, its caption might have been changed by the picture editor at the local office in Jerusalem, by the picture subeditor working at the global pictures desk in Singapore, or by a client’s picture editor, before it was published.

200  An Analysis of Significant Events and their Coverage 17 The same idea was also supported in a series of psychological studies addressing the issue of whether the expression of emotions changes between cultures or if it has common universal characteristics (see Ekman and Friesen, 1987). See also Lutz and Abu-Lughod (1990) and the idea of emotions as social, cultural, political, and historical (and thus can be discussed as particular), as well as located “in the psyche or the natural body” (hence universal) and their creation through sociocultural discourse. Once the picture is published, it may then become a spectacle of suffering – a representation of transnational news (in this case, a visual evidence of the universal feeling of suffering) creating a “beyond the nation” community by “[…] establishing a sense of a broader ‘we’” (Chouliaraki, 2006, p. 10). Although, for Chouliaraki, the “we” appears to represent the imagined community of the West, observing the suffering of the West’s other. 18 Of course, in his analysis Barthes addresses a picture of himself, but it seems just as relevant here. 19 The term Qassam is often used by the state of Israel to describe homemade Hamas’ rockets. 20 The Israeli West Bank barrier had been constructed by the state of Israel since 2002 and consists of a network of fences of vehicle-barrier trenches surrounded by about 60 meters wide exclusion area and up to eight meters high concrete walls. The barrier project is considered highly controversial and a matter of great dispute in the Israeli society and between Israeli and Palestinian authorities. 21 Bailo (1985) identifies the emergence of the second wave of independent films in America (what he calls “feature films”) at about 1911 – a “[...] ­multiple-reel narrative with unusual content and high production costs that merited special billing and advertising.” (p. 110). 22 At the time of my observations, freelance photographers occasionally selling their pictures to the agency would receive a onetime payment of usually about $75 per picture (unless a certain picture was highly exceptional, in which case the price was open for negotiation). 23 Although this is also changing nowadays, as the agency photographers are also receiving payment on each sale of their archived images as well. 24 Even though international news agency photographers are being given more and more liberty to pursue ‘stocky’ assignments (see Frosh, 2013). 2 5 The technological developments in the 1990s have improved the ­selling schemes of the stock agencies, giving rise to an additional selling system known as ‘Royalty Free’: The agencies sell some of the images on a ­single-fee, multiple use, mass-distribution principle – that is to say, paymentper-­picture, not per-use as it is done through the rights-­controlled system. This, of course, has a huge impact on photographers’ earnings, who, in the Royalty Free system, are only paid for the initial reproduction rights of their images (Frosh, 2013). Nonetheless, the competition in the market seems to be working in both directions, and so, with the influence of parallel production systems, stock agencies were also said to be reorganizing their systems. To cut expenses, for example, the stock agencies also started employing staff photographers, and they were said to offer monthly and annual subscriptions for their clients as well (Frosh, 2006). 26 The attempt to ‘capture’ motion in his pictures by using different angles can be addressed under Barthes’ photogenia: technical effects realized at the different levels of the production of the photograph, representing a coding of the photographic analogue (Barthes, 1977).

An Analysis of Significant Events and their Coverage  201 27 The chief’s response could also be interpreted as an example of somewhat of a hegemonic thinking: Serving as the representative of the world, the chief refuses to move the carrot picking pictures. To that end, the chief can also be seen to be grasping the international agency and its local bureau, perhaps, to be serving as the world’s messenger (therefore its products are the most reliable? with the best quality as opposed to the products made by its competitors? or is it that the profession of news is the world’s most valuable/ reliable representative?).

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202  An Analysis of Significant Events and their Coverage Frosh, P. (2003). The image factory: Consumer culture, photography and the visual content industry. London, UK and New York, NY: Berg. Frosh, P. (2000). The image factory: Stock photography, cultural Production and the Image repertoire (Unpublished doctorate dissertation). Hebrew University, Jerusalem. Giddens, A. (1991). Modernity and self-identity: Self and society in the late modern age. Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press. Goodman, G. & Boudana, S. (2016). The language of objectivity: Reuters’ internal editorial discussions on terminology in the Arab-Israeli conflict, 1967–1982. Journalism, 1–17, doi:10.1177/1464884916674230 Gregory, K. (1983). Native view Paradigms: Multiple cultures and ­c ulture conflicts in organizations. Administrative Science Quarterly, 28(3), 359–376. Gürsel, Z. D. (2016). Image brokers: Visualizing world news in the age of digital circulation. Oakland, CA: University of California Press. Hadland, A., Campbell, D. & Lambert, P. (2015). The state of news photography: The lives and livelihoods of photojournalists in the digital age. Oxford, UK: Reuters Institute for the Study of Journalism. Harcup, T. & O’Neill, D. (2001). What is news? Galtung and Ruge revisited. Journalism Studies, 2(2), 261–280. Harding, J. & Pribram, D. E. (2002). The power of feeling. Cultural Studies, 5(4), 407–426. Holtzman, A. (1997). ‫[ ספרות ואומנות פלסטית‬Literature and plastic art]. Tel Aviv, Israel: Hakibutz Hameuhad and the Rabinovitz Foundation for the Arts. Jensen, J. (1984). An interpretive approach to cultural production. In W. Rowland & B. Watkins (Eds.), Interpreting television: Current research perspectives (pp. 98–119). London, UK: Sage. Jewitt, C. & Oyama, R. (2001). Visual meaning: A social semiotic approach. In T. Van Leeuwen & C. Jewitt (Eds.), Handbook of visual analysis (pp. 134–157). London, UK: SAGE Publications. Katz, E. & Dayan, D. (1985). Media events: On the experience of not being there. Religion, 15(3), 305–314. Kitch, C. & Hume, J. (2008). Journalism in a culture of grief. London, UK: Routledge. Kress, G. & Van Leeuwen, T. (1998). Front pages: (The critical) analysis of newspaper layout. In A. Bell & P. Garrett (Eds.), Approaches to media discourse (pp. 186–220). London, UK: Blackwell. Kress, G. & Van Leeuwen, T. (1996). Reading images: The grammar of visual design. New York, NY: Routledge. Krieger, M. (1998). The problem of ekphrasis: Image and words, space and time —and the literary work. In V. Robillard & E. Jongeneel (Eds.), Pictures into words: Theoretical and descriptive approaches to ekphrasis (pp. 3–19). Amsterdam, Netherlands: VU University Press. Labov, W. (1997). Some further steps in narrative analysis. Journal of Narrative and Life History, 7 (1–4), 395–415. Retrieved from www.ling.upenn.edu/~wlabov/sfs.html. Lehman-Wilzig, S. N. & Seletzky, M. (2010). Hard news, soft news, ‘general’ news: The necessity and utility of an intermediate classification. Journalism, 11(1), 37–56.

An Analysis of Significant Events and their Coverage  203 Liebes, T. (1992). Our war/their war: Comparing the intifada and the Gulf War on U.S. and Israeli television. Critical Studies in Mass Communication, 9(1), 44–55. Lutz, C. A. & Abu-Lughod, L. (1990). Language and the politics of emotion. Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press. Mäenpää, J. (2014). Rethinking photojournalism: The changing work practices and professionalism of photojournalists in the digital age. Nordicom Review, 35(2), 91–104. Mellor, P. A. (1993). Death in high modernity: The contemporary presence and absence of death. In D. Clark (Ed.), The sociology of death: Theory, culture, practice (pp. 11–30). Oxford, UK: Blackwell. Mitchell, W. J. T. (1996). Word and image. In R. S. Nelson & R. Shiff (Eds.), Critical terms for art history (pp. 47–57). Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press. Mitchell, W. J. T. (1994). Picture theory: Essays on verbal and visual representation. Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press. Negus, K. (1997). The production of culture. In P. Du Gay (Ed.), Production of culture/cultures of production (pp. 68–102). Milton Keynes, UK and London, UK: Open University/Sage. Nossek, H. (2004). Our news and their news: The role of national identity in the coverage of foreign news. Journalism, 5(3), 343–368. Pantti, M. & Wieten, J. (2005). Mourning becomes the nation: Television coverage of the murder of Pim Fortuyn. Journalism Studies, 6(3), 301–313. Pedelty, M. (1995). War stories: The culture of foreign correspondents. London, UK: Routledge. Perminger, A. (2001). ‫טקסטואליות קולנועית והיצירה של פרנסואה טריפו‬-‫ [­ בין‬Intertextuality and the work of François Truffaut] (Unpublished doctoral dissertation). ­University of Tel Aviv, Israel. Ritchin, F. (1999). In our own image. New York, NY: Aperture. Riffaterre, M. (1990). Compulsory reader response: The intertextual drive. In M. Worton & J. Still (Eds.), Intertextuality: Theories and practices (pp. 56–78). Manchester, UK: Manchester University Press. Robertson, R. (1992). Globalization, social theory and global culture. London, UK: Sage. Robins, K. (1995). Will image move us still? In M. Lister (Ed.), The photographic image in digital culture (pp. 29–49). London, UK and New York, NY: Routledge. Rosenblum, B. (1978). Photographers at work: A sociology of photographic styles. New York, NY: Holmes and Meier. Ryan, B. (1992). Making capital from culture: The corporate form of capitalist cultural production. New York, NY: Walter de Gruyter. Schudson, M. (1989). The sociology of news production. Media, Culture & Society, 11(3), 263–282. Schwartz, D. (1999). Objective representation: Photographs as facts. In B. ­Brennen & H. Hardt (Eds.), Picturing the past: Media, history and photography (pp. 158–181). Chicago, IL: University of Illinois Press. Seaton, J. (2005). Carnage and the media: The making and breaking of news about violence. London, UK: Penguin. Sontag, S. (1979). On photography. New York, NY: Dell.

204  An Analysis of Significant Events and their Coverage Tenenboim-Weinblatt, K. & Neiger, M. (2017). Temporal affordances in the news. Journalism, 1, 1–19. Tuchman, G. (1976). Telling stories. Journal of Communication, 26, 93–97. Tuchman, G. (1973). Making news by doing work: Routinizing the unexpected. The American Journal of Sociology, 79(1), 110–131. Wells, L. (2004). Photography: A critical introduction. London, UK: Routledge. Werner, W. (2004). “What does this picture say?” Reading about the intertextuality of visual images. The International Journal of Social Education, 19(1), 64–82. Zandberg, E. & Neiger, M. (2005). Between the nation and the profession: Journalists as members of contradicting communities. Media, Culture and Society, 27(1), 131–141. Zelizer, B. (2010). About to die: How news images move the public. Oxford, UK: Oxford University Press. Zelizer, B. (1993). Journalists as interpretative communities. Critical Studies in Mass Communication, 10(3), 219–237.

Conclusion

By the time I sat down to write the concluding chapter, several ideas as to what might serve as a good ending came flowing through my head. One option, for example, was to address the process in the field at its current local stages, perhaps accompany another agency photographer and then analyze a few days of his routine. If I started my fieldwork somewhere in 2005 with an agency photographer, so I thought, it would only be appropriate to end this journey in a similar way, ‘on the ground’; this would probably generate an interesting comparative analysis between two points in time and make a very nice closure. Or, perhaps I could focus on yet another case study and see how it develops from inception into an agency news picture (maybe, by the force of chance, it would even get published by one of the agency’s clients); another comparative angle that could, to an extent, work as somewhat of a meaningful grand finale. Then, on a sunny Thursday afternoon, I received that grim email from the agency, and it became clear to me that from that point on I no longer had the access that was required to make these ideas come to life. ­I ndeed, a frustrating moment. But what I did not yet come to realize back then was that the message I received from the agency had not only shattered my original ideas on how to conclude the book. It also meant, at that point, that the entire book project was in fact hanging by a thread: The agency, on its side, made it clear it did not want to participate in the book project, so obviously I could not accompany any agency personnel. But this also resulted in the fact that I could no longer expect all agency personnel whom I had interviewed over the years to sign an ­interview release form, as requested by my publisher. What is more, it also came to my attention that even if I wrote this book on an ­anonymous agency, quoting anonymous agency personnel, then, legally, the agency still holds the copyright for these materials. And so, there I was: A young scholar with a manuscript about an industrial process of seeing, facing a powerful international news organization that fears being seen. And yet, perhaps going back to the very beginning of this book, its title, is indeed what is required here, particularly to the word “­I ndustry”. Since, as much as the world of visual journalism is in a state of flux (­Gürsel, 2016), the industrial modes of international visual  news  production

206  Conclusion have remained surprisingly stable. And even though it has been a while since I completed my fieldwork, during which time news photos production have gone through various changes, the main players in the industry of international photojournalism remained the same, even, to an extent, have become more powerful than ever. ­ ifferent So, at this point, I think placing the process explored in the d chapters of this book in a broader, and current, industrial context, where it very much belongs, is in order, primarily since, as this book has already showed, there is a circular connection here that runs through structure and process, the cultural industries and a cultural economy. It is through the international making of news visuals that a battle over world domination is happening as we speak. And it is one that would, in many ways, determine the future of news as we know it.

Who’s Dominating the International Photojournalism Industry? The last two decades of the 20th century forced what were, at the time, known as the ‘big four’ international news agencies (Reuters, AP, AFP, and UPI) to make significant changes in their financial and organizational structures: The collapse of the Communist regime in the USSR, for example, forced the agencies to regroup. Film news agencies were found to be more and more relevant and would become one of the agencies’ main media sources of revenue in the years that followed (Reuters ­established Reuters TV in 1992; APTV emerged in 1994. See Bielsa, 2008). In addition, by the rise of Bloomberg (1981), the financial ­information market was also shaken, since both Bloomberg and the Dow Jones were considered Reuters’ main competitors in the international market for financial information in the 1980s: At that point, Bloomberg had fewer financial terminals around the world than Reuters. However it would become Reuters’ main rival in the ensuing decades, and at the beginning of the 1990s it announced its intentions to enter the international news market with Bloomberg News, in order to broaden its line of ­services (Boyd-­Barrett, 1998).1 At the same time, AP, UPI, and AFP had become strongly attached to their local markets and thus pulled away from the international market (e.g., the 1990s signified AP as the dominant agency in the American market, having 94% of all US newspapers subscribed to its services. See Boyd-Barrett and Rantanen, 2004). And, of course, new players in the form of global television networks, such as CNN International, BBC World, and later Al Jazeera, also entered the international news arena (providing news information to local networks); these would become a significant free source of information to global audiences. 2 Up until the beginning of the 1980s, the international news pictures market was mostly under complete domination of the two American

Conclusion  207 news agencies (AP and UPI): The French AFP also attempted to enter the field but failed to secure a deal with Reuters, and so halted the strategy. Reuters, on its side, was facing financial difficulties, and so preferred to focus on developing its financial information division so as to stabilize its resources. In 1985, AFP finally established its own picture service, but it was Reuters that positioned itself as the main competitor in the field: A financial comeback (given the amount of revenue coming from the Reuters Monitor Money Rates Services) had led to a merger with UPI, and this allowed Reuters to maintain a leading edge over the ­European pictures market, with UPI maintaining its grip on to the American one.3 Reuters’ business strategy to incorporate pictures into its line of services had led to strong opposition within the company; the picture service was assumed to be profitable only by few in the company and was consequently taken as being an unwise investment of such major resources (Fenby, 1986; Bartram, 2003). Notwithstanding, Reuters had a lot of resources to spend thanks to its successful floatation (1984), and a new picture service was deemed a great investment for the future. In many ways, the decision to enter the field of international news pictures marked Reuters as the leading agency in the field of international news pictures up until the 1990s, when strong winds from the financial front began to blow upon it (see Ilan, 2013). These were also the early years of the internet, which would soon usher in major changes in the pictures industry. New Media, Old (and New) Rivalries A few years ago, AFP’s CEO at the time, Emmanuel Hoog, addressed the future of news agencies in the era of the internet at a keynote speech. “The issue today” said Hoog, “is our presence as news agencies on the internet to enhance brand and know-how value, not income”. He continued: For 150 years, news agencies have been focused on their relationship with press editors, on a ‘one-to-many mode’. Now they have to shift to a new relationship with the public, on a ‘many-to-many mode’ […] We need to be able to provide our audience with contents but also with information about ourselves and our way to produce news content.4 What is clearly reflected from this segment in Hoog’s speech is that AFP have started facing serious challenges with the rise of the internet, and so did its international rivals. In fact, to an extent, the internet was even perceived as somewhat of a potential threat to their very existence by way of replacing the agencies’ own private communication networks ­(MacGregor, 2013). Thus, the collapses of various newspapers around

208  Conclusion the world, for example, have caused serious complications to AP and AFP, who relied on newspaper subscribers as one of their core funding source (Paterson, 2011; MacGregor, 2013).5 Yet the larger agencies were quick to react and have, in many ways, managed to adapt their operational and business models to today’s multimedia universe, seeing the internet as an opportunity (Boyd-Barrett, 2008). The agencies have ­actually managed to cope with the competition from emergent web-based services by simply adding these to their growing circle of ­clients worldwide: For example, they are now running internet news and ­information services for direct client access; selling news and information packages for client websites and mobile telephony services; and the ­decline of television staffing in other media that resulted in cutting overseas correspondents have in fact been used to the agencies’ advantage as well (Boyd-Barrett, 2008; MacGregor, 2013). Social media have also affected the agencies’ operations, particularly in the field of amateur footage which has become a part and parcel of the professional world of news production (Pantti and Sirén, 2015). To that end, the news produsers of the third millennium – the prodnewsers – are now having a strong presence in the making and distribution of news materials worldwide using smartphone technology that is easy to operate, has sophisticated cameras that can now provide high resolution visual images, and the necessary infrastructures to traffic these via multiple media platforms from the scenes of events in seconds (see, e.g., Bruns, 2008. See also the addition of shareability to a contemporary set of news values in Harcup and O’Neill, 2017). This not only puts pressure on the agencies, that are now forced to make sure the ­immediacy in their news content’s production and distribution processes is not ­affected, thereby having their materials published before they have reached the web. It also forces the agencies to track down these non-­journalist ­producers and then having to sign them on copyrights agreements for exclusive use so these ‘raw’ materials could be legally incorporated into the agencies’ news packages on money-time. This is clearly a complicated task, particularly at times when news is needed from isolated and dangerous areas, when there are no agency personnel on the ground. It also requires vigorous checking and verification on the agencies’ side: First, to see whether these materials are already in use by other global news providers. Second, since visual materials can be easily altered these days in various ways and published on the web, and there are numerous organizations and institutions who constantly try to ride on the agencies’ trustworthy name so as to promote their own agendas (hence journalists are told to start off citizen materials’ verification processes by simply “assuming a piece of UGC is false”. Wardle cited in Pantti and Sirén, 2015, p. 496). Furthermore, and mostly due to the lack of resources, local news providers serving as the agencies’ clients are, in fact, relying on the agencies’ ability to perform the role of gatekeepers in

Conclusion  209 authenticating citizen materials given their presumed high professional ethical standards, so the agencies are required to pursue an even more strict verification policy so as to also not jeopardize their highly valued credibility (Pantti and Sirén, 2015. See also the skills that would be ­required from the “editor of the future” and the infrastructures of credibility in Gürsel, 2012). And, of course, added to this is the fact that the web nowadays is already flooded with amateur imagery, making things even more complicated for the agencies to stay ahead of their rivals. One fascinating phenomenon with the flooding of newsworthy ­user-generated content (UGC) on the web is the emergence of certain ­organizations such as Storyful, which identified the need to filter, traffic, and eventually mediate between the prodnewsers and the news organizations and turn this into a profitable business. Established in 2010, Storyful prides itself of being a “social intelligence and news company combining journalism, data and technology to deliver social insights and verify content for media and brand partners”. Particularly interesting for the business of news is Storyful’s role within the international news arena, as the company aims at “supporting global newsrooms with upto-the-minute, verified, user-generated video to report on the leading news of the day”.6 Storyful, which also employs a global team of expert journalists, identified a certain vacuum that was created by the emergence of endless potentially newsworthy UGC on the web, on the one hand, and the global news providers’ hunger for visual materials flowing from non-journalists yet having no organized network of operations to make use of such materials on the other. Not long ago, global news providers had to search for the right materials themselves, put these through a vigorous verification process, track down their citizen producers, and eventually sign them on copyrights agreements – a highly demanding and an extremely time-consuming process at times, which might result in substantial loses in a business that thrives on immediacy. However, with the emergence of Storyful and similar organizations, global news providers can now search for materials on the Storyful web archive and simply purchase their usage rights from the company, which already sorts out the entire verification process on its own. In the beginning this had worked out well for both sides: Storyful had conducted all the searching and verifying processes and then sold the rights to use the materials to news providers who, as a result, saved valuable time and managed to include rare footage into their news content; apparently, such materials are now becoming more and more favored by news clients around the world. However, in the past few years Storyful has gained a strong presence in the international news arena and has positioned itself as a powerful competitor in the field of newsy UGC, particularly in the area of moving images: Unlike global news providers, particularly the international news agencies, who mostly deal with the making of news, Storyful mostly focuses on tracking down citizen materials and therefore often

210  Conclusion has a leading edge over global news providers in being the first to fish out visual images coming from the ground. As a result, Storyful can now sell its materials to the highest bidder. On October 31, 2017, for example, a pickup truck was driven down a crowded cycle way in lower Manhattan in New York, killing eight people and injuring 11 before the driver was shot by a police officer in what was described by officials as “the deadliest terrorist attack on New York City since Sept. 11, 2001” (Mueller, Rashbaum and Baker, 2017). Apparently, an amateur video was shot at the scene showing the New York terror suspect as he was fleeing from the area and was then shot by police officers a few minutes later (Mueller et al., 2017). Storyful was quick to react and managed to track down the footage, make contact with the person who shot the video, sign him, and purchase the footage for a small fee. Eventually it was sold to Thomson Reuters for the amount of $4,500. Storyful clearly does not have the same global reach as the agencies’, nor does it have the resources to compete with them in the supply of news to global markets. Moreover, the company is making profit simply by selling the rights to use its UGC materials to particular global news providers. Thus, even when Storyful sells the same materials to a number of providers based on varying agreements of use (since not all contracts are based on exclusive use), its profits are still tiny compared to the agencies’, who could, in turn, sell their news packages to thousands of clients worldwide. But they can also save their materials on their archives and make even more profit over time, as these materials might be purchased by more clients in the future. Nonetheless, this comes to show how the agencies are not only competing with other agencies nowadays, but also over UGC with organizations such as Storyful, which focus on selling the content to competing agencies and also directly to agencies’ clients worldwide. As a result, there are now dedicated UGC desks working globally in the agencies and in other major newsrooms (see e.g., BBC’s “UGC Hub”. Pantti and Sirén, 2015) that are focused on tracking down rare visuals on the web before everyone else, to include in the agencies’ packages. Finally, given the possibilities of web technology, the agencies today are also far more visible to the public than ever before (Paterson, 2011; MacGregor, 2013): Thomson Reuters, AFP, and AP, for instance, can now be seen on their own websites with breaking news, stills, and video services; they have millions of followers directed to their web ­stories; and they also maintain a relatively strong presence on various social media platforms such as Twitter and Facebook. Serving News from the Top of the World In the turbulent information world of today, when “information is first and foremost visuals” and with the possible threats of internet technology, it seems that the larger western international agencies have managed

Conclusion  211 to survive, perhaps even gain greater dominance, in the worldwide supply of international news visual content (Gynnild, 2017)7: A not-for-profit news cooperative, AP is considered one of the most significant international news wholesalers. In 2005 it was said to have 3,700 employees that were spread around 242 bureaus worldwide serving 121 countries, with 1,700 American and 8,500 international subscribers (Horvit, 2006). Today, according to the company’s website, its teams are operating in 263 locations worldwide serving over 100 countries. With a news division that totals up to two-thirds of its overall staff members, the company is said to deliver about 2,000 stories a day, 50,000 videos a month, and 1 million photos a year, and prides itself on having more than half of the world’s population seeing AP’s content daily via 15,000 different news outlets worldwide.8 In the early years of the decade 2000–2009, AFP depended heavily on subscriptions from France (over 40%), and its clients were spread in 165 different countries, apart from its Francophone clients (who made up approximately 46% of the agency’s revenues. Boyd-Barrett, 2000; Boyd-Barrett and Rantanen, 2004). It had major difficulties raising funds in order to invest properly into the research and development of new distribution technologies and did not enjoy the financial support from the French government that it had in its first years of operations (Boyd-Barrett and Rantanen, 2004). Today, AFP operates about 200 bureaus, with 1,513 journalists (out of a total 2,296 members of staff) covering news stories from around 150 countries. The company sees itself as a growing business (with a turnover of €300.5 million in 2016). It currently serves about 4,827 customers worldwide (of which 74% are media) who receive about 5,000 stories, 3,000 photos, 250 videos, 150 video graphics, and 75 graphic materials daily.9 In the early years of the third millennium, Reuters was described as the leading agency due to the number of its clients, the amount of its annual revenues, and the resources that it spent on research and development worldwide (Boyd-Barrett and Rantanen, 2004). As a company that positioned itself at the service of the international market right from the outset (and therefore did not have to rely mainly on the supply of information to the local British market unlike its French and American rivals, who relied on their local markets), its revenues were four times those of AP and UPI in the foreign markets in the late 1970s, and its staff was drawn from 160 different nationalities in the late 1980s. By 2000, Reuters had positioned itself as a financial information provider that was independent of media, with more than 90% of its revenues flowing from stockbrokers, banks, and other non-media organizations (Boyd-Barrett and Rantanen, 2004; Boyd-Barrett, 2008). In 2006, Reuters claimed to be the biggest international news agency in the world: It had 196 bureaus delivering information to 130 different countries worldwide and had its profits estimated at £2.4 billion.10

212  Conclusion The same year, Bloomberg, its main competitor in financial news and transaction services, reported sales of approximately $430 million less (Boyd-Barrett, 2008). Still, from the early years of the 21st century the two companies managed to position themselves as two of the most powerful players in the international financial news arena, both struggling to keep their pockets “deep enough” in order to win the battle for control and to dominate the international financial news information market (Bartram, 2003, p. 398). In 2007, Reuters was the first to come to terms with its weaknesses – especially due to an impending financial crisis. In May, the Canadian Thomson financial organization and Reuters agreed on the terms of a merger that was completed in April 2008 to become the world’s largest provider of financial and news information. By the end of the decade 2000–2009, Thomson Reuters was worth about $30 billion. Its income was estimated at $13.2 billion, with 60% coming from financial information operations. Its revenues were estimated at $1.5 billion, with 53,000 employees working in 93 countries and a news division that has grown as well (from 2,400 to 2,700 journalists). The company was controlled by the Thomson family, which, at the time, held about 55% of the total shares, while Reuters’ share of all Thomson Reuters business was estimated at about 5% (Handworker, 2009. Although just a few months ago the Thomson family was said to sell out its financial data business to the Blackstone Group and tear apart the Thomson Corp/Reuters Group Plc merger following a “difficult ­decade”. See Scanlan, 2018).11 Today Thomson Reuters has 2,500 journalists delivering 2.2 million news stories a year in multiple languages. It delivers over 200 video news stories (“up-to-the-second footage of every international news event”, available raw or ready-to-run); it serves more than 1,600 pictures each day to its clients, having also a searchable ­archive of more than 13 million images in a variety of coverage areas (e.g., news, sports, features, lifestyle, etc.). Thomson Reuters also supplies certain multimedia tools such as the Reuters Connect that apparently gives its clients an “unrivaled access” to multimedia stories from around the world. This includes Reuters coverage, but also real-time and archival content from other media organizations, such as the BBC, USA Today, Africa 24, and others, while the service is also said to optimize the client’s editorial budget and maximize its return on investment.12 While local news organizations around the world are struggling to survive, the process of commissioning visuals is rapidly being replaced by fast materials (in the news photo business particularly these are called “fast photos” – those photos that could be easily searched online and get embedded into the news stories in the time available to journalists, but also since publications are paying their subscriptions annually, and so these are flowing in daily as part of the agencies’ services. Gürsel, 2016). Hence, it would be safe to say, for now, that the overall operations of

Conclusion  213 international news information, particularly in the news visuals division, are mostly put in the hands of three major international news agencies known as the ‘big three’: the French AFP, the American AP, and the British-Canadian Thomson Reuters (Gynnild, 2017). Lagging behind in the international news arena, at this point in time, are the following companies, which still own a considerable share in the unstable international business of the news image that might be easily shaken in the very near future: While AP was rising as the leading agency in the American market, UPI became rather marginal in the international news flow arena. Most of the international contracts owned by the company were sold to AP, and its international picture service was sold to Reuters in the mid-1980s (see Ilan, 2013). A few years ago, it was said to deliver only 300 news stories and about 150 pictures daily, and that it was mostly focused on the coverage of technological and scientific innovations worldwide (Boyd-Barrett and Rantanen, 2004). Still, UPI sees itself today as a leading global provider of news, photos, and information to millions of readers around the world via upi.com and its licensing services – a ­“one-stop-site” for US and world news, entertainment, trends, science and health, and “stunning photography”, while the company also delivers key reports in various fields.13 Xinhua News Agency (Xinhua) is considered the largest official news agency in the People’s Republic of China, serving mostly as a central organ of the Chinese Communist Party (CCP) and the government, even though in the last two and a half decades of the 20th century it has in fact tried to expand its operations abroad as well. Today it is said to employ about 10,000 journalists. They are covering the news in more than 100 bureaus worldwide; in about 30 bureaus located in China (thereby providing coverage from each of the country’s provinces); and via five overseas regional bureaus based in Hong Kong, Mexico City, Nairobi, Cairo, and Brussels. A few years ago Xinhuanet.com, the agency’s news website (established in 1997), claimed to be third in daily hits (800 million daily, placing the company’s website behind BBC and CNN but ahead of Reuters, AP, and AFP) and among the world’s top 50 websites (BoydBarrett, 2008). However, the agency is still struggling to gain credibility today as it did in the early years of the decade 2000–2009 and also lacks a global news reach to be able to compete with the larger Western news organizations in the international market (see Xin, 2006; McGregor, 2013).14 Established in 1981 as a company primarily aimed at delivering data that would essentially help financial organizations, Bloomberg LP would already become a key player in the international financial news arena in the late 1980s, feeding about 5,000 customers in 40 countries via the Bloomberg terminal with the company’s financial data daily. In 2001, Bloomberg News (established in 1990) already had 1,100 reporters and

214  Conclusion editors working in 80 bureaus in 50 countries, producing over 4,000 stories daily (Bartram, 2003). In 2014 Bloomberg LP was said to have generated $9 billion in revenue, with its financial terminals accounting for 85% of its total revenue; this helped support its news division that included extensive radio and TV programming, a financial newswire, and BusinessWeek magazine (Alpert, 2015). Today, Bloomberg News sees itself as “one of the world’s leading financial news organizations”. It has 2,400 journalists working in more than 150 bureaus; it produces about 5,000 stories daily; and it has a robust archive of hundreds of thousands of images available to preview and download through its Media Source service. Its news materials, according to the company’s website, are now carried on Bloomberg’s web, mobile, television, digital video, radio, and print and are syndicated to more than 440 publications around the globe.15 Finally, the European Pressphoto Agency (EPA) was established in 1985 by seven major Western European national photo agencies and was originally tailored for the needs of the European media market. In 2003 EPA launched its new international photo service, planning on ‘going global’. Today EPA sees itself as an independent news photo organization providing global photo coverage in a variety of fields ranging from news, politics, sports, and business to arts, culture, and entertainment. It is based on an international network of 400 photographers, and on the daily production of its nine European member agencies: ANA-MPA in Greece; ANP in the Netherlands; ANSA in Italy; APA in Austria; EFE in Spain; KEYSTONE in Switzerland; LUSA in Portugal; MTI in Hungary; and PAP in Poland. The EPA service currently offers about 2,000 new images daily, having its archive containing over six million images. It is managed from the company headquarters located in Frankfurt, having also regional desks in Bangkok, Cairo, and Washington D.C., although EPA is also struggling to compete with the ‘big three’.16 The largest western agencies – AP, AFP, and Thomson Reuters – have made it through stormy weathers over the years of their operations, and they have now also managed to overcome recent difficult times and, at least for now, are likely to stay around. A decade ago, Boyd-Barrett suggested that the larger agencies are converging towards a new business model based on several characteristics: Subscriptions, pointed Boyd-­ Barrett, would be tailored flexibly to clients’ demands; there would be a lower dependence on government subsidy and/or on fees from owner-­ clients; a lower dependence on media clients and a higher dependence on non-media clients; a growing use of internet for news production and distribution; integration of text, video, voice, and data services; and intensification of multilingual services – among other things (Boyd-­Barrett, 2008). But even if his prediction becomes a reality, there is still a vast scholarly work that needs to be done on the ways such powerful organizations that are becoming more and more significant in the overall supply of international news information (text, still, and moving image) around

Conclusion  215 the world are incorporating such changes into their daily routines. That is to say, more research is required in the areas whereby agency news products are processed – how these are selected as potential stories to cover that are eventually distributed to worldwide clients and very much determine the ways the world is viewed and experienced by global audiences (how it is, for example, that the agencies’ “operation of journalism” is more directly related to revenue considerations; or how the agencies will express a “more international identity”; and what it is exactly that makes an agency acquire one. Boyd-Barrett, 2008, pp. 166–167). What Has Changed in the Process By 1995, the agency that was at the focus of this book could process 250 color pictures daily from around the world, transmit 100 of them to any individual client, and send a full-color picture in less than 30 seconds to a certain client in Europe.17 While pictures of the collapse of the Soviet Union, well under way at this point, would have once taken hours to reach London, they were now being rapidly transmitted via the agency’s various innovative technological infrastructures, with the agency’s browser that would soon allow for the service to run as a simple Windows program viewable on every PC.18 Digital cameras and laptops were also changing agencies photographers’ working practices. During the 1998 football World Cup finals in France, for example, Reuters’ new cameras and digital transmission technologies astonished newspapers and magazines, delivering images of Brazil’s opening tournament goal against Scotland in just seven minutes (Michel, 2000; Bartram, 2003). In 2007, the agency explored in this book circulated about 43,000 pictures per month, rising to approximately 60,000 at the end of 2009.19 Today, its main image competitors from the international news front are clearly its news agency rivals, but also Getty Images, which, nowadays, is becoming much more than just a potential threat (Handworker, 2009) (Figure C.1). 60,000 50,000 40,000 30,000 20,000 10,000 0

Jan Feb Mar Apr May Jun

Jul

Aug Sep Oct Nov Dec

Figure C.1  Total number of picture images in 2007-monthly. Approximately 515,000 picture images circulated by the agency in 2007 at an average of just under 43,000 pictures per month.

216  Conclusion In the late 1990s, Getty was said to employ an aggressive acquisition and technology strategy and would become the most powerful stock agency in the world: Within a few years from when it was established (1995), the company was already gobbling up several branded collections such as Tony Stone Images, a leading stock photography agency; Hulton Deutsch (to become Hulton Getty), one of the largest privately owned collections of archival photography at the time (about 15 million images from the major British newspaper and press archives of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries); AllSport, a leading sports photography agency; PhotoDisc, the leading royalty-free stock photography and electronic delivery brand; and the news-oriented images specialist, Liaison Agency – among others (Frosh, 2003). In 1999, Getty acquired the prestigious stock brand – The Image Bank, an aggressive competitor, for the sum of $183 million. Following the acquisition, Getty would have an excess of 60 million images and more than 30,000 hours of footage, putting the company in an unassailable leadership position (gross revenues) in the stock photo industry, just ahead of VCG (Visual Communications Group) and Corbis (Pickerell, 1999). And just a year later Getty already announced its intentions to buy VCG for $220 million; the future merger was said to make Getty more than five times the size of Corbis, granting the company enough market share to “virtually suffocate all other players in the creative professional market”. 20 But, of course, in the rapidly changing image industry, this is all ancient history. By the year 2014, Getty was said to have moved from selling a relatively small number of images to a small number of customers, to selling the huge amount of about 100 million images (including all downloads) to many more customers. This was done by way of moving from individual sales of picture rights for a period of time to vastly more all-you-can-eat subscription deals. Which is to say, a lower price per picture resulted in many more customers and pictures, while the ­number of its pictures contributors has grown from 15,000 (of whom about 4,000 were active) to over 200,000 (Estrin, 2014). Apparently, competition nowadays is less strong than it used to be as well. While news organizations are more and more struggling with having to commission photo assignments on their own, Getty has also penetrated this side of operations and now offers its picture services to them. One interesting example is the case of Fairfax Media – a progressive media company in Australia and New Zealand that operates several broadly-based service businesses spanning marketing, property, entertainment, and more. Fairfax has a rich portfolio that includes leading websites and tablet and smartphone apps, such as the online news sites smh.com.au and theage.com.au in Australia and stuff.co.nz in New Zealand, and publishes metropolitan, agricultural, regional, and community newspapers, alongside financial and consumer magazines. 21 A few years ago, the group was said to have stopped all internal picture sourcing, having Getty being used as its inhouse pictures operations (Estrin, 2014).

Conclusion  217 Apart from its aggressive business strategy, Getty has also showed great flexibility in reacting to the recent changes in the business where everyone is a photographer and images are flooding the net. Such is the case, for example, with its iStockphoto service (bought by Getty in 2006), which, just a few years ago, had about 200,000 individual citizen contributors that were getting royalty checks monthly and were having their pictures published. Established as a site “by creatives, for creatives”, iStock offers millions of photos, illustrations, videos, and audio tracks that are sourced “from the crowd” and that are available via simple, affordable pricing. 22 But this was just the beginning. In March 2014, Getty unveiled its innovative embed feature, so people could now easily visit Getty’s library of content, select an image, and copy and embed an HTML code to use that image on their own websites. This new tool would allow people to share Getty’s imagery at no cost, yet for noncommercial use, on blogs, websites, and social media channels. “With people increasingly turning to imagery to communicate and tell their stories online” announced Getty, “the embed capability opens up Getty Images’ award-winning imagery for seamless sharing”.23 According to Jonathan Klein, the cofounder and chief executive of Getty Images, sharing is apparently Getty’s way to show the public how much it is caring: “This generation”, said Klein, “is sharing all the time, sharing pictures and communicating with pictures, and they love pictures, so why are we holding ours back? Why are we making it hard for them to enjoy pictures?” (Klein in Estrin, 2014). There is a catch of course. These so-called free images are essentially targeted at those who had never bought a photo and were most unlikely to buy one. Furthermore, the images cannot be resized and it is impossible to put any copy on them or remove the Getty Images name from them, so it is practically useless for those aiming at using those images in meaningful ways. The embed also links back to the Getty website, and there are other functionalities added to it. So, for example, a right click on an image that has been embedded will show up similar images from the same location, even from the same shoot. This, according to Klein, helps in building Getty’s brand, attracts more visitors, and generates advertising revenues (Estrin, 2014). So there is much more here than pure altruism and a way to help society, since underneath the surface lies a rather simple business scheme: To begin with, this entire initiative, according to Craig Peters, Getty’s senior vice president of business development, was mostly an attempt to deal with widespread unauthorized posting of Getty Images. This is because, apparently, it is very easy these days to find content online and utilize it, and this usually happens with self-publishers who have very little knowledge about copyright and the licensing of images, but that cannot afford paying for the use of these images either. Second, not every Getty image can in fact be embedded, and apparently the share of editorial/news images is much smaller than that of stock photos. Third,

218  Conclusion the company, according to its terms, can in fact collect data related to the use of these embeds and make future decisions based on such data (e.g., which stock images are found more popular, etc.). Finally, Getty can also place advertisements in the embedded viewer, so the business potential here is rather huge (Benton, 2014). In 2016, Getty struck an exclusive deal with VCG so as to license all of Corbis’ images around the world (except China). This means that Getty can now offer the Corbis’ video, imagery, and its historic archival content alongside its collections of almost 200 million images and videos, having about 330 image partner relationships, including NBC Universal and BBC World (Seymour, 2016). One interesting partner relationship in particular (established in 2003 and renewed again in 2016) is Getty’s content partnership with the French AFP international news agency. Both companies have worked in partnership so as to ensure “premium, comprehensive and up-to-the-minute coverage of News, Sports, and Entertainment imagery and video reaches news rooms and readers around the world”. 24 “Getty Images”, said Lee Martin, Getty’s Senior Vice President Sales, is proud to be associated with AFP and its rich history of journalistic excellence and to continue our longstanding and successful partnership. Our respective businesses complement each other in bringing an unrivalled breadth, depth, reach and quality of coverage around world News, Sports and Entertainment imagery and video to ­customers around the globe. 25 The Getty/AFP renewed partnership clearly echoes the expansion ­i ntentions of the stock industry’s super-agencies into new areas, including photojournalism, in the late 1990s and early 2000s (Frosh, 2013). Frosh (2013) describes, for example, how, by entering into the ‘editorial photography’ arena at the time, Getty was clearly pitted against Corbis but also against the largest international news agencies, thereby forcing AP and Reuters, for example, to reorganize their photo divisions. As a result, AP announced that it would allow its employees to use the company equipment to shoot commercial stock images in their spare time in 2006 and, later on, have established a global distribution agreement with Corbis. So Getty is clearly becoming an increasingly strong contestant in the international photojournalism arena which, to an e­ xtent, marks its shifting from a provider of universal ‘visual content’ to a highly field-specific expertise agency that aims at providing tailor-made imagery into new and diverse markets. At the same time, however, it also puts pressure on the international news agencies, which, in turn, are very much forced nowadays to adjust their production and distribution systems to the stock business, having news photos become more and more like stock (see Frosh, 2013). Yet

Conclusion  219 much scholarly work is still called for on Getty’s news operations and the labor that is invested in the making of its ‘editorial’ products. Amateur pictures supplied by non-journalists are also a big challenge for the photojournalism industry: On the one hand, the international news agency that was at the focus of this book, as are its competitors, is constantly looking for better ways in which amateur pictures might be absorbed within the agency’s daily routines and production processes. On the other, there is also the emergence of certain photo agencies that, much like Storyful in video content, have recognized the financial potential in amateur imagery and have thus set foot in the market so as to compete with professional media. Such is the case, for example, with the 2006 French-born Citizenside.com – a “Web 2.0 press agency”, as it was described by its founders, who realized a market need to organize amateur photos so these could be used by news organizations after the London bombings in 2005. The idea that professional journalists cannot be everywhere while citizen journalism can mobilize its community members almost anywhere was soon taken as a guideline for the journalists working at the agency. But also, the fact is that there is a growing need from mainstream media for visuals, coming from citizens, that have also gone through highly strict checking procedures, so these could be instantly incorporated into their news products (i.e., moving from UGC to UCC – user-certified content). In 2007 the French AFP had acquired a 34% stake in the company, which now works globally (even though its contributors are mostly European), operating in more than 150 countries (Nicey, 2013). Yet, surprisingly, from the side of the agency that was at the focus of this project, such amateur pictures are not taken to be as entirely influential as they are often thought to be. In fact, and unlike the case in the agency’s TV services, nowadays for the agency to be able to use amateur pictures is becoming quite rare: First, since the money is no longer flowing in as it used to be. This means that purchasing images from amateur press agencies is almost never an option, and so the international agencies would most likely prefer to try to track down and negotiate directly with the non-journalist producers themselves and vice versa. Then, once a connection is established, these amateur pictures would very often require tremendous team effort to verify, and so such pictures should really be exceptional in terms of their news value and overall contribution to the agency’s coverage (in TV, UGC is purchased more often than in Pictures, partly since, perhaps, the altering of still images is easier nowadays than having to stage a video. But also, in Pictures, the quality standards are stricter than in TV, where, say, a grainy footage might still be of great value). Example: On July 17, 2014, a Malaysia Airlines passenger flight number MH17 en route from Amsterdam to Kuala Lumpur had crashed after being hit by a Russian-made missile fired from a field controlled by

220  Conclusion pro-Russian fighters over eastern Ukraine. 26 As it happened, an Israeli pilot had taken a picture of the Malaysian plane at the Schiphol airport in Amsterdam just a few hours before it took off and sent it to his friends via WhatsApp. After the story of the crash broke, the Israeli pilot realized that his picture was, in fact, the last time the Malaysian plane was seen before it was hit, and contacted the agency’s office in ­Jerusalem. That evening, an agency’s Israeli photographer received a phone call from his local chief informing him that the pilot had taken this extraordinary picture and that he would like to sell it to the agency.  Soon, several agency pictures personnel, including the Jerusalem editor, the Europe pictures editor, and even the global pictures editor himself, were working on verifying the picture, but also on searching for details about the pilot ­(Google, Facebook). Eventually the pilot was found credible and the picture was purchased for the sum of $500 – a considerable amount of money, as pictures taken by non-journalists are nowadays usually purchased for about $100. Clearly, there are signs of strong movement in the field of newsy visual UGC, perhaps even signs of a beginning of a shift in the power fields of professional news photography altogether. But more research is still needed along these lines so as to analyze how exactly mainstream media are coping with these new forms of production and distribution of ‘amateur’ news photos and how these are processed by international news providers. What has changed in the process? Overall, the entire pictures process in the agency is now far more regulated than it used to be, so the agency’s prestigious brand will not be harmed in any way. That is also the reason why agency photographers are now not allowed to use Photoshop at all in the process, so there will not be any misunderstandings (see also Gynnild, 2017). In fact, whenever a complaint is filed to the agency that a picture was altered (and there are apparently many out there who are constantly searching for such possible agency alterations), the ­process itself is structured in such a way that the pictures’ files cannot be opened at all in Photoshop, and photographers who are willing to take the risk may be facing certain legal actions. The editor in the local office is allowed to do some Photoshop corrections and so is the local chief, ­although these would only be minor corrections and only if the computers are in good condition, while most of the pictures corrections take place at the global pictures desks. Organizations are similar in a way to living organisms; they change over time and often perform better with the help of innovative technology. And so, instead of the agency’s single global pictures desk in ­Singapore, pictures are now received by various desks in strategic ­locations around the world serving as global pictures desks, where pictures are processed and are eventually sent to clients worldwide. This is mostly done as a way to handle better the global high volume of pictures that are received under pressing time differences. What is more, photographers are now

Conclusion  221 capable of sending their pictures directly from their cameras to a global FTP, while office editors around the world are now synchronized with photographers’ cameras; this clearly helps in speeding up the entire process, which, apparently, was found a bit sluggish to Pictures managers, but it also helps in simplifying the overall system. And, of course, information on possible events to cover that was once received via Mirs devices and particular messaging groups on pagers is now received in the form of WhatsApp messages in closed groups or as chats in Facebook Messenger. Many things have also changed in the agency’s pictures labor since I first started my fieldwork. In Israel, all the pictures personnel that I met are no longer working for the agency: The once agency picture editor at the local office is now working at the pictures department of a local newspaper; the former senior pictures editor at the local office has completely left the business and is now pursuing a graduate degree in city planning; and the former chief photographer was fired from the agency. The Israeli photographer whose work I’ve managed to explore from up close has resigned; he now serves as a stringer for AFP, runs a ­photography workshop for high school pupils, gives lectures on photojournalism based on his former experience as a news agency photographer, and has recently published a successful photobook that was based on a long-time personal project of his. At the global pictures desk, the former pictures deputy editor had left the company, and I was informed that several changes were also made on the EIC, sub- and senior sub-­levels of pictures ­operations. The former head of Pictures at The Guardian was found redundant just a few years ago. The paper’s former assistant picture editor is now running the pictures operations at a ­British newspaper, and it came to my attention that the paper’s pictures editors that I met are mostly doing freelance work now. If there is anything to gain out of this, it is the fact that although there is certain stability in predicting a far more visual future to journalism, the future of professional news image brokers is perhaps becoming less and less stable. A Few Concluding Remarks: A Closure that Offers Some Openings “Though photojournalism prides itself on having brought visibility to many issues”, said Gürsel in her conclusion, “the work behind producing and circulating news images has remained mostly invisible” (Gürsel, 2016, p. 288). It is precisely photojournalism work that was the point of departure of this project. More particularly, I have tried to illustrate the entire complex process that takes place before, during, and after the international news picture is taken as it travels through the hands of various image brokers – from a story to a news picture, from a product to a story. To a certain extent, this book can be perceived as an example of

222  Conclusion what Mitchell called an exercise of “showing seeing” (Mitchell, 2002); it demonstrates how a powerful international news organization ‘sees’ the world by focusing an ethnographic eye on the labor that is invested in the construction of its pictorial products. The evidence suggests that, much like the production of all cultural artifacts, the production of news pictures too is complex and goes through significant moments and sites as the pictures are executed – from the minute they are conceived as an idea through to their form as products ready for distribution and reception, and as data affecting future ideas and processes: It supports the idea that such moments and sites are very much dictated by the institution and its need for routine in the field and beyond. These effects often come into play in the form of different technologies and accessories used by photographers and editors in the field (e.g., cameras or editing software and their standards of use dictated by the organization; company cars; chairs and computer screens; shift schedules or allocation of photographers to the different regions). Yet there are other forces in play through which the news picture is molded. These are economic pressures and competition and their effects at every stage of the process – whether from competing international news organizations or institutions in other sectors (e.g., Getty Images). There is also evidence of influence from other industries (such as the film industry). There is evidence of different glocal mechanisms invested in the process of production so as to produce adjustments to a constantly changing international market by tailoring the agency’s news visuals to the particular needs set by local news clients. But there is also evidence of the ways that such mechanisms reflect on the very structure of the international news organization itself. And there is also evidence of the effects of such a complex international business environment in which the agency operates on every aspect of its organization. This expresses the process of production of news pictures as an open system affecting parallel production routines, yet one that is structured by such processes as well. Similarly, there are also significant cultural forces to consider. These bring to bear the cultural identities of key practitioners and take the form of struggle over social power: between different occupational communities (chief photographers vs. photographers, photographers vs. editors, the head of photography and deputy editor); nationalities (locals vs. foreigners, Israelis vs. Palestinians); departments ­(Pictures ­ rganizations (international vs. local); and the cultural vs. TV); o ­i ndustries at large. When these economic and cultural forces affect the production routine – both in the form of external pressures from outside the organization, and in the form of delicate micro-connections from within – they illustrate the complete articulation of a cultural economy.

Conclusion  223 News pictures are produced in circular structures. They are distributed to clients as a ‘final’ product ready for publication by different local news outlets. And they are injected back into the production routine by different players: Published pictures, for example, are gathered back as evidence of success or failure (known as the impact) to improve future processes – but so do complaints made by furious consumers; compliments given by satisfied clients; or simply special requests for particular stories received by local bureaus from others. Nonetheless, there are also significant linear structures through which power is exercised at some stages within such circles which help put the production routine in motion, such as editing decisions made by a photographer in the field or an editor in the office; or different relationships of authority maintained at different levels of operations (e.g., a chief photographer having the last word) that all have an impact. Finally, the findings in this project suggest there is a far stronger relationship between production and consumption than has been previously suggested in industrial pictures production, whereby the audience plays a pivotal role at various moments and sites along the entire process. It is an active force affecting future processes at the levels of reception (circulation of clients’ papers, stories favored). But, as this book came to show, the audience also plays a significant role before that, in production: for example, at the events in the field (permitting the news coverage to take place); in the form of ‘external editors’ throughout the process of selection; or as visual consumer practices are expressed at different levels of operations (editors selecting “Top Pix” or simply photographers ‘bringing’ their visual ‘baggage’ to work). There is a strong connection performed at various moments and sites between the news text, its producers, and its audiences, even at the ‘earliest’ stages of production. To that end, a complete analysis of the news picture’s process of production should indeed take into account all of its participants, approaching the news text “[...] as an unintentional effect of the encounter between all of these”, when none “have the capacity to seal off this effect and ­determine its sole meaning” (Azoulay, 2008, p. 23). 27 Apart from offering some explanations, this project mainly raises new paths for future inquiry. It reveals, for example, that there needs to be far more ethnographic work on news media institutions, in particular on international news agencies and their processes of production whereby the news text (text, video, and stills) acquires additional meanings. Similarly, greater focus on local news organizations and their connections with international news agencies also ought to be pursued. Much work is also required along the lines of news audiences, and there is still an alarming neglect in the areas of commercial photography. Most notably in that respect is the absence of scholarship on news photography production, specifically on the industrial labor that is invested in such processes. 28

224  Conclusion On a final note, this project may also serve as a reminder that news organizations should certainly be more assessable in order to help create a healthier social system of trust – particularly those powerful organizations that knowingly do not maintain a clear policy of transparency and close their gates to outsiders. These should therefore be forced to r­ eveal their complex ways of seeing and unravel the work routine through which their different forms of representation acquire their special powers of signification. Only then can we discover how “visuality” performs both as a social construction of the visual and a visual construction of the social (Mitchell, 2002, p. 179). In time, it might get us closer to uncover the forces of newsworthiness, which we so often tend to take for granted, and of those powerful news institutions we often take as naturally trustworthy.

Notes 1 See also www.bloomberg.com, 2017. 2 CNN, perhaps one of the major players in the field of continuous international news information flow, for example, was reaching 1 million of all US television households by 1980 and 59 million households in more than 140 countries by 1999 (see Volkmer, 1999). 3 The European Press photo Agency (EPA) also entered the European news pictures market in the mid 1980s, but did not gain enough power to compete with its international rivals. 4 See “News agencies in the digital era”, May 10, 2012, AFP website, https:// www.afp.com/en/agency/innovation/news-agencies-digital-era. 5 “[…] our historical clients” pointed Hoog, “are fragile and structurally weakened by the print crisis”. Ibid. 6 See www.storyful.com, 2017. 7 See Hoog in “News agencies in the digital era”, May 10, 2012, AFP website, www.afp.com/en/agency/innovation/news-agencies-digital-era. 8 See www.ap.com, 2017. 9 See www.afp.com, 2017. 10 See www.reuters.com, 2006. 11 The new Blackstone deal was said not to affect the news service, which, ­apparently, remains under Thomson. Still, there are growing concerns on exactly how this new merger will affect the Reuters news division; whether it will be able to produce “the same kind of news or something of a different kind” (see e.g., Jessop, 2018 in the critical blog “The Baron”). 12 See www.thomsonreuters.com, 2017. 13 See www.upi.com, 2017. 14 See also www.asianetnews.net (under Xinhua); www.afp.com (under Partners), 2017. 15 See ‘News’ under Bloomberg’s careers [‘news & research’], www.bloomberg. com, 2017. Much like Xinhua, Bloomberg is also not considered to have the global news reach as do the larger international agencies (MacGregor, 2013). 16 See www.epa.com, 2017. 17 Based on information gathered from the agency’s archive. 18 Based on information gathered from the agency’s archive. 19 Based on information gathered from the agency’s archive.

Conclusion  225 20 See “Getty Images to buy Visual Communications Group”, 2000, February 29. 21 See ‘Fairfax Media’ under ‘Corporate Profile’, www.fairfaxmedia.com. 22 See ‘iStock by Gety Images’ at www.gettyimages.com; Estrin, 2014; Frosh, 2013. 23 See “Getty images unveils innovative embed feature for sharing of tens of millions of images”, www.gettyimages.com, company news, 6/3/2014. 24 See “Getty Images and AFP renew leading content partnership”, www.afp. com, AFP press release, 25/1/2016. 25 See “Getty Images and AFP renew leading content partnership”, www.afp. com, AFP press release, 25/1/2016. 26 See “MH17 Ukraine plane crash: What we know”. (2016, September 28). BBC World. Europe. Retrieved from www.bbc.com/news/world-europe-28357880. 27 With her theory of photography, Azoulay (2008) calls to take into account the camera, the photographer, the photographed subject, and the spectator. Although in commercial photography, as this book came to show, there are, of course, other ‘professional’ forces to consider as well. From a more ­philosophical point of departure, Foucault supports a similar holistic perspective, as he sees production to be a particular force that “[…] traverses and produces things […] a productive network which runs through the whole social body, much more than as a negative instance whose function is repression” (Foucault cited in Rabinow, 1984, p. 61). 28 See, e.g., some of the more recent works in the field in Bock, 2008; Gürsel, 2012, 2016; Mäenpää, 2014; Pogliano, 2015; Pantti and Sirén, 2015; ­Hadland, Campbell and Lambert, 2015. But more work is still required in these areas of inquiry, and certainly more on news pictures’ labor in the office.

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Index

access 10–11, 12, 25, 69, 71, 83, 98, 108, 111, 120, 125, 127, 138–140, 145, 172, 190, 192, 205, 208, 212; and gain 12, 25 AFP 26, 47, 54, 58, 69, 101, 136, 144, 145–146, 156, 158, 206–208, 210–211, 213–214, 218–219, 221 agency partners 125 agents 30, 93, 102, 125–126, 128; and of classification 102; and of globalization 30 Al Jazeera 206 Alamy 136 alterations 1–2, 26, 57, 87–88, 164, 166, 180, 208, 219–220; see also manipulation; doctoring amateur 208, 219–220; and imagery 209, 219; and photography 50; and pictures 219; and video 210 America On-Line see AOL AOL 85, 159, 189 AP 1, 43, 58, 69, 132, 136, 140, 145, 157–158, 167, 206–208, 210–211, 213–214, 218 archives 2, 7, 93, 102, 106, 125, 139, 140, 142, 210, 216 army barrier 74, 176 art photography 23 assistant: manager 6; picture editor 6, 130, 139–140 atmosphere pictures 43, 61, 157–158, 161–162 audiences 4, 6, 7, 14, 19–23, 25–27, 29, 44, 62, 67, 69, 74, 90–91, 94, 97, 117, 148, 160, 162, 175, 178, 191, 195, 198, 206–207, 215, 223 Babylon 64, 72, 159 Barak, Ehud 179, 182

BBC 2, 210, 212–213; and BBC World 97–98, 206, 218 Bedouins 189 Best in the last 24 hours 68, 103, 112 Best of the month 68–69, 103 bin 129, 131, 140–141; and live 136, 139, 141 Blackstone Group 212 Blair, Tony 140 blog 1–2 Bloomberg 206, 212–214; and Bloomberg News 206, 213–214 brand 3, 52, 88, 108, 179, 207, 209 Bulk sales 131 bureaus 5, 6, 8, 11, 32, 40–43, 54, 64–69, 92, 98, 125, 142–145, 147, 155, 168, 175–176, 198, 211, 213–214, 223 Canon 51–52, 122 caption 1, 64–65, 71–73, 83, 90–91, 93, 95, 109–110, 114, 135, 143, 159, 168, 175–178, 186–187; and correction 93, 135 categories 18, 24, 100, 104, 106–108, 111; and meta-, 107; and sub-, 107; and super-, 106; and tree of 106, 107 chief 2, 4, 47–49, 53, 63, 71, 73, 125, 178, 183, 190, 197–198, 217, 220; and photographer 9, 11, 40, 42–43, 45–46, 49–50, 54, 58, 65, 68–69, 71, 81, 87–88, 122, 142, 145, 155, 168, 189–190, 195–197, 221–223 citizen: journalism 219; producers 209 Citizenside.com 219 clone 1, 42, 85–88 CNN 69, 97–98, 117, 206, 213 collective: knowledge 91; memory 1 commandments 114, 115 commercial photography 20, 113, 223

230 Index commodities 13–15, 18, 24, 26–27, 102, 124, 175–176 communities 3, 18, 30, 49, 51, 87, 90, 95, 133, 148, 160, 163, 175, 181–182, 185–188, 198, 216, 219, 222; and imaginative 186–187; and imagined feeling 182, 187; and imagined national 181–182; and national 49, 175, 186, 188; and occupational 18, 49, 51, 87, 95, 133, 148, 160, 163, 175, 182, 197–198, 222 conceptual formula 56–57, 169, 180; see also format consumers 7, 26, 45, 50, 62, 66, 95, 136, 160, 175, 193, 216, 223; and audience of 26–27, 69, 91, 94, 97, 148, 191, 198; and culture 7; and end-, 7; and practices 50, 67, 95, 223 Corbis 125, 136, 140, 216, 218 coverage 27, 41, 44–45, 47, 51, 54, 57, 61, 67, 86, 92, 100, 122, 142, 144–146, 148, 155–156, 159, 163, 165, 168–169, 178, 182–183, 190, 192, 194–195, 212–214, 218–219, 223; and balanced 48, 50, 53 Coyote 117 Creative use 106, 108 credit crunch 131 CSP see Culturally Sensitive Pictures cultural 3–5, 7–8, 12–20, 22, 25–27, 29, 31, 40–42, 46, 98, 100, 113, 163, 179, 182, 197–198; and commodities 14, 18; and economy 5, 18, 22, 24, 32, 196, 206, 222; and goods 20; and identity 15–16, 31, 92, 163, 175, 182; and industries 13, 18, 20, 31–32, 179, 196, 206, 222; and intermediary occupations 19; and mediators 5, 69; and production 4, 7, 13–19, 22, 24, 26, 113, 191; and studies 13–16, 29; and texts 17, 26, 191 culture: circuit of 18–19, 24–25; industrialization of 14, 17; industries of 17; organizational 19; production of 15, 17, 19 Culturally Sensitive Pictures 89, 90 data 11, 23–26, 32, 42, 74, 85, 90, 110, 116–117, 119, 122, 146, 209, 212–214, 218, 222 decisive moment 23, 160

design 19, 23, 25, 117–121, 132–134, 137–138; and graphic 4, 25, 28, 117–121; and visual plan 138 dictionary 73, 159 digital 3, 63, 112, 127, 161, 214–215; and camera 51, 160, 161, 215; and editing 63, 161; and era 63, 80; and image 161; and photography 161; and technology 28, 30, 161 Direct Inject 86 Disengagement Plan, the 47, 75n3 distribution 6, 23, 25–26, 28, 61, 66, 90, 93, 99, 103, 160, 192, 208, 214, 218, 220, 222; and technology 66, 211 division 8, 18–19, 43, 50, 107, 123–126, 166, 193, 207, 218; and editorial 124, and news 123, 124, 211–214 doctoring 2, 3, 87 domestic 4, 30 dominants 143 Dow Jones The 206 editing 3, 40, 62–64, 71, 88, 91, 95, 131, 158, 161, 167, 180, 223; and photo-, 3, 10, 114; and process 2–3, 62–64, 71–72, 86, 160–161, 163, 180, 184; and software 2, 176, 222; and tools 62–63, 161 editors 2–6, 9–10, 23, 25–26, 28, 40, 42, 45, 47–49, 58, 61–62, 64–65, 69–74, 80–101, 103–106, 108–112, 114, 116–118, 122–125, 128–131, 133–140, 142–146, 159–160, 168–169, 176, 179, 195, 207, 209, 214, 220–223; and arts 139; and deputy 6, 80–84, 99–101, 133, 221–222; and external 62, 160; and features 137–138; and global 82, 142; and graphics 118; and in- charge, see EIC; and international desk 144, 146; and keywords 109–117; and magazine 104–105, 107, 142; and pictures 5–6, 10, 41, 45, 70, 72–73, 86, 95, 99, 109, 113, 116–117, 123, 126, 129–130, 133–142, 145–146, 156, 220–221; and senior 2–3, 5–6, 73, 84, 96, 98–99, 130, 136, 145, 221; and sub see subeditor; and web 130, 136 EIC 6, 65, 81, 83–84, 87, 89, 93–99, 109, 142–143 ekphrasis 113, 116–117, 175

Index  231 ekphrastic: encounter 116; fear 116; hope 116, 176, 178; impossibility 116, 176 embed feature 217 English 64, 70, 73, 80, 83, 91–92, 165, 176 EPA 58, 70, 125, 131–132, 136, 145, 156, 158–159, 214 Ethnography 5, 8, 12–13, 21, 28–29, 222, 223; and multisite 5; and News Production 28–30 external: eye 62; viewer 158 Fairfax Media 216 features 45–46, 130, 132, 137–138, 190–192, 195–197, 212, 217; and pictures 133, 191, 195–196, 198; and story 45, 138, 188, 190–191, 195 File, The 85, 96, 105, 111–112, 126, 143 File Transfer Protocol see FTP film 50, 120, 160–162, 190–191, 193, 222; and news agencies 206 financial: crisis 111–112, 212; information 16, 206–207, 211–212; terminals 206, 214 Financial Times, The 119, 122, 145 flat plan 128, 132 footage 83, 86, 146, 208–210, 212, 216, 219 foreign news 30, 175 format 56, 85, 127, 179, 197 frame 58–60, 165, 176, 185; and time 7, 59–60, 86, 101, 105 freelance 2, 41, 221; and photographers 1, 49, 54, 130–131, 137, 141 front page 32, 45, 134, 146, 162, 176–178 FTP 72–73, 85, 120, 221; and National 69, 71; and World 69, 74 gatekeepers 208 Gaza 32, 49–50, 53, 71, 155–156, 158, 164, 168, 172, 188 gear 51, 55–56, 60, 70, 74, 167, 180 gender 15, 16 general news 46, 133 genre 21, 24, 102, 108, 162–163, 165, 191 Getty 45, 70, 136, 140, 145, 190–192, 216–219; and Images 45, 125, 156, 189, 191, 193, 215, 217–218, 222

Gizmos 134, 142 global: Graphics 6, 32, 41, 81, 117, 121; news providers 69, 208–210; pictures desk 5–6, 8, 10, 32, 40–42, 64–65, 71, 73–74, 80–81, 83–84, 91–92, 98–99, 104, 118–119, 122, 134, 136, 143, 155, 168, 220–221 globalization 30 glocal 4, 60, 80, 92, 98, 165, 178; and mechanisms 54, 74, 90, 126, 140, 148, 222; see also glocalization glocalization 178 Google 90, 220; and earth 119; and maps 119; and News 119 GPO 52, 70, 71 grabs 59–60, 83, 146–147, 156, 156n56 graphics 2, 81, 93, 117–118, 120–122, 134, 142, 211; and browser 120; and designs 117–121; and designers 4, 23, 25, 28, 118, 121; and journalists 6, 117–121; and pictures 107, 134 grief 56, 180–181, 184, 187 Guardian, The 5, 10, 12, 32, 42, 128–132, 134–135, 137, 139–142, 145–146, 221 Haaretz 71 Haiti 80, 97, 105 Hajj, Adnan 1–3 Hamas 43; and militants 71 handouts 147 hard news 45–46, 104, 121, 134, 139, 162, 191, 196 photography: fine arts 23, 44; head of 6, 10, 128, 130, 133–134, 222 Hebrew 53, 64, 70, 73, 156, 169–170 Herald Tribune, The 32, 71, 122, 155, 176–178 Hezbollah 1, 54 Highlights 143–144 Holmes, Paul 2 Hoog, Emmanuel 207 hub 67, 80, 210 ideology 14, 20 IDF 1, 8, 32, 52, 54, 155–156, 166–167, 169–172; see also Israeli Defense Forces Illustrated pictures 106–108 images 1, 2, 8, 22–24, 26–28, 45, 86, 90, 94, 103, 107, 111–114, 116–117, 121–122, 125, 132, 137, 142, 147,

232 Index 161, 168, 172, 176, 178, 180, 187–188, 191–194, 196, 208–210, 212, 214–219; and amateur 209, 219; and brokers 27, 28, 221; and futurepast 27; and industry 94, 216; and news 26–28, 213, 216, 221; and word 112–113, 178 Image Bank, The 216 IMDB 90 Impact 122, 144–146, 223; and information 144–145; and list 144, 146; and process 123, 144, 145 institutions 3, 7–8, 12, 16–17, 19–20, 24, 30, 53, 74, 102, 139, 192, 208, 222–224 international: desk 6, 32, 42, 69, 71, 122–123, 142–146; markets 4, 23, 54, 60, 64, 74, 81, 90, 92, 103–104, 125–126, 128, 144, 155, 163, 165, 176, 191, 193, 206, 211, 213, 222; news agencies 1, 3–4, 7, 26, 30–31, 45, 52–53, 92, 100, 108, 155, 163–168, 175, 182, 189–190, 192–193, 195–196, 198, 206, 209–211, 213, 218–219, 223; news production process 4, 25, 28, 30–31, 155, 193, 198; news services 28; play see play reports internet 30, 32, 55, 63, 86, 127, 207–208, 210, 214 intertext 172, 175; see also Intertextuality Intertextuality 171–172, 174–175, 178, 186–187 Israel 1, 5–8, 11–12, 16, 31–32, 41, 43–44, 46–50, 52–54, 58–60, 69–71, 73, 155–156, 159, 163–164, 166–168, 171–172, 174–180, 182–184, 186, 188–189, 194, 220–222 Israel Today 70 Israeli Defense Forces 1, 52, 155 Israeli-Palestinian conflict 31, 48, 50, 164, 168, 175–176, 178, 182 iStockphoto 217

Jews, orthodox 46, 172 Johnson, Charles 1 JPEG 85, 120, 127

Japanese phone, The 83 Jerusalem 5–6, 11–12, 42, 47, 49–50, 53–54, 66, 144, 156, 163, 169, 171, 183, 220; and bureau 6, 8, 32, 40–42, 54, 66–67, 81, 155, 175; and pictures department 49, 54, 167, 180, 183, 189, 220 Jerusalem Post, The 71

Maariv 60, 71, 172 MADA 52 magazine 23, 26, 45, 85, 95, 97, 101, 105, 109, 111, 124, 126–128, 130, 162, 189, 197, 214–216; and clients 109; and desk 6, 32, 41, 68, 81, 93–95, 100–101, 103–105, 107, 109–112, 114; and editors

keywords 110–117, 140–142; and desk 111–112, 114; and process 109, 111, 114, 116–117; and team 6, 32, 41, 81, 109, 111–112; and tree 110–111 Klein, Jonathan 217 Kobra 85, 97, 117 labor 15, 25–26, 31, 122, 141, 197, 219, 222; and cultural 18; and industrial 223; and pictures 28, 31, 221; and process 14, 16 lenses 23, 51, 56, 59, 122 Light box 127 Little Green Footballs 1 local 12, 15, 28, 31–32, 41, 48–49, 54, 59, 64–65, 69, 74, 80, 90, 92, 98, 103, 125–126, 143–146, 163, 165, 167–169, 171–172, 174, 178, 181–182, 186–188, 193, 195, 198, 205–206, 208, 212, 220, 222–223; and agencies 125; and audiences 23, 44, 90; and bureaus 5–6, 8, 11, 32, 40–41, 54, 65, 67, 69, 81, 92, 98, 143–144, 155, 168, 175–176, 198, 223; and clients 69–70, 74, 90, 99, 140, 165, 222; and community 163, 181–182, 187; and departments 9, 44, 69, 147, 183; and editors 42, 64, 72, 74, 145; and identity 170, 175; and markets 90, 125, 126, 206, 211; and newspapers 42, 70–71, 145, 156, 167, 221; and offices 44, 48, 54, 65, 67, 70–73, 176, 183, 189, 22–221; and photographers 40, 48, 60, 64, 68–69, 74, 88, 175, 197 London 5–7, 71, 80, 89, 93, 111, 118, 126, 128, 130, 140, 142, 144–146, 215, 219

Index  233 104–105, 107, 142; and markets 101, 125 Magnum 111 manipulation 1, 2, 3, 15, 87 marketing 4, 19, 23, 25, 123–124, 129, 191–192, 216 Martin, Lee 218 MED, The 85, 88–89, 105, 119–120 Media 1, 4, 12–13, 17, 20, 28–29, 52, 91, 104, 112, 123, 166, 206–209, 211, 214, 216, 219–220, 223; and Archive 105; and audiences 20; and Browser 85, 118; and clients 4, 16, 127, 214; and Editor 85; and event 159; and market 127, 214; and organizations 7–8, 17, 127, 192, 211–212; and owners 14; and production 12, 27, 29; and social 208, 210, 217 memory 47, 51; and cards 51–52, 59, 80, 86, 158, 161 merger 129, 163, 207, 212, 216 messaging: groups 42, 52–54, 221; services 53 Middle East, The 2–3, 6, 81, 83, 87, 89, 95, 123, 126, 142–143 Mirs 221; and device 52, 70, 75n6 Morfix 73

182–183, 193, 195–196, 205, 209, 212, 214, 219, 222–224; packages 28; photographers 55, 62, 101, 156, 172, 181; pictures 3–8, 16, 20–28, 30–32, 40–42, 45–46, 50, 56, 62–64, 67, 74, 101–103, 108, 114, 121, 124, 133–134, 136–137, 146–148, 155, 159, 161–162, 165, 169, 172, 179, 181, 190–193, 195–196, 198, 205– 207, 211, 213, 217–218, 220–223; sources 97; stories 12, 23, 29, 44–46, 86, 97–98, 117, 121, 130, 136, 143, 190–191, 195, 211–213; value 43, 46, 86, 99, 108, 112, 114, 134, 168, 208, 219 newsrooms 21, 26, 28–29, 120–122, 209–210 newsworthiness 4, 7, 22, 60, 99–100, 120, 159, 162, 193–195, 224 NG 23 Nikon 52

NASA 118 national 30, 49, 98, 133–134, 159, 165, 175, 182; and agencies 87, 93, 214; and identity 163–164, 169, 176; and markets 4 National Geographic 22, 44; see also NG nationality 15–16, 50, 65, 175–176, 211, 222 NBC Universal 218 neutrality 51, 53, 163–164, 172, 192 news: agencies 1, 3–4, 7, 25–26, 30–31, 45, 52–53, 92, 100, 103, 108, 123, 155, 157, 162–165, 168, 175, 182, 189–190, 192–193, 195–196, 198, 206–207, 209, 211, 213, 215–216, 218–219, 223; clients 45, 52, 162, 165, 190, 209, 222; conglomerates 28; ecology 28; events 3, 5, 31, 43, 46, 54, 69, 71, 97, 103, 118, 134, 138–139, 148, 162, 167–168, 180, 192, 195–196, 212; foreign 30, 175; market 4, 206; organizations 3, 11, 13, 21–22, 28–29, 31–32, 44, 46, 50–51, 53, 91, 98, 103, 123, 139, 147,

PA 136 pager 53; and device 42, 52–54, 67, 69, 71, 166 Palestinians 16, 48–50, 52–53, 71, 167–168, 176, 222 Paneikon 86–87 participatory journalism 91 patriotism 49 Peretz, Amir 43, 58, 60 personnel 8, 18, 23, 51, 58, 63, 65, 82–83, 94, 98, 111, 122, 139–140, 179; and agency 12, 54, 205 and photography 10, 67, 130, 146, 220–221; and TV 67, 146 Peters, Craig 217 Philadelphi Route 172 Photo Mechanic 73, 85 photographic moment 101 photojournalism 3, 12, 20, 23–24, 28, 32–33, 63, 104, 162, 194, 196, 206, 218–219, 221 Photoshop 1, 3, 62, 71, 87–88, 119, 159, 161, 220 Picture: browser 120; galleries 135–136; kill 93; packages 101,

objectivity 51, 53, 57, 62–63, 73, 163–164, 175, 181 Observer, The 129–130, 139 occupied territories 53 Olympic Games 85–86, 117, 119, 122, 144

234 Index 104; researchers 130; specialists 123; Stream Editor 85; of the event 51, 58, 61, 146, 158–159, 161–163, 165, 167, 169; see also returned play reports 59, 143–144 political economy 13–16, 29; and of communication 13, 17, 24; and critical 14–15; and of culture 13 pool 58, 69, 93 press card 52 prodnewsers 31, 208, 209; see also produsers produsers 50, 208 PSED 85 Pseudo-events 43 pseudo-individuality 197 Qassam 43; and rocket 188, 200n19 Rabin, Yitzhak 47, 156, 159 regime: of signification 32, 162; of truth 32 regional: allocation 47; bureaus 213; clients 83, 93; desk 214; divisions 125–126; kill 93; network 81 representation: verbal 64, 113, 117, 175; visual 3, 16, 72, 102, 112–113, 162, 175, 185 returned picture 44, 66–67, 198n3 Reuters 1–3, 58, 70, 132, 136, 140, 158, 206–207, 211–213, 215, 218; and blog 2; and Monitor Money Rates Services 207; and TV 206; see also Thomson Reuters revenues 16, 128, 130, 191–192, 197, 206–207, 211–212, 214–217 Rex 136, 140 sales 4, 27, 32, 42, 44, 52, 80, 105, 109, 111–112, 114, 123–126, 128, 131, 191, 212, 216, 218; and agents 93, 125–126, 128; and head of Europe 6, 123; and personnell 123–124, 126–127; and representatives 85, 101, 106, 111, 123–126; and specialists 123–125; and team 103, 124 Scan Pix 125 Schlesinger, David 2, 3 semiotic analysis 6, 20, 24, 27, 32, 113, 155 Shalit, Gilad 71 shareability 208 shelf life 112

shutter 157, 160 signification 3, 5, 24, 42, 122, 162, 224 Singapore 5–6, 8, 10, 32, 42, 59, 64–67, 71, 73–74, 80, 86, 88, 92, 94, 97–99, 103–104, 118, 122, 143–144, 146, 155, 159, 168, 175, 220 soft news 46, 190, 195–196 software 2–3, 61–62, 64, 73, 85–86, 97, 136, 145, 176 spike 40, 62, 71, 80, 93, 96–97, 136, 143, 155, 158, 164, 189–190, 194, 197 staff 2, 42, 49, 104, 106, 123, 190, 211; and photographers 5–6, 49, 130–131, 168–169, 192 standards 2, 46, 57, 62, 85, 88, 92, 126, 140, 165, 169, 179–180, 196–198, 209, 219, 222 stock 21, 45, 101, 107–108, 113, 116, 191–193, 216, 218; and agencies 25, 45, 113, 125, 161, 216; and images 24–25, 63, 101, 103, 113–114, 217–218; and photography 24–25, 101, 107, 162, 216; and industry 24, 107, 216, 218 Storyful 209–210, 219 stringer 70, 87–88, 221 subeditors 5–6, 81, 84–85, 87, 89–93, 96, 135–138; and senior-, 81, 83, 85, 94–99, 221 success 3, 23–24, 44, 46, 49, 52, 54, 56–57, 68–69, 83, 92, 98, 101, 109, 111, 117, 123, 145, 169, 179, 190, 223 suicide bombing 32, 50, 59, 155, 166–168, 176–179 Supplemental Code Top Pix 96, 99–100; see also Top Pix Szlukovenyi, Tom 2 terror 48, 168, 171, 185, 210 testimony 65, 72, 102, 121, 181, 193; and Local 172 Thomson Reuters 145, 210, 212–214 Top Pix 96, 99–100, 103, 111–112, 117, 134, 136, 223 traffic 64, 81, 85, 87, 96, 118, 144, 195, 208–209 training 3, 47, 87, 94–95, 111, 124–125, 169–170

Index  235 traveling light 56 trust 3–4, 52, 73, 88, 208, 224 Tulkarem 8, 32, 152, 166, 176, 179 TV 12, 40, 58–60, 67–69, 71, 81, 83, 92, 97, 117, 142–143, 145–147, 214, 219, 222; and AP-, 157, 206; and crews 8, 13, 43, 58, 67, 146, 166; and department 59; and desk 83; and personnell 67, 146; and products 4; and Reuters 206 UCC 219 UGC 208–210, 219–220 UK 7, 81, 105, 125, 140, 143, 146 UPI 157, 206–207, 211, 213 USA Today 212 Visual Communications Group 216, 218

West Bank 49–50, 71, 168, 176–178; and barrier 46, 189, 200n20 WhatsApp 220–221 Whitmore, Greg 128, 130 Wikipedia 90–91 Williams, Rowan 134 Wire services 90 Wolfson, Barkay 172–173 Witnessing 25, 66, 72, 82, 160, 187, 194; and eye 193 World: Cup 85, 122, 137, 144, 215; Diary 71; Press Photo 26 Xinhua 213 Yahoo 66, 89–90, 97, 155, 159 Yedioth Ahronoth 60, 70–71, 156 Yesha 53 ZAKA 52, 166, 172