What Precedes the Digital News Image?

Not all photographs are news images. How, then, do certain photographs become news images? Through circulating in particular types of networks. Another way of asking this question is, What precedes the news image? This chapter provides a particular history of news photography, focusing on how images move and acquire value. The objective is not to repeat the already well-told story of what preceded the news image historically, not what illustrated the news before photography, but rather to highlight the infrastructures that enable the production and circulation of news images as a form of visual worldmaking. This chapter lays out the professional history against which my fieldwork was conducted. In the second half of the chapter I describe, especially for readers not familiar with the photojournalism industry, the processes by which a photograph can generate revenue as a news image and the different attitudes toward profit that I encountered.

In the summer of 1839, at a meeting of the French Academy of Sciences in Paris, the process behind daguerreotypes, named after their inventor, Louise Daguerre, was declared "a free gift to the world." As visual culture theorist Ariella Azoulay reminds us, "the same country that bestowed the Declaration of the Rights of Man and the Citizen, France, also nationalized the invention of photography in order to bequeath it, without delay, to all of humanity." That the invention was a free gift to the world is significant because the French government gave Daguerre an annuity in exchange for the patent, thereby acknowledging the commercial value of photography. Mathematician, physician, and Deputy of the Pyrénées-Orientales François Arago details this arrangement in his report to the French Chamber of Deputies, stressing that Daguerre himself had not wanted a lump sum "which might give the contract the character of a sale." Arago continued, "It would not be the same with a pension. It is with a pension that you reward the soldier, crippled on the field of honor, the official, grown gray at his post," and thus, he reminded the deputies, they had honored the families of major scholars after their deaths. From the beginning, then, photographic technology was considered to be a discovery of global interest and something whose significance lay beyond its financial profitability.

Despite the attention attracted by daguerreotypes for accurately capturing the world in unprecedented detail, these photographs were singular material objects. As such, they had limited circulation, and this kept daguerreotypes from reaching large audiences and becoming news images. The excitement generated was about the process and promise of photography, not about any one particularly significant photograph. Almost as soon as the process was made public, photography studios were established in urban centers worldwide. Soon both studios and peripatetic photographers began producing and circulating images of distant elsewheres. By the 1850s a new feverish excitement accompanied the first reproduction of photographs. As historian Rebecca Solnit puts it, "Photographic reproduction would make the world's images and experiences as available as the Manchester mills made cotton." Through the development of photographic reproduction a new, though long anticipated, object emerged: the photograph as commodity. Views of the world could be mass-produced and sold. For larger and larger audiences, the world became a visually knowable object, and photography emerged as a visual medium of worldmaking.

Photographic history can and has been told as a series of technological innovations or a collection of great names or iconic images. Yet each technological innovation had to be preceded by a shift in imagination, and each great photographer rose to eminence in a particular sociohistorical context in which certain images could be deemed iconic. The telling of what precedes the digital news image in this chapter underscores the entangled political, technological, and commercial histories behind changes in visual worldmaking. What follows is a very brief history of photojournalism from its beginning to the early twenty-first century and the years immediately preceding my fieldwork, which saw the transition from analog to digital technologies. Just as significant as the invention of photographic reproduction technologies in the 1850s, the transition to digital reproductions allowed images to circulate in completely new ways and through a whole new range of networks, giving rise to new kinds of image brokers. Digital technologies changed the photojournalism industry radically, yet the elements central to a genealogy of digital news images — contingencies and confluences of capital, technology, transportation, political power, and military campaigns — are the same ones that were central to many other moments of innovation in the history of photographic representation. We are still witnessing radical shifts in the use of new visual forms in journalism and debating their respective commercial and journalistic value. I anticipate that these same elements will be central to future developments.

A SHORT HISTORY OF PHOTOJOURNALISM

It may be hard for the twenty-first-century reader to imagine journalism without pictures, and yet newspaper photography began only in the early 1880s. By some accounts, the first mechanically reproduced photograph in a newspaper, "A Scene in Shanty Town," appeared in the New York Daily Graphic in 1880. The Leipziger Illustrierte published photographs using a similar technique in 1882. Because of the excessive costs of halftones, photographs were not used regularly but rather employed for special occasions, such as coronations. It was not until 1896 that the New York Times used illustrations regularly in a weekend supplement, indicating that the visual was a key aspect of journalism. Eventually "picture newspapers" began to appear. The first few "picture newspapers," such as the Illustrated London News (1890) and the Daily Mirror (founded in 1904, the first newspaper to be entirely illustrated by photographs), were published in England. Excelsior in Paris and the Daily Graphic in New York soon followed.

The story of transportation is central to developments in photojournalism in terms of both how images circulated and the obstacles faced by traveling photographers. After all, photographic...