The Incredibly Expensive Business of War Coverage

• In Event: The Popular Cultures of Digital Photography: Practices, Aesthetics, Institutions

Abstract

How do you calculate the ROI (return on investment) on a war photograph? How do you pay for its production? And why might other popular and commercial photography genres help answer these questions? This paper returns to the beginning of the Iraq war during the rise of professional digital photojournalism and recalls tensions around the financials behind war coverage at two institutions, a wire service and a visual content provider. At the wire service there was much discomfort about the fact that celebrity photography generated income for the photography department, thus strengthening its hand when asking for resources to cover the war. Meanwhile at the visual content provider the sales department hoped the editorial division would consider the future value of their images when making decisions and encouraged them not to ignore the profitable genre of lifestyle photography. Strong news content did not always make for images with strong editorial stock value in the future they argued. This paper looks back to think about the current state of photography and asks what the ramifications are for visual news coverage of the future.

Bio:
Zeynep Devrim Gürsel is a cultural anthropologist and assistant professor in the department of International Studies at Macalester College. Her book, Image Brokers (UC Press, 2015) is based on fieldwork conducted in the United States, France and Turkey; it focuses on the production, distribution, and circulation of international news images and the changing cultures of photojournalism after the digital turn.

Author

• Zeynep Devrim Gürsel, Macalester College