Inattentive Subjects: The Emergence of a Photojournalistic Norm

• In Event: Histories of Veracity

Abstract

In news photographs, the deferred gaze of the photographed subject stands as a widespread, well-established norm. Typically, when news photographs depict people, those people do not visibly pose for the camera or gaze at it: instead, they appear absorbed in the events or interactions that serve as the pretext for the image. The convention of the deferred gaze functions as a means of naturalizing photojournalistic representation by eliding the visual signifiers of interaction between photographer and subject. On this basis, scholars who have studied the professional practices of photojournalists (Schwartz, 1999; Becker, 2004) have contended that this convention serves as a rhetorical marker of photojournalistic objectivity. Of course, as historical studies of objectivity (Schudson, 1978; Daston and Galison, 2007) demonstrate, objective representation is not a natural or timeless value: it is a contingent one, becoming enshrined as an ideal through social consensus, epistemic context, and professional norms.

How, then, did this popular association between inattentive subjects and objective representation develop? What ideological pressures, professional practices, and technological affordances helped to initiate it? This paper examines the historical emergence of the convention of the inattentive subject in news photography and explores what this convention reveals about the shifting epistemic functions of news photographs as well as the relationship between textual and visual journalism between 1900 and 1940. Drawing on discussions of inattention and performance within photography studies (Frosh, 2001, 2012; Becker, 2013; Fried, 1978), this paper examines one large corpus of early news photography--the photographic archive of the Bain News Agency--and traces the shifting place of the deferred gaze within it.

Contextualizing this body of photographs through the study of news photography manuals, historical discussions of the role of the photojournalist and photojournalistic subject, and codes of professional conduct, I argue that the convention of the deferred gaze helped to establish photography as a source of journalistic knowledge that could be cast as impersonal, non-hierarchical, and timely. These traits were vital to the consolidation of photojournalism as a distinct discursive sphere and profession, and to its transformation from a marginal practice to a vital element of the news.

Author

• Annie Rudd, U of Calgary