UC San Diego

This dissertation unpacks the professional practices and conceptual underpinnings of photojournalism in contemporary news media production. By viewing such imagery as both a product of capital and a necessity of the democratic social order, I address the problematic and generative assumptions/consumptions/functions of the documentary photograph with an eye toward a reassessment of the news image industry from capture to caption.

Central to my argument is my consideration of photojournalism as a “scopic regime,” due to the practice's particular mode of envisioning disempowered subjects through a framework that symbolically eliminates the photographer/subject power structure. Using the dual lenses of visual culture and documentary theory, I will clarify the parallel relationships of visioning and witnessing as elemental to the production of photojournalistic reality. Intertwined with this foundational ideal of journalistic imagery are other infrequently analyzed relationships specific to the production of the presumed photographic real: visuality to truth, camera to photographer, subject to audience. I further argue the camera (in documentary photography specifically) is a tool of erasure that produces a scopic regime through its disembodiment of the photographer’s gaze — as I claim it is partially the photojournalistic camera that allows for a conceptual

laundering of the photographer’s subjectivity into objectivity — and that it is this key moment of the photographer’s disappearing act where the envisioned reality of the subject becomes suspect.

This research argues that news images are worlding — integral to constructing the social imaginary on a global scale — and, as such, both the product, producer and process must be subject to analysis in order to unpack the problems and opportunities within/behind/before/beyond the frame. In the absence of such a thorough intersectional critique, the news image remains one of the most powerful modes of instantiating disempowerment in the contemporary media field.