Image brokers: visualizing world news in the age of digital circulation

A proverbial statement of a picture being worth “a thousand words” may have been an early observation of the tensions between the world and its representations. Intensified, those tensions and uncertainty about the adequate means of describing reality have reportedly developed into a veritable crisis of representation that, since Foucault, has been diagnosed in much contemporary cultural production. A solid and dependably “real” world has been rendered inaccessible to human beings now destined to deal with a mere play of signifiers. But who creates signs and, therefore, who exercises power over the representations of the world we get? Zeynep Devrim Gürsel’s monograph Image Brokers: Visualizing World News in the Age of Digital Circulation enters a conversation on representation with a question about news images and their role in the worldmaking. She sets out an anthropological investigation of news agencies and visual content providers in order to understand the process through which some images become formative fictions, that is, dominant narratives about the world, while other images never stand a chance to “circulate with evidentiary or truth value” (p. 14). To do so, she interrogates the infrastructures of news image-making and follows a very loosely aggregated group of decision-makers in the world of photojournalism whom she calls image brokers.