HOW THE PICTURE PRESS MADE AMERICA: NEWS PHOTOGRAPHY AND THE POLITICS OF REPRESENTATION

Abstract

This dissertation looks at the related ways in which two pioneering news photographicagencies depicted the American self and presented an “understanding” of America’s nationhood. First, this dissertation investigates Bain News Service between 1900 and 1920 and the concurrent industrialization and technological achievements that changed the nature of photography and mass communication. It considers Bain’s agency as an influential national institution and gatekeeper of visual information that, along with newspaper publishers, determined the flow of photographic representation both at home and abroad. Second, this dissertation examines in parallel terms the VII agency from its inception in 2001 to 2020––a period defined by globalization, digitalization, and media convergence. VII, as a decentralized global entity, competed with a multitude of producers and consumers to influence the social discourse. The findings of this dissertation illuminate the power, and recent loss thereof, of news photographs to make visible and to promote specific social discourses within the functions of news photo agencies. In investigating Bain News Service, the first commercial news photo service in the United States founded in 1895, and the VII Photo agency, one of the preeminent photo agencies in the digital era founded in 2001, the dissertation considers how changes in the news business and photographic technologies altered representational practices and the sharing of visual information globally. This dissertation traces the rapidly evolving economic and technological environment across the century — two trends which together have not only contributed to the diminishing authority of the news photographic agency as an institution, but have weakened news photography’s role in promoting and sustaining a national identity and a nation’s reputation. Centralized national news photographic agencies of the early twentieth century, such as Bain News Service, dominated visual representations in the press. The Bain agency provided images of the United States that promoted the sovereign national status quo and disseminated images of the nation aligned with the ideology of the country’s political elite. One hundred years later, photo agencies including VII, operate in a globally-oriented, citizen-driven public sphere. The photographs disseminated by VII serve to challenge the American national status quo; they were (and still are) taken and often published in the hopes that the images will (help) bring social change. Guided by Stuart Hall’s concept of the politics of representation, this dissertation traces the evolution of the news photo agency, as a journalistic institution, while specifically examining news images along with ideologies embedded in them. The dissertation also considers the news photo agency as an Althusserian Ideological State Apparatus (ISA)–– a system separate from the government, but indirectly involved in the expression of dominant ideologies and the promotion of a particular social discourse. To assess the significance of the news photo agency as an institution, and the ways in which it represented “Americanness,” this dissertation uses several approaches, including discourse and historiographical analyses and a photo-thematic analysis of the archives of Bain News Service and VII Photo. In analyzing the construction of American social discourse, the following questions guided the research: How do news photographs and the news photo agencies as journalistic institutions help represent/promote social discourses? How have Bain News Service and VII represented “Americanness” in their news photographs? How are ideas and ideologies of nationalism, exceptionalism, and the American Dream visualized in these photographs? How does the representation of nationalism, exceptionalism, and the American Dream differ in twentieth-century images produced by Bain compared to the twenty-first-century images produced by VII? Through thematic and visual examinations of news photographs of the American nation, as produced by Bain News Service and VII Photo respectively, this dissertation also looks at representations of American exceptionalism, nationalism, and the American Dream over time to determine the visual dialogue within the United States and between the American nation and the rest of the world. This investigation finds photographic representations of America’s greatness took an important place in the news and for the news photo agencies of the early 1900s, creating a highly specific understanding of the American nation as a rising global power. The centralization of image production under the news photo agencies of the twentieth century also determined a specific meaning of nationalism, exceptionalism, and the American Dream in line with the nation’s leadership. With the advent of newer technologies in the twenty-first century, the public also began to take on an active role in the producing and distributing of representations of the American individual and nation, resulting in the waning authority of the news photo agency. The decentralization of image production that resulted from forces such as convergence, digitalization, globalization, and citizen (photo)journalism in the twenty-first century has, in turn, complicated and visually re-defined the meaning of nationalism, exceptionalism, and the American Dream. Moreover, news photographic representations of social inequalities, environmental issues, and political divisions that proliferate across the Internet and social media in the twenty-first century have altered the visual portrait of America’s reputation and the ways global audiences “see” the United States. The examination of the business, structure, and news photographs produced by the two innovative news photo agencies set a century apart illuminates the significance of the news photo agency at large. The investigations outlined in the chapters ahead clarify how photojournalistic institutions have shaped public knowledge about a nation and its ideological values.