Image Brokers Visualizing World News in the Age of Digital Circulation

Reviews

“Zeynep Devrim Gürsel’s original and important new book takes ethnography to the heart of the ever-accelerating media world of photojournalism. Her central concept of the photojournalists’ works as formative fictions reminds us that they are always steeped in cultural understandings about the rest of the world. At the same time, the eponymous ‘image brokers’ who decide what we see are facing dilemmas that come with the digital transformations changing the very circuits through which reality is represented—all this in a rapidly changing image economy that impacts the news as we know it.”—Faye Ginsburg, New York University

“Gürsel has been in the middle of the fast-moving news process and at global centers of news power after 9/11 and during a period of dramatic change in the image-handling infrastructure. A wonderful close-up study—ethnographically lively, intellectually sophisticated.”—Ulf Hannerz, author of Foreign News: Exploring the World of Foreign Correspondents

“Image Brokers offers an intimate look at the complicated work that goes on behind the production and circulation of international news images at a time when the news industry is being subjected to profound technological changes due to digitization as well as a larger photojournalistic community in flux. Gürsel presents some fascinating new material, the result of fieldwork in several different sites and countries. This sophisticated and articulate book will be most welcome to scholars and students in a variety of fields.”—Patricia Spyer, Graduate Institute, Geneva