Image Brokers ─ Visualizing World News in the Age of Digital Circulation

Image Brokers is an in-depth ethnography of the labor and infrastructure behind news images and how they are circulated. Zeynep Gursel presents an intimate look at the ways image brokersthe people who manage the distribution or restriction of imagesconstruct and culturally mediate the images they circulate. Through this framework, news images become visual commodities that impact how politics and culture are visualized in the world.

Set against the backdrop of the War on Terror and the industry-wide transition from analog to digital technologies,Image Brokers is a multi-sited ethnography based on fieldwork conducted at the industry’s centers of power in New York and Paris. It also explores how new digital and social media platforms continue to change photojournalism and create ever-widening distribution networks. The book is a powerful investigation of the processes of decision making amid the changing infrastructures of representation.

Zeynep Devrim Gursel is Assistant Professor of Anthropology and International Studies at Macalester College.