Transformations of photojournalism : a multi-site ethnography of visual production techniques in economic photojournalism

Abstract (English)

During my doctoral research, I worked on the production techniques of fictional photography in French cinema, analyzing in particular the place of the idea of market value in production processes. Based on several months' ethnography with image professionals on film photography production sites, I showed that international market stakes in French cinema orient the choices of socio-technical systems, modes of creative action and techniques, and have an impact on the visual form of photographs. Market value is a real point of reference that contributes to the organization of the production space of an image in an industrial context. I intend to reuse my findings to extend my analyses to the field of economic photojournalism. The visual data present in journalistic photographs and videos are marketable data. The value of the visible and the visual organization present in an image include market dimensions (Bolin, in Hepp and al., 2022) that can be analyzed to understand the transformations of journalism.
A series of questions then arise for this research: how is the market value of photographs defined in economic journalism with a view to their public display ? Through the construction of the visible and the invisible, how is an idea and the unthinking of the economy constructed ? How is the visual authority of economic practices constructed ? Where are the points of tension ? Observation questions then emerge: what is the professional environment and political line of the photojournalist ? How is the photographic production chain configured ? What links do photojournalists have with the people they work with, and with the people, spaces and activities they photograph ? What tools does he use ? If he uses AI, how does he do it, and for what purpose ? Is his aim to use AI for photomontage ? Is his choice of tools determined by the editorial line of his newspaper, a market for images, his access to the field, the medium on which the photograph will be distributed ? How does he construct his gaze to organize the visible in what he perceives in the environment, then in what he will show in the photograph ? Then, how will the photograph be displayed in the newspaper and in the article ? How does the written text relate to the photographs ? Finally, what is the visual experience of photojournalists and their collaborators, or even their models ?
All these questions are essential if we are to understand how a part of the visual culture of the local and global economy is constructed in Europe.