What's Behind the Spectacle? An Update on the Overlooked: Stock Photography and the Visual Content Industry

Research output: Chapter in Book/Report/Conference proceedingConference contributionpeer-review

Abstract

This paper analyses developments over the past three years in the stock photography industry, the global multi-billion dollar business that manufactures the majority of advertising and marketing images, and an increasing number of editorial and news photographs. Focusing on how the industry shapes the visual background to our lives - and the 'monopoly of appearance' (Debord 1970: 12) of our societies - the paper critically examines stock photography's place at the very frontier of contemporary cultural dynamics: technological change, globalization, struggles over the legal and social definitions of intellectual 'property' and cultural authority, the aestheticization of the lifeworld, and the apparently ceaseless conquest of material and virtual spaces by increasing numbers of visual images. It does this by briefly looking in turn at three interlinked questions: 1) how does the industry currently organize representational power and cultural authority; 2) what is the reach of the indust
Original languageAmerican English
Title of host publicationConference Papers -- International Communication Association
Pages1 - 20
StatePublished - 2007

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