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This chapter looks at the news and editorial division of Global Views Inc. (GVI), one of the largest corporate visual content providers, on the brink of the US invasion of Iraq in 2003. It follows the fast paced work of Jackie, a photo editor at GVI, and other image brokers as they negotiate with photographers and publications. News images represent a mere fraction of the profits generated by selling visual content such as celebrity portraiture and stock photos. GVI produces no journalistic text and is not a news organization; hence this chapter looks at image brokers working to produce and circulate images as content for other professionals.

This chapter discusses Agence France-Press (AFP), one of the three largest global news agencies and produces original reportage—both text and photographs and video—for news publications worldwide that subscribe to what is often still referred to as its “wire feed” despite the obsolescence of this medium. Prior to digitalization, AFP would rarely compete with a photo agency because its job was defined as producing fast photographs that summarized an event in a single shot. The chapter analyzes the politics of visualizing world news in the daily practices of image brokers at AFP's Paris headquarters shortly after the circulation of the infamous photographs of Abu Ghraib prison and amid the first wave of beheading images as Iraq was once again declared a sovereign nation. Specifically, it addresses crises of visualization amid the emergence of new kinds of image brokers who digitally circulate their own representations.

This chapter examines editorial decisions concerning photography at major US news magazines at a moment when the magazines still had sizable print subscribers and robust newsstand sales while online versions were just beginning to emerge. Everyday work at Newsworld is about brokering images and reproducing worldviews. Image brokers at Newsworld have to negotiate not only with their colleagues, who are writers and text editors, but also with those in the art department, who negotiate presentation issues such as layout and design. The chapter follows the many layers of negotiation behind a finished issue and highlights the rule of text even in news publications known for visual journalism that serve as points of references for photographers all over the world.

This conclusion looks at the landscape of photojournalism today. What happens to image brokering and photojournalism in the age of social media and increased digitalization? While there has been an increasing demand for imagery, the work of photojournalists and professional image brokers has been significantly devalued. The conclusion then examines visual worldmaking practices through four recent news events—the 2013 Gezi protests in Turkey, the January 2015 attacks on the French satirical magazine Charlie Hebdo, World Press Photo's decision to revoke a prize in its 2015 Contemporary Issues category, and the earthquake in Nepal in April 2015. Only one thing about the future of journalism is clear: it must be visual.

This chapter traces the history of photographs on the move and the development of an international community whose business it is to broker the images that document the news. There are two important stories here: the well-known one about the rise of photojournalism, and the less-known one about the rise of distribution networks and changes in infrastructures of representation. This history of the business of image brokering focuses specifically on the significant restructuring of the industry as a result of digitalization—most importantly, the rise of the visual content provider. The chapter then analyzes the challenges of news images as a product line.

This chapter addresses the relationship between imagemaking and worldmaking, or how assumed conflict shapes the production and circulation of news images which then in turn contribute to what political possibilities seem plausible. Specifically the chapter looks at worldmaking at two sites: the newsroom of a major US news publication and a World Press Photo seminar intended to develop democracy by way of photojournalism. At both sites presumed binaries shape processes of worldmaking frame by frame. Balancing such aesthetic conflict comes to stand in for journalistic objectivity. The professional brokering of news images involves simultaneous processes of producing representations and reproducing worldviews. Understanding these processes is key to understanding global infrastructures of worldmaking with its production of certain categories of people and possibilities for certain kinds of visibility and not others. In the end, better scholarship on how images both represent and produce political conflict may require that we look beyond images of conflict itself.