The Generic News Photo

Let's take a peek at a picture. Hans Pennink for AP:

Reading the Pictures did their usual shitty take "I see this as a Citizenship Picture, you can see in her eyes ... " blah blah blah. Any of that stuff, if present at all, is in the text and not the photo. The photograph is an almost completely generic photograph of a person getting a shot. There are two features that render it not-quite generic: the medical staffer giving the shot is more suited-up than we'd have expected a year ago, and in the background there is a videographer.

There are a 100 explanations that cover those details that do not include "sars-cov-2 vaccine Phase III clinical trial."

There could be anything in that hypodermic, and the ground truth is that there's a fair chance that it's saline right now. This is a blinded trial, with a robust control group.

This is just one case of a million like it. Many news photographs are completely generic. Street protests look like street protests, arrests look like arrests, building fires like building fires, shots look like shots, car accidents look like car accidents. Increasingly (?) we see news photos muddled up. Wait! says the internet sleuth that is not the earthquake in Haiti, but rather the tsunami in Thailand! and they are perfectly correct. But, really, who cares? The devastation is indistinguishable.

We have a fetish for sending someone out to take the same damned photo, but in the new place, as if somehow it means something different. Nothing new is communicated by using the new picture in place of some stock photograph stand-in.

Why did the photographer make this particular photograph for the vaccine trial shot? Because the woman is pretty, she's tattooed and has dyed hair and cool glasses, but she doesn't look threateningly sexy or boringly ordinary. She's cute. 1000 other injections were given that day in facility for this or that, and some of them were for this clinical trial. But none of the other subjects hit the right note of cute for the photographer and the picture editor, so here we are.

The photograph was not selected for its information/news content, but for the attractiveness of the subject.

We live in a generic world of suitably picturesque refugees, nurses, victims, heroes. They all blend together. The picture serves exactly no informational function, it only reifies the text. It makes us grant the text a little more truthiness, and, perhaps more important, it gives us something picturesque to rest our eyes on for a moment.

There is something in the chain of evidence. We gain some value from knowing that a guy with a camera went to the place, at the time, and took the photo. The photo itself is essentially a stock photo, it's indistinguishable from 100s of other photos made of similar news events across the globe, but this one was taken there, then. When it works, we barely notice it. When someone botches it, when we see the NYPD badge barely visible on the arm of the cop who is, ostensibly, beating the hell out of someone in LA, the illusion shatters for some of us.

It speaks, somehow, to how little the actual photograph has to do with what we make of a photograph. There's something like the Kuleshov effect here. Show us the same photo of a prone man being handcuffed by cops: caption it Police arrest alleged school shooter after 3 day manhunt or Police arrest peaceful protester and we'll take the photo quite differently.

We understand any photo at least in part based on what we are told about it. With these kinds of generic photographs, there simply isn't any novel content, and we rely almost entirely on what we are told. Looking in the photo above for meaning "in her eyes" is a fool's game. Her expression can be read any way you like, it is an empty vessel in to which you can pour whatever idea you have, whatever idea you have derived from the accompanying article.

And so it is with any news photograph of this sort of repeated event, photographed with the repeated tropes. They are empty vessels in to which you pour the meaning you derive from the news article's text. Knowing that the photo is really of that thing, even though it is indistinguishable from 100 others, somehow enables us to so pour that meaning.

It is a curious phenomenon. We will read, or skim, the text to determine how we feel about the photograph, and make meaning of the photo from that without much regard for the details of the picture itself. The picture does not much matter. What does matter, profoundly, is our belief that this generic photograph is real.

An illustration would not work the same way. A photo captioned a similar scene was recorded last year in a different place would not work in the same way.

If we believe this completely generic thing to be the real deal, we pour our meaning in and by god we see in her eyes the thing that we want to see there.