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Abstract
This article applies the ecological theory of professions to analyze professional discourse in the World Press Photo (WPP) contest, an international photojournalism contest held in Amsterdam, the Netherlands. The article analyzes the content of 148 photojournalism works that received environmental awards in the period 1992 to 2011, the two decades after the 1992 Earth Summit in Rio de Janeiro. The article seeks to understand the representation and negotiation of objectivity and the claims of professional boundaries by the media of both developed and developing countries as well as non-governmental organizations (NGOs). It also seeks to interpret the professional discourse of the WPP in relation to ideologies and power dynamics in both journalism and global environmental politics. The results suggested that the media of developed countries dominated the discourse, and the conventional notion of journalistic objectivity remained intact. However, the results also showed that global environmental politics and the situation of journalism created openings for the media of developing countries and NGOs to enlarge jurisdictional claims in the area of natural disaster reporting and to challenge the conventional notion of objectivity. The results also showed that the conventional notion of objectivity did not necessarily hinder explanations of the complexity of environmental issues, which was made possible by choosing unique angles of storytelling, planning multiple shots, and using richly suggestive, naturalistic images.
Notes
1. The year stands for the year of photography, and 2011 is the most recent year of the contest included in the study. The World Press Photo's main page and its online archive mark the years of photos in two different ways. Whereas archive.worldpressphoto.org uses the year of the photograph, www.worldpressphoto.org uses the year of the announcement of the prize. This study uses the year of the photograph, so the 2012 photos on the main page are actually the 2011 photos used in this study.
2. The ecological theory of professions takes a unique approach to understanding professional boundaries. Boundaries do not readily exist between professions; instead, they are made up of the sites of professional competition. A profession is a set of turf battles “yoked into a single defensible position in the system of professions” (Abbott, Citation1995b, p. 860). In other words, we do not “look for boundaries of things, but things of boundaries” (p. 857). This approach was inspired by symbolic interactionism.
3. The uses of the terms “west,” “east,” and “rest” have subtle differences in different disciplines. In journalism studies, Western journalism refers to countries with mature democratic systems, such as in North America and Western Europe (Hanitzsch, Citation2011). Economists use “west” to refer to advanced economies that include Australia, New Zealand, and Japan and “rest” to refer to low-income countries (Maddison, 2002). In international relations, the distinction between west and east is a cultural-ideological divide, and it is more often used to refer to the divide between the Eastern Communist Bloc and the Western Capitalist Bloc in Cold War politics. After the Cold War, north–south issues and the economic conflicts between developed countries and developing countries have been considered the most important (Veseth, Citation2002). This article chooses to divide media into those of developing countries and those of developed countries to avoid confusing terminology and to situate the study in the post-Cold War global political order. Nonetheless, it should be noted that the countries of Western journalism still form the most important part of the developed world.
4. Except for nature documentary works (e.g. beautiful birds), almost all awarded environmental photos tell stories of people influencing or being influenced by the environment, thus representing the relationship between humans and their environment. However, a few works focus on people and use the environment only as a distant background of news. For example, one photo story depicted the life of Afghan refugees in Pakistan, who escaped from their country because of political instability and drought. Images of this type are excluded from the analysis.
5. All the works were accessed on the WPP website. These works cover 11 of the 21 contest categories, including Nature, Nature Stories, General News, General News Stories, Spot News, Spot News Stories, Contemporary Issues, Contemporary Issue Stories, People in the News, People in the News Stories, and Portraits.
6. More coding of organizations, such as types of media (newspaper, magazine, news agency, TV, etc.), was conducted in the preliminary study, but it did not lead to findings of professional struggle over ideas of objectivity and professional boundaries.
7. The 20-year period is divided into three time spans of similar length. Another benefit is that each started with a key event in global environmental politics—the Earth Summit in June 1992; the adoption of the Kyoto Protocol in December 1997; and the publication of the Millennium Ecosystem Assessment in April 2005—so the possible contextual influence of such events was balanced among the three time spans.
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Notes on contributors
Yang Liu
Yang Liu received his master's degree in journalism from the University of Missouri-Columbia in 2010. He is a doctoral student in communication science at the University of Wisconsin-Madison. His theoretical interest is the tension between the journalistic field that reproduces power and journalism as a democratic instrument. On the empirical level, he is intrigued by photojournalism, citizen journalism, and journalism ethics.