The Icon, Distributed: The Spectral Visual Politics of News Photography

Photographic icons provide broad audiences with a stable resource for public discourse and a sense of continuity. However, changes to our media landscape, most notably those introduced by digital photography and social media, are eroding the stabilising function of icons and the sense of continuity they provide viewers. In this article, my objective is to retheorise iconicity and the icon to account for these changes. To do so, I focus on the news, which has been the source of most iconic photos. I argue that we need to rethink how icons work in the news in two fundamental ways. First, with regard to individual news photos, I argue that iconicity is best understood as a spectrum, reflecting a degree of adherence to a visual blueprint shared by icons, not, as it is usually understood, as a category established through the inclusion of certain photos and the exclusion of others. Second, I argue that news photography as a whole can be thought of as an icon because it shares a common visual structure.