The rules of a middle-brow art: Digital production and cultural consecration in the global field of professional photojournalism

Solaroli, Marco

doi:10.1016/j.poetic.2016.09.001

Cited by 12 publications

(9 citation statements)

References 36 publications

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“…In the course of the last decades, digitalization and the loss of salaried jobs with newspapers has dealt a severe blow to traditional photojournalism. In parallel, however, the work of news and documentary photographers has gradually entered art galleries and museums, with top-tier photojournalists increasingly laying claim to being recognized as authors and even as artists (Solaroli, 2016). In this context, a significant role is played by press photo competitions and awards, which work as institutional devices of professional consecration, circulating cultural value and shaping visual memory.…”

Section: Performance Of Value and Institutionalization Of Memory At P...mentioning

confidence: 99%

The Visual Memory of Protest

2023

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This chapter investigates the relationship between photojournalistic prizes, protest movements, and visual memory, focusing on the institutional work of the World Press Photo (WPP) awards in shaping the visual memory of protest over the last two decades. It offers an analysis of the WPP archive, complemented by interviews with photographers and jurors. Through exemplary cases, it highlights (dis)continuities in the content and style of protest imagery. It focuses on persistent visual motifs (e.g. shield-bearing riot police vs. protesters) and innovative authorial practices developed by award-winning photojournalists. The chapter concludes that the tensions between reiteration and innovation in the WPP's performance of value and its institutionalization of memory have repercussions for the shaping of protest imagery and its public visual memory.

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Section: Performance Of Value and Institutionalization Of Memory At P...mentioning

confidence: 99%

The Visual Memory of Protest

2023

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“…The binarism at the heart of the Bourdieusian field is not incidental, but structures contemporary uses of the theory: witness the vast literature focused on the ways that features clustered at the far end of one pole symbolically "pollute" actors and objects aiming for consecration on an opposite pole (e.g. Heise & Tudor 2007, Solaroli 2016. Nor is the focus on art objects simply circumstantial.…”

Section: Culture Unboundmentioning

confidence: 99%

Black Hole Suns: Binarism and Gravity in Cultural Fields

Gerber

2019

Cult. Unbound

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Sociologicial analyses of artistic practice have long drawn on theoretical traditions grounded in binaries and dualisms. Such analytical strategies, exemplified here by field theoretical approaches, center art objects and their movements in and across markets, where binaristic visions of art worlds do offer significant leverage. But when the analyst moves away from markets for art objects and looks to artistic practices the binaristic lens provides, at best, a blurred image with meaningful blind spots. This article suggests an alternative vision of artistic practice-one based on gravity rather than polarity-that captures the ways individuals and their actions make sense in a specific universe of meaning without forcing them into fundamentally competitive and economistic relationships. It leverages findings enabled by a unique sampling strategy in a four year study of visual artists in the United States to illuminate some limitations of binary theoretical frameworks, and outlines a generative alternative to dualism that promotes new analytical and theoretical directions for sociological analyses of artists and artistic practice. This alternative model provides new leverage on four persistent issues in analyses of artistic work: cultural change in occupational fields; actors' attempts to manage overlapping but incommensurate forms of recognition, reputation, attention, and success; the persistent hegemony of markets for objects in both vernacular and sociological understandings of artistic practice; and questions of visibility and legitimacy central to understanding boundary formation and boundary work in creative fields. The gravitational metaphor promotes a distict set of strategies for the study of artistic work as well as other nontraditional occupations.

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“…The emergence and perpetuation of intellectual celebrity can be captured by the concept of consecration. This concept, understood as the ‘legitimate definition’ of an actor in a field, has been central to Bourdieu’s work (Bourdieu, 1996: 225) and explored in the studies of cultural production (Allen and Parsons, 2006; Cattani et al, 2014; Dubois, 2011; Lizé, 2016; Solaroli, 2016) but insufficiently accounted for in the sociology of intellectuals. Sociologists of intellectuals did explore the recognition of theories in various fields (Lamont, 1987) or, on the other hand, their failure to attract it (McLaughlin, 1998), but seem to have misunderstood that lasting intellectual fame or even iconicity (Bartmanski, 2012; Inglis, 2018) is a qualitatively different phenomenon.…”

Section: Theories Of Intellectuals Between Social Dependence and Perfmentioning

confidence: 99%

Becoming Socrates: Five elements of the consecration process and the case of Jan Patočka

Želinský

2019

European Journal of Social Theory

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This article explores the phenomenon of consecration, which, so far, has been neglected by sociologists of intellectuals. Contrary to the common Bourdieusian approach to consecration, which conflates it with legitimization, consecration is conceptualized as a process of the symbolic elevation of a figure, or an object, to the level of sacred symbols relevant to a particular community. Five analytically distinctive elements are identified that constitute the consecration process and a proposed framework is applied to disentangle the consecration of the Czech philosopher, and martyr of anti-communist dissent, Jan Patočka. In this analysis, original data are used to uncover repressed facts about the life of this intellectual icon.

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The rules of a middle-brow art: Digital production and cultural consecration in the global field of professional photojournalism

Cited by 12 publications

References 36 publications

The Visual Memory of Protest

The Visual Memory of Protest

Black Hole Suns: Binarism and Gravity in Cultural Fields

Becoming Socrates: Five elements of the consecration process and the case of Jan Patočka

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