A quick thought experiment: consider American Marines fighting the Pacific campaign during World War II; the brutality of counterinsurgency in 1960s Vietnam; widespread famine in 1980s Ethiopia; how the world changed after two commercial airplanes pierced through the World Trade Center in 2001; the torture of Iraqis in Abu Ghraib by an occupying American army; the spectacular acts of violence and iconoclasm carried out by a para-state claiming to represent the Caliphate in the Levant. An iconic photograph or two representing each of these moments likely flashed in your mind’s eye when reading through this list. These far-flung events are all concretized in images that have been captured by and/or circulated through the infrastructure of photojournalism. In fact, both the global impact of these events and how they are perceived have much to do with these very images. This much is abundantly clear. Image Brokers is a book that invites readers to search beyond the truism that we live in a world substantially made through images; instead, it takes us along a path toward understanding the image industry that makes the world look the way it does for us as consumers of the news. Guided by the axiom that pictures are “formative fictions,” this wonderful ethnography captures an arresting snapshot of the industry that is responsible for visually narrating our world at a time of rapid technological change. The practices that made a photo of six Marines lifting a flag in Iwo Jima crystalize into a national mytheme are radically different from those that made the surreptitious pixilated image of a hooded figure with electrical wires pinned on his fingers, a man named Ali Shallal al-Qaisi, a source of deep shame and anger for that very same nation. Both were, in some sense, staged. But

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Image Brokers：可视化数字流通时代的世界新闻作者：Zeynep Devrim Gürsel

一个快速的思想实验：考虑一下二战期间美国海军陆战队在太平洋战役中的战斗；1960 年代越南反叛乱的残暴；1980 年代埃塞俄比亚的大饥荒；2001 年两架商用飞机穿过世贸中心后，世界发生了怎样的变化；美军占领军在阿布格莱布折磨伊拉克人；一个声称代表黎凡特哈里发国的准国家所实施的壮观的暴力行为和破坏偶像的行为。在阅读这份清单时，你的脑海中可能会闪过一两张代表这些时刻的标志性照片。这些遥远的事件都在由新闻摄影基础设施捕获和/或通过这些基础设施传播的图像中具体化。实际上，这些事件的全球影响以及人们如何看待它们都与这些图像有很大关系。这一点非常清楚。Image Brokers 是一本书，它邀请读者超越我们生活在一个基本上由图像构成的世界这一事实进行探索；相反，它让我们走上了一条了解图像行业的道路，让世界看起来像我们作为新闻消费者的样子。在图片是“虚构的虚构”这一公理的指导下，这部精彩的民族志捕捉到了一个引人注目的行业快照，该行业负责在技术快速变革的时代以视觉方式叙述我们的世界。六名海军陆战队员在硫磺岛举起旗帜的照片成为国家神话的做法，与将电线钉在手指上的蒙面人物秘密像素化图像的做法完全不同，一个名叫阿里·沙勒尔的男人 - Qaisi 是同一个国家深感耻辱和愤怒的根源。从某种意义上说，两者都是上演的。但