How do ordinary people behave in front of news cameras?

What is it about?

People are often reactive to cameras, and tension can exist between the idealized ways people want to be depicted and the ways journalists visually render them. Considering that visual media are “complex reflections of a relationship between maker and subject in which both play roles in shaping their character and content,” scholars have called for more research on journalists’ subjects and how they behave in front of the visual news media. This work answers that call and provides one of the first empirical glimpses into how people regard the experience of being photographed and video-recorded by journalists. As a primary arc of the work is concerned with the nature of experience, it adopts a phenomenological approach and seeks to identify (a) the expectations that news media subjects have of visual journalists, (b) how journalists’ subjects perceive the experience of being photographed and video-recorded in a news media context, and (c) how the subject’s identities and representational aspirations affect their perception of the imaging event.

Featured Image

Photo by Joe Ridley/Beth Martin on Unsplash

Photo by Joe Ridley/Beth Martin on Unsplash