‘Stay back for your own safety’: News photographers, interference, and the photographs they are prevented from taking

Abstract

This exploratory, mixed-methods study uses semi-structured interviews to identify the sources of interference that news photographers encounter and then, using survey research, assesses these interferences’ prevalence. It also uses interview and survey data to identify photographs that photographers are prevented from taking and ones taken despite interference. In so doing, the study illuminates how the constraints photojournalists encounter shape their work and, ultimately, the types of images missing from the mass media. Men and women, and freelancers and staff photographers, encounter different types of obstructions. Anxieties about public visibility, and the desire to control images, predict higher rates of interference. News scenes, police activities, accidents, and private spaces were among the most common scenes photographers were prevented from photographing. Taken together, this study contributes to Shoemaker and Reese’s hierarchy of influences model, by explicating the extra-media and individual sources of influence that shape photojournalistic practice.