ABSTRACT
This introduction presents an overview of the key concepts discussed in the subsequent chapters of this book. The book analyzes the complex international production process of news pictures, in the hope to shed some light on the overall production of newsworthiness. It demonstrates that by entering into what Lutz and Collins described as "The Great Machinery of Desire", we might have a better understanding of the meaning of news pictures as cultural products and the reasons for their privileged status in ones everyday lives. By exploring news pictures' processes of production, how we put a cultural economy into work and how it works on us. The book presents both approaches, whether 'divorced' or 'reconciled', resonate: Indeed, the agency's pictures service is part of a powerful private organization with a well-known profit orientation. Drawing from the two approaches, the analysis may be of some contribution to the overlooked ground of cultural production, particularly its manufacturing processes, in cultural studies.
