As a scholar of visual media, my academic career has consistently reflected overlapping interests in news and documentary photography, journalism/media history and theory, critical and cultural studies, (visual) discourse analyses, and their applications in historical and contemporary contexts.
My fascination with news photography and visual media began a long time ago in my homeland of Bulgaria. Shielded by the “iron curtain,” I was rarely exposed to distant lands and cultures in person or through media. This was not a surprise, of course, given that in the 1980s, the Bulgarian newspapers and television were still handled by the then communist government that focused on the nation’s elites. At the time, however, a one-of-a-kind magazine called Paraleli (or Parallels) issued by the Bulgarian Telegraph Agency (BTA) offered a glimpse of the world outside my homeland. Paraleli arrived at my family’s doorstep once a week and helped open my eyes to the world. The magazine featured rather smallish, poor quality, mostly black-and-white images of exotic lands and countries, diverse cultures, and traditions from around the world, scientific discoveries, celebrities, and more. Among these images, photographs of the United States appeared on many occasions and left a lasting impression on me. I remember being smitten by America’s vast oceans and landscapes, the breathtaking skylines and high rises, the bustling streets, dreamy houses with white picket fences, and the fashionably dressed people hurrying off to important, high-paying jobs or to mesmerizing entertainment venues—the American Dream.
Years later, I was able to visit many of the places I had seen in the news photographs and to pursue my higher education and career advancement as a first-generation immigrant in the United States. The process and experiences along with it, however, were not nearly as “dreamy” as I had imagined, so I began searching for answers about what those magazine images had done to change the course of my life so profoundly. To answer these questions, among many others that came eventually, I began investigating photography and representation. In the early 2010s, during my time at the University of Nevada, Las Vegas as a graduate student, my investigation culminated in a master’s thesis on American photography of immigrant experiences, with Jacob A. Riis’s work as the primary subject of my inquiry.
Fueled by Riis’s work, my search for answers grew even more intense and my exploration continued beyond my master’s degree. By the time I began my doctoral studies at the University of Maryland, College Park, much has already changed in terms of photographic production, distribution, and consumption. The traditional press (newspapers, magazines, television) competed with citizen-produced images uploaded to the Internet faster than they can be viewed. The images of America’s magnificent oceans and landscapes, the breathtaking skylines and high rises, the bustling streets, the dreamy houses with white picket fences, and the fashionably dressed American people, were quickly being replaced by images of highly subjective life experiences, which were often overshadowed by political conflicts, oppression, hardship, hurt, and anger. My dissertation, “How the Picture Press Made America: News Photography and the Politics of Representation,” explores this shift.
More specifically, my dissertation looked at the related ways in which two pioneering news photographic agencies, set a century apart, depicted the American self and presented an “understanding” of America’s nationhood. First, I investigated Bain News Service between 1900 and 1920 and the concurrent industrialization and technological achievements that changed the nature of photography and mass communication. Next, I examined in parallel terms the VII agency from its inception in 2001 to 2020––a period defined by globalization, digitalization, and media convergence. VII, as a decentralized global entity, competed with a multitude of producers and consumers to influence the social discourse. The findings of my dissertation illuminated the power, and recent loss thereof, of news photographs to make visible and to promote specific social discourses within the functions of news photo agencies.
In my research, I found that the Bain agency provided images of the United States that promoted the sovereign national status quo and disseminated images of the nation aligned with the ideology of the country’s political elite. One hundred years later, photo agencies including VII, operate in a globally-oriented, citizen-driven public sphere. The photographs disseminated by VII serve to challenge the American national status quo; they were (and still are) taken and often published in the hopes that the images will (help) bring social change.
Through thematic and visual examinations of news photographs of the American nation, as produced by Bain News Service and VII respectively, I looked at representations of American exceptionalism, nationalism, and the American Dream over time to determine the visual dialogue within the United States and between the American nation and the rest of the world.
My examination of the business, structure, and news photographs produced by the two innovative news photo agencies set a century apart illuminated the significance of the news photo agency and clarified how (photo)journalistic institutions have shaped public knowledge about a nation and its ideological values—a process that is largely disrupted by citizen-produced images that are distributed via social media today.
My dissertation focused on representation of a nation and nationhood, and I intend to expand this work into a book that will also examine representations of race, gender, and class.
In addition to visual communication and photo journalism, throughout my academic career I have also explored other storytelling and media forms including muckraking, sensationalism, literary journalism, documentary film, and more. My scholarship has been featured in several prestigious academic publications. Some sample publications include:
- “Discourses of Power in Historical News Photographs: Bain News Service and Representation in the Age of Imperialism,” in D. M. Baylen (ed.), Dreams and inspirations: The book of selected readings, pp. 45-64. Carrollton, GA: International Visual Literacy Association.
- “Presenting ‘The Other Half’: Jacob Riis’s Reform Photography and Magic Lantern Spectacles as the Beginning of Documentary Film,” Visual Communication Quarterly, 26, 2 (2019): 91-105.
- “Antebellum Urban Reporting as Literary Journalism and Muckraking: George G. Foster’s City Sketches in the New York Press,” Journalism History, 44, 4 (2019): 221-31.
My first co-authored book titled Pressing Matters: A Chronicle of American Media, was published in late 2025.
My future research portfolio will continue to focus on interdisciplinary approaches to studying journalism and media, reaching into areas such as American studies; U.S. history; strategic communications; qualitative textual and visual research methods; globalization and global mass communications; history of media technologies, theories of culture, media, globalization, and visual communication. I also intend to continue to explore the ways in which visual representations in the media affect political, social, and cultural discourses in the United States and abroad.
Following my years-long examination of the history of visual media, I am particularly interested in contributing to scholarship that looks at the ways new technologies, such as digital photography, social media, and artificial intelligence, will continue to influence representational practices, and I am eager to bring my ongoing inquiries and research productivity to your campus.
