Abstract: A decade into the age of digital photography, this dissertation describes a major transition in the image industry responsible for global production of visual knowledge. Against the backdrop of Gulf War II, commonly referred to as 'the most photographed war in history,' the fieldwork narratives guide readers through key nodal points of production, distribution, and circulation of the international photojournalism industry: the newsroom of a large corporate 'visual content' provider, the photography department of a wire service, the editorial offices of US news magazines, and a prestigious annual photojournalism festival. These are the social worlds of the labor behind news images. I investigate news images as 'formative fictions'—constructed representations that reflect current events yet simultaneously shape ways of imagining the world and political possibilities within it. These cultural products circulate as commodities but also as visual truth-claims about populations and historical events. Rather than analyze a single object of mass media in a bounded geographical setting, this dissertation documents the network through which international news photographs move to understand the structural limitations and possibilities that shape these images and their use in contemporary ways of worldmaking. The shift to digital photography and satellite communication in the mid 1990s allowed photographs to be transmitted from anywhere in the world and made available online almost instantly. Digitalization came with hopes of increased democratization of vision and promised worldwide access to diverse ways of seeing. However, enormous 'one-stop shopping' visual content providers, all owned by Euro-American entities and established through a series of corporate acquisitions, now dominate the world of photojournalism. I focus on moments of selection at critical sites to investigate the brokering of images as an everyday practice of imagination, one through which we might better understand how categories of people are produced by images that in turn inform how that category is defined and imaged in the future. At a time when digital photography and the circulation of amateur images are commented on by US Department of Defense, I aim to make explicit the political potential of photojournalism and how particular images get repeated and transformed.