To think that they were idiotic enough to refuse that! said Claude, who had approached with an air of interest. But why, I ask you, why?
Because it's realistic, said Fagerolles, in so sharp a voice that one could not tell whether he was gibing at the jury or at the picture.

Recently, corporate capitalism, having grounds to believe itself triumphant, has begun to adopt abstract art. And the adoption is proving easy. Diagrams of aesthetic power lend themselves to becoming emblems of economic power. In the process almost all lived experience has been eliminated from the image. Thus, the extreme of abstract art demonstrates, as an epilogue, the original problematic of professional art: an art in reality concerned with a selective, very reduced area of experience, which nevertheless claims to be universal.

I've been riveted by Mrs. Q's blog, Fed Up With Lunch: The School Lunch Project. She is a school teacher who is eating in the student cafeteria and blogging about it, undercover. Grist has the backstory, which itself is interesting, but the photos fascinate. Despite almost constant news coverage, it is rare to see a photograph of an actual school lunch from a major news outlet.

When Time Magazine writes about school lunches they go to Getty

The two photos in Time's story are from Charlie Schuck and Tom Schierlitz. Both are professionals in every sense of the word. But rather than communicating any sort of reality, the images are full of school lunch convention—they are stock photos after all—even light, flatware, a subdivided tray with portioned food. The photos are orderly and stylized with everything is in its proper place demonstrating the control and craft expected from any photographer calling himself a professional. But where the story is critical these photos are almost nostalgic, completely useless for conveying any real information about the problems which the story claims to be documenting. These photos speak in code, they are symbolic and illustrate a school lunch mythology. A line-drawing of an apple or carton of milk would have worked just as well. Mrs. Q's, on the other hand, document the actual situation. Her images show food in cellophane-covered cardboard or styrofoam straight from the freezer, branded packaging, horrifying nutrition facts. Where the stock photos have a knife and spoon (sometimes even metal), Mrs. Q's have a plastic spork.

Why would a major news organization with its many resources choose the stock photo rather than finding a photo, any photo, of the actual conditions? The answer is simple: photos like Mrs. Q's aren't professional.

John Berger's 1976 essay The Primitive and the Professional from About Looking predicts the situation. The nature of the professional artist is bound tightly within conventions, which are accepted so deeply among the class that he or she serves, as to become unnoticed:

His training however — and it was his training which made him a professional — taught him a set of conventional skills. That is to say, he became skilled in using a set of conventions. Conventions of composition, drawing, perspective, chiaroscuro, anatomy, poses, symbolism. And these conventions correspond so closely to the social experience — or anyway to the social manners — of the class he was serving, that they were not even seen as conventions but were thought of as the only way of recording and preserving eternal truths.

The class in this case is the corporate structure behind all major news organizations today. They want their product to look professional and are taking the meaning of professional photography for granted. In most contexts, even news magazines, the correspondence between reality and the photograph is not a convention which defines the photo as professional. A photograph's honesty and professionalism are seen as independent qualities. And it so happens that the qualities and conventions that make a "good" photograph within the context of a news magazine also happen to be the same qualities and conventions that make a photograph suitable for a brochure or annual report. The aesthetics of the news photo are reflecting the power structure of the org chart.

Mrs. Q's photos bring very little convention but an enormous experience—she's actually eating the food. Nobody has told her that while her photos may show what school lunches look like, this isn't what professional school lunch photos look like. Where's the apple? Didn't you use a soft-box? She is not using what Berger calls "the pictorial grammar of the tradition." Her images align with Berger's primitive and her story is more powerful for it. Because, what it is saying could never be said with any ready-made skills. For what it is saying was never meant, according to the cultural class system, to be said.