The restructuring of Swedish newspapers due to technological and economic changes in the last decade has hit journalists, and especially photojournalists, very hard. In 2017, Sweden's 165 daily newspapers only employed a total of 60 photojournalists combined, with 70 newspapers left with no photojournalist on staff at all. However, during the same time period the use of images in Swedish newspapers increased.

Using Bourdieu’s field theory, the purpose of this dissertation is to analyse the positions of photojournalism and photojournalists in the Swedish journalistic field during a crucial and important time for the media industry, through 40 interviews with respondents in swedish newspaper as well as with freelancers in the field. The actors varied in age, gender and number of years in the field, and most importantly through different amounts of symbolic capital, in accordance with Bourdieu’s theory.

The study shows that Swedish photojournalists’ ideal was to document the world and produce in-depth visual news stories. However, these time-consuming ideals comes into conflict with emerging market-oriented ideals described by other actors in the Swedish journalistic field. This also meant that although photojournalism itself is described as having an increased importance in the field, the photojournalists hadn’t received a correspondingly higher status.

The study concludes that the commercial importance of photojournalism to the market-oriented journalistic field, as described by actors in the field, shows how it has become a professional boundary object which in turn exposes an on-going professional boundary work and symbolic power struggles between, on the one side, media managers, reporters and multi-skilled journalists and on the other side, photojournalists, concerning the doxa and ethos of photojournalism which in turn is affecting the professional position of photojournalists in the Swedish journalistic field.