Photojournalism

Barricades on rue Saint-Maur (1848), the first photo used to illustrate a newspaper story

The practice of illustrating news stories with photographs was made possible by printing and photography innovations that occurred in the mid 19th century. Although early illustrations had appeared in newspapers, such as an illustration of the funeral of Lord Horatio Nelson in The Times (1806), the first weekly illustrated newspaper was the Illustrated London News, first printed in 1842.[1] The illustrations were printed with the use of engravings.

The first photograph to be used in illustration of a newspaper story was a depiction of barricades in Paris during the June Days uprising taken on 25 June 1848; the photo was published as an engraving in L'Illustration of 1–8 July 1848.[2]

Versions of Roger Fenton's Valley of the Shadow of Death, with and without cannonballs on the road

During the Crimean War, the ILN pioneered the birth of early photojournalism by printing pictures of the war that had been taken by Roger Fenton.[3] Fenton was the first official war photographer and his work included documenting the effects of the war on the troops, panoramas of the landscapes where the battles took place, model representations of the action, and portraits of commanders, which laid the groundwork for modern photojournalism.[4][5] Other photographers of the war included William Simpson and Carol Szathmari. Similarly, the American Civil War photographs of Mathew Brady were engraved before publication in Harper's Weekly. The technology had not yet developed to the point of being able to print photographs in newspapers, which greatly restricted the audience of Brady's photographs. However, it was still common for photographs to be engraved and subsequently printed in newspapers or periodicals throughout the war. Disaster, including train wrecks and city fires, was also a popular subject for illustrated newspapers in the early days.[6]

The Crawlers, London, 1876–1877, a photograph from John Thomson's Street Life in London photo-documentary

The printing of images in newspapers remained an isolated occurrence in this period. Photos were used to enhance the text rather than to act as a medium of information in its own right. This began to change with the work of one of the pioneers of photojournalism, John Thomson, in the late 1870s.[7] In collaboration with the radical journalist Adolphe Smith, he began publishing a monthly magazine, Street Life in London, from 1876 to 1877. The project documented in photographs and text, the lives of the street people of London and established social documentary photography as a form of photojournalism.[8] Instead of the images acting as a supplement to the text, he pioneered the use of printed photographs as the predominant medium for the imparting of information, successfully combining photography with the printed word.[9]

On March 4, 1880, The Daily Graphic (New York)[10] published the first halftone (rather than engraved) reproduction of a news photograph.

"Geronimo's camp before surrender to General Crook, March 27, 1886: Geronimo and Natches mounted; Geronimo's son (Perico) standing at his side holding baby." By C. S. Fly.

In March 1886, when General George Crook received word that the Apache leader Geronimo would negotiate surrender terms, photographer C. S. Fly took his equipment and attached himself to the military column. During the three days of negotiations, Fly took about 15 exposures on 8 by 10 inches (200 by 250 mm) glass negatives.[11] His photos of Geronimo and the other free Apaches, taken on March 25 and 26, are the only known photographs taken of American Indians while still at war with the United States.[12] Fly coolly posed his subjects, asking them to move and turn their heads and faces, to improve his composition. The popular publication Harper's Weekly published six of his images in their April 24, 1886 issue.[11]

In 1887, flash powder was invented, enabling journalists such as Jacob Riis to photograph informal subjects indoors, which led to the landmark 1890 book How the Other Half Lives.[13] By 1897, it became possible to reproduce halftone photographs on printing presses running at full speed.[14][15]

In France, agencies such as Rol, Branger and Chusseau-Flaviens (ca. 1880–1910) syndicated photographs from around the world to meet the need for timely new illustration.[16] Despite these innovations, limitations remained, and many of the sensational newspaper and magazine stories in the period from 1897 to 1927 were illustrated with engravings. In 1921, the wirephoto made it possible to transmit pictures almost as quickly as news itself could travel.

The "Golden Age of Photojournalism" is often considered to be roughly the 1930s through the 1950s.[17] It was made possible by the development of the compact commercial 35mm Leica camera in 1925, and the first flash bulbs between 1927 and 1930, which allowed the journalist true flexibility in taking pictures.

The Berliner Illustrirte Zeitung pioneered modern photojournalism and was widely copied. Pictured, the cover of issue of 26 August 1936: a meeting between Francisco Franco and Emilio Mola.

A new style of magazine and newspaper appeared that used photography more than text to tell stories. The Berliner Illustrirte Zeitung was the first to pioneer the format of the illustrated news magazine. Beginning in 1901, it began to print photographs inside the magazine, a revolutionary innovation. In the successive decades, it was developed into the prototype of the modern news magazine.[18]

It pioneered the photo-essay,[18][19] had a specialised staff and production unit for pictures and maintained a photo library.[20] It also introduced the use of candid photographs taken with the new smaller cameras.[21]

The magazine sought out reporters who could tell a story using photographs, notably the pioneer sports photographer Martin Munkácsi, the first staff photographer,[22][23] and Erich Salomon, one of the founders of photojournalism.[24]

Other magazines included, Arbeiter-Illustrierte-Zeitung (Berlin), Vu (France), Life (USA), Look (USA), Picture Post (London)); and newspapers, The Daily Mirror (London) and The New York Daily News. Famous photographers of the era included Robert Capa, Romano Cagnoni, Alfred Eisenstaedt, Margaret Bourke-White and W. Eugene Smith.

Henri Cartier-Bresson is held by some to be the father of modern photojournalism,[25] although this appellation has been applied to various other photographers, such as Erich Salomon, whose candid pictures of political figures were novel in the 1930s.[26]

The photojournalism of, for example, Agustí Centelles played an important role in the propaganda efforts of the Republican side in the Spanish Civil War in the late 1930s.[27]

In Migrant Mother (1936) Dorothea Lange produced the seminal image of the Great Depression. The FSA also employed several other photojournalists to document the depression.

American journalist Julien Bryan photographed and filmed the beginning of the Second World War being under heavy German bombardment in September 1939 in Poland.[28] He was pioneer worker in color photography, Kodachrome.

William Vandivert photographed in color the German bombardment of London called the Blitz in 1940.

Soldier Tony Vaccaro is also recognized as one of the pre-eminent photographers of World War II. His images taken with the modest Argus C3 captured horrific moments in war, similar to Capa's Spanish soldier being shot. Capa himself was on Omaha Beach on D-Day and captured pivotal images of the conflict on that occasion. Vaccaro is also known for having developed his own images in soldier's helmets, and using chemicals found in the ruins of a camera store in 1944.[29]

Until the 1980s, most large newspapers were printed with turn-of-the-century "letterpress" technology using easily smudged oil-based ink, off-white, low-quality "newsprint" paper, and coarse engraving screens. While letterpresses produced legible text, the photoengraving dots that formed pictures often bled or smeared and became fuzzy and indistinct. In this way, even when newspapers used photographs well — a good crop, a respectable size — murky reproduction often left readers re-reading the caption to see what the photo was all about. The Wall Street Journal adopted stippled hedcuts in 1979 to publish portraits and avoid the limitations of letterpress printing. Not until the 1980s did a majority of newspapers switch to "offset" presses that reproduce photos with fidelity on better, whiter paper.

Boy destroying piano at Pant-y-Waen, South Wales, by Philip Jones Griffiths, 1961

By contrast Life, one of America's most popular weekly magazines from 1936 through the early 1970s, was filled with photographs reproduced beautifully on oversize 11×14-inch pages, using fine engraving screens, high-quality inks, and glossy paper. Life often published a United Press International (UPI) or Associated Press (AP) photo that had been first reproduced in newspapers, but the quality magazine version appeared to be a different photo altogether. In large part because their pictures were clear enough to be appreciated, and because their name always appeared with their work, magazine photographers achieved near-celebrity status. Life became a standard by which the public judged photography, and many of today's photo books celebrate "photojournalism" as if it had been the exclusive province of near-celebrity magazine photographers.

In 1947, a few famous photographers founded the international photographic cooperative Magnum Photos. In 1989, Corbis Corporation and in 1995 Getty Images were founded. These powerful image libraries sell the rights to photographs and other still images.

Sports photojournalists at Indianapolis Motor Speedway

The Golden Age of Photojournalism ended in the 1970s when many photo-magazines ceased publication, most prominently, Life, which ended weekly publication in December 1972.[30] They found that they could not compete with other media for advertising revenue to sustain their large circulations and high costs. Still, those magazines taught journalism much about the photographic essay and the power of still images.[31]

However, since the late 1970s, photojournalism and documentary photography have increasingly been accorded a place in art galleries alongside fine art photography. Luc Delahaye, Manuel Rivera-Ortiz and the members of VII Photo Agency are among many who regularly exhibit in galleries and museums.[32]

Most photojournalists consider stage-managed shots presented as candid to be unethical.[43] There have been examples in the history of photojournalism of photographers purposefully deceiving their audience by doing so.

Mike Meadows, a veteran photographer of the Los Angeles Times, was covering a major wild fire sweeping southern California on 27 October 1993. His picture of a Los Angeles County firefighter, Mike Alves cooling himself off with water in a pool in Altadena ran both in the Times and nationally. Prior to submitting the photograph for a Pulitzer Prize, Meadows' assignment editor, Fred Sweets, contacted the firefighter, who reportedly said he had been asked by Meadows to go to the pool and splash water on his head. Meadows denied the accusation, claiming "I may have been guilty of saying this would make a nice shot, but to the best of my recollection, I did not directly ask him to do that. ... I've been doing breaking news stories for years and years and I've never in my life set up a picture." Meadows was suspended without pay for a week and picture was withdrawn from any prize competitions – the Times called it a "fabrication" and the paper's photography director, Larry Armstrong, said "when you manipulate the situation, you manipulate the news."[43][44]

Edward Keating, a Pulitzer Prize winner from The New York Times, photographed a young boy pointing a toy gun outside a Middle Eastern grocery store, near a town where the FBI raided an alleged Al Qaeda cell. Other photographers at the scene claimed that Keating pointed with his own arm to show the boy which way to look and aim the gun. After the Columbia Journalism Review reported the incident, Keating was forced to leave the paper.[45]

Phone journalism is a relatively new and even controversial means of photojournalism, which involves the use of pictures taken and edited on phones by professional or non-professional photographers.

In recent years, as social media has become major platform on which people receive news and share events, Phone photography is gaining popularity as the primary tool for online visual communication. A phone is easy to carry and always accessible in a pocket, and the immediacy in taking pictures can reduce the intervention of the scene and subjects to a minimum. With the assistance of abundant applications, photographers can achieve a highly aesthetic way of conveying messages. Once the pictures are uploaded onto social media, photographers can immediately expose their work to a wide range of audiences and receive real-time feedback from them. With a large number of active participants online, the pictures could also be spread out in a short period of time, thus evoking profound influence on society.

Having noticed the advantages of the combination of social media and Phoneography, some well-known newspapers, news magazines and professional photojournalists decided to employ Phone journalism as a new approach. When the London Bombings happened in July 2005, for the first time, both the New York Times and the Washington Post ran photos on their front pages made by citizen journalists with camera phones.[56] As work of witnesses and survivors, the images were less the outcome of documentary intent than a response to a traumatic shock.[56] These photos represented 'vivid, factual accounts of history as it explodes around us',[56] as described by Washington Post journalist Robert MacMillan. In another instance, when superstorm Sandy hit the East Coast, causing great damage and casualty, Time sent out five photographers with iPhones to document the devastation. Photographers dived deep into the site and captured pictures in close proximity to the storm and human suffering. One of the shots, raging ocean waves collapsing on Coney Island in Brooklyn, taken by Benjamin Lowy, made the cover of Time's November 12 issue. Then in 2013, the Chicago Sun-Times got rid of its entire staff of 28 photographers, including John H. White, a Pulitzer Prize winner in photography. The newspaper cited viewers shifting towards more video as a reason. They then employed freelance photographers and required them to train in how to use an iPhone for photography to fill the gap. Some viewers online were quick to point out an at times reduction in quality in comparison to the newspaper's previous full-time professionals.[57][58][59]