n.

Journalism in which a news story is presented primarily through photographs with supplementary written copy.

photojournalist pho'to·jour'nal·ist n.
photojournalistic pho'to·jour'nal·is'tic adj.

Photojournalism can be defined as photography intended, in conjunction with text, to convey information about a topical event or events. This demarcates it, albeit loosely, from documentary photography, which trades immediacy for time spent examining an ongoing situation or process: AIDS in the Congo, for example, or the life of Hutterites in Montana, as opposed to a hostage-taking incident. As William Stapp has pointed out, several conditions had to be fulfilled before photojournalism became practicable: the photographic process had to be capable of capturing newsworthy events or their aftermath with sufficient realism and clarity; transmission had to be fast enough to bring pictures home while the subject matter was still topical; and a reproduction process was needed that could multiply images rapidly, on a large scale and preferably together with text. By 1914, all these conditions were on the way to being met. Cameras were efficient and relatively portable, and dry plates and roll-film (though photojournalists often preferred not to use it) were increasingly easy and quick to use. Trains, cars, and steamships offered rapid transport, and phototelegraphy was becoming a practical, if expensive, option. Finally, the half-tone process had been widely in use since c. 1900, and in 1904 the London Daily Mirror had become the world's first daily newspaper to be illustrated entirely with photographs.

There is, of course, more to the early history of photojournalism than this. Photographers had attempted to record the aftermath of battles and disasters since the 1840s (the Hamburg Fire of 1842, the US-Mexican War of 1846-8). Moreover, the burgeoning illustrated press on both sides of the Atlantic soon began to make considerable use of photographs, albeit in wood-engraved or lithographed form that gave considerable licence to the journals' in-house artists. As early as July 1848, L' Illustration published pictures from specially commissioned daguerreotypes of revolutionary events in Paris. Joseph Cundall's photographs of Crimean veterans were used by the Illustrated London News in 1855, and pictures by Le Gray of Garibaldi (1860) and Nadar of visiting Japanese emissaries (1862) by Le Monde illustré. The trend increased during the American Civil War (1861-5), when photographers went out to capture events on a considerable and organized scale. However, people who wanted to see Civil War photographs in their original form still had to view them in galleries, or buy them as individual prints, or as tipped-in illustrations in expensive volumes.

Another problem, increasingly apparent when photographs began to appear in print from the 1880s onwards, was the camera's inability to capture the kind of violent, dramatic action that the public was accustomed to from battle paintings and graphic illustrations. It is interesting, for example, to compare Karl Bulla's photograph of a terrorist incident in a St Petersburg street in 1910 with contemporary artists' impressions of bomb outrages—all panic, commotion, and flying debris. Bulla's picture shows an entirely static situation, with an empty carriage and a group of soldiers and policemen assuming studied poses (different according to rank) of confident authority for the camera. The only trace of the event is a horse lying dead on the cobbles in its harness.

In fact, Bulla's firm was one of the first major picture agencies, supplying news photographs to the Russian and foreign press. It covered the Russo-Japanese War, the 1905 Revolution, the First World War, and many of the revolutionary events of 1917 in Petrograd (St Petersburg). By this time, however, the Russian press was in considerable disarray and communications were breaking down. The same cannot be said for Berlin, which also experienced revolutionary disturbances between November 1918 and the following spring, though with a different outcome. The German capital had at least ten picture agencies, linked to newspapers all over Central Europe, and many of the thousands of photographs of the German Revolution were taken by experienced agency photographers like Willy Römer who went out day after day in search of pictures.

The German Revolution illustrates several features of photojournalism at this stage in its history. One relates to equipment. In addition, usually, to a 13 × 18 cm (5 × 7 in) plate camera weighing about 2 kg (4.5 lb), the photographer had to carry spare plates, a tripod, and often a step ladder. Emulsions and lenses were slow, and telephoto lenses were also heavy and hard to focus, so were rarely used. Flashpowder was awkward to use and liable to attract unwanted attention. Photographers were unlikely to use valuable plates unless conditions were good and the action really interesting. They were also loath to risk the confiscation of expensive equipment by flouting bans, and they had a healthy fear of bullets. Many events, therefore, went unrecorded. Moreover, the production cycle of contemporary newspapers was slow: pictures might take between a week and a fortnight to appear in the ‘illustrateds’, although the picture supplements of daily papers were faster: the Wednesday Bilder vom Tage supplement of the Berliner Lokalanzeiger might carry photographs from the previous weekend.

Finally, although most photojournalists seem to have approached their work in a fairly neutral way, the events of 1918-19 revealed some emerging issues about visual coverage. For example, Spartakists and other proletarian insurgents were unfamiliar with photography and had little idea how to exploit it. Generals and politicians, however, were learning how to manage events for photographic effect. In particular, left-wing atrocities were likely to be much more thoroughly recorded than those (often ghastlier) by government troops and auxiliaries. After the event, of course, photographs took on a life of their own, and many pictures of the German Revolution were used as propaganda during the political struggles of the next ten years.

The 1920s and 1930s witnessed a large-scale expansion of photojournalism, driven by urbanization, consumerism, and the parallel growth of sports and mass entertainment. Established papers like the Berliner illustrirte Zeitung, the Illustrated London News, and L'Illustration modernized their appearance and used more photographs, while many newcomers entered the market: the Zürcher illustrierte (1925), Match (1926), Vu (1928), Regards (1931/32), Weekly Illustrated (1934), Life (1936), Lilliput (1937), Look (1937), Picture Post (1938), and countless others. Advertising (which also increasingly used photography) became a major source of revenue, keeping cover prices down and boosting circulation. More agencies appeared on both sides of the Atlantic. Layouts became more imaginative and dynamic, and the concept of the photo-essay emerged. The AP Wirephoto network was inaugurated in 1935, reducing transmission times (in optimum conditions) from days or hours to minutes. There was a constant broadening of content, from summit conferences to air shows and beauty contests. Sport became an integral part of all illustrated papers, and also spawned its own journals. Equipment also improved, with the 1924 Ermanox followed by the Leica, Rolleiflex, and Contax: all eminently suitable for the roving photojournalist, though not themselves the cause of the new mass picture market. Photojournalists proliferated, from the urbane, bespectacled Erich Salomon to the buccaneering Robert Capa, who by 1939 had become identified with a new kind of celebrity. Female professionals included Margaret Bourke-White, Lotte Jacobi, and Gerda Taro. However, photojournalism was not just a business for photographers: agency chiefs like Simon Guttmann of Dephot, editors like Stefan Lorant, publishers like Lucien Vogel and Henry Luce (1898-1967), and businessman-experts like Kurt Korff and Kurt Safranski, first of Ullstein publishing, then of Black Star, all helped to create the system that existed by the Second World War.

Photojournalism had political implications. Totalitarian movements increasingly recognized its importance for their own purposes, hence the founding of the Communist Arbeiter illustrierte Zeitung and Nazi Illustrierter Beobachter, both in 1926, and USSR in Construction in 1931. The late 1930s and 1940s saw the appearance of beautifully photographed and produced, but mendacious, propaganda magazines like the Japanese Nippon and Front and the German Signal. Even in the democratic press, however, especially on controversial issues such as the Spanish Civil War (1936-9), the choice, layout, cropping, and captioning of photographs radically affected the messages conveyed. Later, during the television era, such issues would arouse concern, especially the imbalance between photography's emotional impact and its power to explain.

After playing a major role in the reporting of the Second World War, photojournalism in its classic form experienced a kind of Indian summer, with a final efflorescence, in the USA, in the civil rights campaigns of the late 1950s and 1960s. But an early sign of impending change was the foundation of the Magnum agency in 1947, partly reflecting photographers' desire for more control of their work, both during publication and afterwards. In the second half of the century, the agency scene was to become ever more varied and complex, with the appearance by c. 2000 of both giants like Corbis and Getty Images and small elite groups like VII. Photographers' working conditions still varied considerably, according to whether they were agency contract workers or members of a cooperative; but far fewer of them than in 1945 were likely to be staff employees of an individual newspaper or magazine.

In the background was the rise of television which, during the 1960s, became the first source of news for increasing numbers of people, especially in the USA. (John F. Kennedy's assassination in November 1963 is often cited as a turning point.) However, the effects of the new ‘super-medium’, to which all other media had to adapt, were neither simple nor immediate. One obvious casualty was the film newsreel, which was doubly undermined by shrinking cinema audiences. Television also threatened still photography by drawing advertising revenue away from the illustrated press. Nevertheless, mechanical 35 mm cameras like the Leica and Nikon F continued for years to have important advantages over television equipment. The most remembered images of the 1960s, and 1970s, from civil rights reportage to Eddie Adams's Execution in a Saigon Street (1968) and Nick Ut's Vietnamese girl burned by napalm (1972), were made by photojournalists. Some photographs, like those of the My Lai massacre, achieved even greater currency by being shown on television.

The ‘landmark’ significance of Picture Post's (1957) and Life's (1972) demise should not be exaggerated. Both papers had internal problems that might have been avoided. Magazines like Stern and Paris Match continued, and new picture outlets appeared, from the colour supplements of the 1960s to photography-conscious newspapers like the British Independent. Eventually, most print media increased their earning power and extended their reach by acquiring websites. The upshot of all this was that, at the beginning of the 21st century, photojournalism's role in reporting breaking news remained strong.

From the 1960s, nevertheless, there was increasing awareness of the polysemic character of the image—its capacity to be read in different ways by different individuals and groups; its malleability (from the 1980s also by digital means); and the ways in which the picture-gathering process could be manipulated. As already suggested, these were not new issues; indeed, British suffragettes had become adept at staging media events before 1914. But from the 1960s, campaigns by civil rights, gay rights, and feminist activists brought them into sharp focus, as did the proliferation of film- and communications-studies courses in higher education. The long-term consequences have been, arguably, both greater sophistication and critical awareness on the part of both picture makers and viewers and the permanent weakening of earlier assumptions about the truthfulness of the photographic image.

Anon. President Poincaré and Tsar Nicholas II inspect naval guardsmen during Poincaré's state visit to Russia, July 1914. L'Illustration, no. 3726, 25 July 1914

— Amanda Hopkinson/Robin Lenman

Featured article: The Daily Herald Archive.

Bibliography

• Life Library of Photography: Photojournalism (1972).
• Evans, H., Pictures on a Page: Photo-Journalism, Graphics and Picture Editing (1978).
• Fulton, M. (ed.), Eyes of Time: Photojournalism in America (1988).
• Fotografía Pública/Photography in Print 1919-1939 (2000).
• Amar, P.-J., Le Photojournalisme (2000).
• Lebeck, R., and Dewitz, B. v., Kiosk: A History of Photojournalism (2001)

Note: click on a word meaning below to see its connections and related words.

The noun has one meaning:

Meaning #1: journalism that presents a story primarily through the use of pictures

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Dansk (Danish)
n. - billedjournalisme

Nederlands (Dutch)
fotojournalistiek

Français (French)
n. - photojournalisme

Deutsch (German)
n. - Fotojournalismus

Ελληνική (Greek)
n. - φωτοδημοσιογραφία

Italiano (Italian)
fotogiornalismo

Português (Portuguese)
n. - fotojornalismo (m)

Русский (Russian)
фотожурнализм

Español (Spanish)
n. - fotoperiodismo

Svenska (Swedish)
n. - fotojournalistik

中文（简体） (Chinese (Simplified))
摄影新闻工作

中文（繁體） (Chinese (Traditional))
n. - 攝影新聞工作

한국어 (Korean)
n. - 글보다 사진을 많이 넣는 잡지제작 태도

日本語 (Japanese)
n. - フォトジャーナリズム

العربيه (Arabic)
‏(الاسم) الصحافه الصوريه, ملحق صوري تابع للصحيفه‏

עברית (Hebrew)
n. - ‮עיתונאות צילום (דיווח באמצעות המצלמה)‬

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