Photojournalism

• 1. Introduction

  ›

  Photojournalism asks a deceptively simple question: can a single image tell the truth about the world? On the 25th of June 1848, someone carried a camera into the streets of Paris during the June Days uprising and pointed it at a barricade. That photograph was soon published not as a photograph at all, but as an engraving in L'Illustration. The technology to print the image directly did not yet exist. Yet the impulse was there: to show, not merely describe, what was happening.

  From that moment, photojournalism has grown into one of the most ethically contested and visually powerful disciplines in all of journalism. It has documented wars, civil rights struggles, natural disasters, and the quiet private lives of ordinary people. It has haunted the photographers who practiced it. And it has repeatedly forced society to confront images it might have preferred never to see.

  The questions this story will examine are not simple ones. How did a craft that began with cumbersome glass-plate cameras and darkrooms on wheels become the smartphone-fed, social-media-distributed practice of today? What ethical lines separate honest witness from staged manipulation? And what happens to professional photojournalists when anyone with a phone can break the news before them?

• 2. From Engravings to Halftones

  ›

  The Illustrated London News, first printed in 1842, was the world's first weekly illustrated newspaper, and it relied entirely on engravings rather than photographs. Its pages set the template for what visual news reporting could look like, long before the technology existed to print a photograph directly on newsprint.

  The Crimean War gave early photojournalism its first sustained test. Roger Fenton, named the first official war photographer, traveled to the conflict and documented troop conditions, panoramic battlefields, portraits of commanders, and model reconstructions of the fighting. His technical constraints were severe: the glass-plate camera required long exposures, and each plate had to be prepared and developed immediately, which meant traveling in a horse-drawn transportable darkroom. That darkroom reportedly made him a target for enemy fire at times, and those constraints are precisely why his photographs never captured the action directly.

  Mathew Brady faced similar limits during the American Civil War. His photographs were engraved before they could appear in Harper's Weekly. The audience who might have seen a Brady photograph was sharply restricted by the technology that separated the image from the printed page.

  The break came on the 4th of March 1880, when the Daily Graphic in New York published the first halftone reproduction of a news photograph, bypassing engraving entirely. Six years later, photographer C. S. Fly attached himself to the military column when General George Crook received word that the Apache leader Geronimo would negotiate surrender. During three days of talks on the 25th and the 26th of March 1886, Fly made about 15 exposures on glass negatives. Those images are the only known photographs of American Indians taken while still at war with the United States. Harper's Weekly published six of them in its issue of the 24th of April 1886.

  By 1887, flash powder existed, which let journalists photograph indoor scenes for the first time. Jacob Riis used that technology to produce the 1890 book How the Other Half Lives. A decade later, in 1897, it became possible to reproduce halftone photographs on full-speed printing presses. The wire photo arrived in 1921, transmitting pictures almost as fast as text news could travel.

• 3. The Golden Age

  ›

  The Berliner Illustrirte Zeitung began printing photographs inside its pages in 1901, pioneering the format that would define the modern illustrated news magazine. Over the following decades it developed the photo-essay, built a dedicated staff and production unit for pictures, maintained a photo library, and introduced candid images taken with smaller cameras. Its notable staff included the pioneer sports photographer Martin Munkacsi, listed as the first staff photographer, and Erich Salomon, whose candid pictures of political figures were described as novel in the 1930s.

  The compact commercial 35 mm Leica camera, introduced in 1925, transformed what a photojournalist could do in the field. Combined with the first flash bulbs, developed between 1927 and 1930, it gave photographers true mobility. They could move with the action, take multiple shots of an unfolding event, and begin to build a visual narrative on their own.

  Life magazine, which ran as a popular weekly from 1936 through the early 1970s, became the standard by which the public judged photography. Printed on oversize glossy pages with fine engraving screens and high-quality inks, Life could make a photograph that had already run murkily in a newspaper look like an entirely different image. Magazine photographers achieved near-celebrity status partly because their names consistently appeared alongside their work.

  Robert Capa was present on Omaha Beach on D-Day and captured pivotal images of the fighting there. Tony Vaccaro, photographing with a modest Argus C3, documented horrific moments of the war and developed his own images in soldiers' helmets using chemicals he found in the ruins of a camera store in 1944. Julien Bryan, described as a pioneer in color photography and Kodachrome, filmed and photographed the German bombardment of Poland in September 1939. William Vandivert photographed the Blitz in color in 1940.

  Henri Cartier-Bresson is held by some to be the father of modern photojournalism, though the same title has been applied to Erich Salomon. In 1947, Cartier-Bresson joined Robert Capa, David Seymour, George Rodger, William Vandivert, Rita Vandivert, and Maria Eisner in founding Magnum Photos, the international photographic cooperative owned and run by its members.

• 4. The Ethical Weight of the Frame

  ›

  Eddie Adams photographed the street execution of a Viet Cong soldier during the Vietnam War, capturing the exact moment of death. The victim's wife learned her husband had been killed when she saw his photograph on the front page of a newspaper. Adams was later quoted reflecting on that image: "I was getting money for showing one man killing another. Two lives were destroyed, and I was getting paid for it. I was a hero." He described the photograph as something that haunted him for the rest of his life.

  Bill Hudson was in Birmingham, Alabama, documenting civil rights protests when he photographed high school student Walter Gadsden appearing to be attacked by a police dog. That image ran above the fold in the May 1963 issue of The New York Times and is credited with changing the trajectory of the civil rights movement.

  Those two photographs illustrate the constant ethical question at the center of photojournalism: what is the cost of showing the truth? Photojournalists work under an ethical framework demanding honesty and impartiality, but they must make instant decisions about what to photograph, what to include in the frame, and what to show the public. In American journalism, an unspoken rule of thumb holds that "if it bleeds, it leads," and photographs of violence and tragedy dominate accordingly. The people depicted in such images often do not know their names will be absent from the caption, and their right to privacy is sometimes not addressed at all.

  Photo manipulation adds another layer of difficulty. War photography has always been staged to some degree, partly because early cameras were too bulky to capture spontaneous action. The degree of manipulation that is acceptable remains actively contested. The 2006 Lebanon War photographs controversies became a prominent example of how captioning and editing choices can cross ethical lines. Digital photography has widened the possibilities for manipulation, reproduction, and transmission of images, complicating every judgment a photojournalist or editor must make.

  The National Press Photographers Association, founded in the U.S. in 1946 and numbering around 10,000 members, codifies its expectations in a formal code of ethics. That code holds that photojournalists have an individual responsibility to strive for images that report truthfully, honestly, and objectively at all times, and that no code can prejudge every situation, so common sense and good judgment remain essential.

• 5. Staged Shots and Suspended Careers

  ›

  On the 27th of October 1993, Mike Meadows of the Los Angeles Times photographed Los Angeles County firefighter Mike Alves cooling himself in a pool in Altadena while covering a major wildfire sweeping southern California. The image ran in the Times and nationally. Before Meadows submitted it for a Pulitzer Prize, his assignment editor Fred Sweets contacted Alves, who reportedly said Meadows had asked him to go to the pool and splash water on his head. Meadows denied directing the scene but acknowledged saying it would make a nice shot. The Times called the photograph a fabrication, suspended Meadows without pay for a week, and withdrew the image from all prize competitions. The paper's photography director, Larry Armstrong, said: "when you manipulate the situation, you manipulate the news."

  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 had raided an alleged Al Qaeda cell. Other photographers at the scene claimed Keating had pointed with his own arm to show the boy which direction to look and aim. After the Columbia Journalism Review reported the incident, Keating was forced to leave the paper.

  Both cases underscore a principle that most photojournalists hold firmly: stage-managed shots presented as candid are unethical, regardless of how compelling the resulting image may be. The photojournalist often loses control of an image once it is delivered to a news organization, but the responsibility for how it was obtained remains with the photographer.

• 6. Technology and the Shifting Profession

  ›

  On the 18th of February 2004, The New York Times published a photograph of AT&T chief executive John Zeglis on its front page. The image had been taken with a camera phone. That moment signaled how far the tools of photojournalism had shifted from the glass-plate cameras of the Crimean War.

  By the late 1990s, even as digital cameras such as the Nikon D1 and the Canon EOS D30 were in their early stages, a single color photograph from a remote location still required nearly 30 minutes to scan and transmit to a news office. Within a few years, a photojournalist equipped with a digital camera, a mobile phone, and a laptop could send a high-quality image in minutes or seconds.

  When the London Bombings happened in July 2005, both The New York Times and The Washington Post ran front-page photographs made by citizen journalists with camera phones, the first time either paper had done so. When Hurricane Sandy struck the northeastern United States in 2012, Time dispatched five photographers carrying iPhones to document the devastation. A photograph of ocean waves collapsing on Coney Island in Brooklyn, taken by Benjamin Lowy, made the cover of Time's November 12 issue that year.

  In 2013, the Chicago Sun-Times laid off its entire staff of 28 photographers, including John H. White, a Pulitzer Prize winner. The paper then hired freelancers and required them to train in iPhone photography. Readers noted a reduction in quality compared to the paper's previous full-time professionals.

  By 2016, the New York Times employed 52 photo editors and relied on freelancers for 50% or more of its visual content. The Wall Street Journal employed 24 photo editors and used freelancers for 66% of its features imagery. The Washington Post employed 19 photo editors and relied on freelancers for 80% of its international news imagery. Staff photojournalism jobs continued to shrink through the 2010s, and former photojournalist Dan Chung of The Guardian and Reuters argued that professionals would need to adapt to video work to sustain careers in the field.

• 7. Organizations and Recognition

  ›

  The Danish Union of Press Photographers, known as Pressefotografforbundet, holds the distinction of being the first national organization for newspaper photographers anywhere in the world. Founded in 1912 in Copenhagen by six press photographers, it has grown to over 800 members.

  Since 1968, Pulitzer Prizes have been awarded for two specific categories of photojournalism: Feature Photography and Spot News Photography. Other major awards include the World Press Photo, Best of Photojournalism, Pictures of the Year, and the UK-based Press Photographer's Year.

  VII Photo Agency was founded in September 2001 by seven photographers: Alexandra Boulat, Ron Haviv, Gary Knight, Antonin Kratochvil, Christopher Morris, James Nachtwey, and John Stanmeyer. Its name derives directly from that founding group of seven. Today the agency has 30 members and runs a mentor program.

  Corbis Corporation was founded in 1989 and Getty Images in 1995, both building large image libraries that sell the rights to photographs. Since the late 1970s, photojournalism and documentary photography have also found growing space in art galleries, with practitioners such as Luc Delahaye and Manuel Rivera-Ortiz exhibiting alongside fine art photographers in museums and gallery spaces, a shift that would have been difficult to imagine during the Golden Age when the photograph's value was measured primarily in news terms.