life magazine and the photo essay
DESCRIPTION
Life Magazine and the Photo EssayTRANSCRIPT
ANDANDANDAND
CHALLENGING THE ROLE OF PICTURES IN THE AMERICAN PRESS
Final thesis
Journalism Master (‘dagbladjournalistiek’)
Rijksuniversiteit Groningen
ANDANDANDAND THE PHOTO ESSAYTHE PHOTO ESSAYTHE PHOTO ESSAYTHE PHOTO ESSAY
CHALLENGING THE ROLE OF PICTURES IN THE AMERICAN PRESS
Final thesis by Ieke Oud S1332112
Journalism Master (‘dagbladjournalistiek’)
Rijksuniversiteit Groningen
February 22, 2010
Dr. C.J. Peters Prof. dr. M.J. Broersma
THE PHOTO ESSAYTHE PHOTO ESSAYTHE PHOTO ESSAYTHE PHOTO ESSAY
CHALLENGING THE ROLE OF PICTURES IN THE AMERICAN PRESS
ACKNOWLEDGEMENTSACKNOWLEDGEMENTSACKNOWLEDGEMENTSACKNOWLEDGEMENTS
Seventeen months of my life.
I would like to thank my supervisor,
Chris Peters, for his helpful suggestions
and critical eye.
I thank my parents for their continuing
support and sponsoring.
And finally, a big thank you to Ruud, for
his enduring patience, and his
encouraging and comforting words.
TABLE OF CONTENTSTABLE OF CONTENTSTABLE OF CONTENTSTABLE OF CONTENTS
ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS ............................................................................................................................................ 2
INTRODUCTION ........................................................................................................................................................... 4
1. THE SIGNIFICANCE OF THE VISUAL ........................................................................................................... 13
1.1 The naturalness of the press photograph .......................................................................................... 16
1.2 The rhetoric of the image ..................................................................................................................... 21
1.3 The role of words in photographic messages .................................................................................. 23
1.4 Narratives in photographs ................................................................................................................... 27
2. PICTURES IN THE AMERICAN PRESS ....................................................................................................... 31
2.1 Tracing the origins of American photojournalism: 1842-1880..................................................... 33
2.2 The growth of American photojournalism: 1880-1936 ................................................................. 35
2.3 Photographs as instruments of ‘objective’ journalism .................................................................... 37
2.4 Photojournalism as a respected profession ...................................................................................... 39
2.5 Differences between newspaper and magazine photography....................................................... 44
2.6 The emergence of the picture magazine ........................................................................................... 45
2.7 Luce’s innovative enterprise and the birth of Life............................................................................ 47
3. LIFE AND ITS ‘PICTURE-MAGIC’ .................................................................................................................. 53
3.1 The start of the magazine .................................................................................................................... 54
3.2 Audience and circulation ...................................................................................................................... 56
3.3 Content and aesthetics .......................................................................................................................... 61
3.4 Editing text and photographs ............................................................................................................... 66
4. LIFE AND THE IDIOM OF THE PHOTO ESSAY .......................................................................................... 70
4.1 Two photo essays: ‘Vassar’ and ‘Gwyned Filling’ ............................................................................. 73
4.2 Challenging traditions of American journalism ................................................................................ 75
4.3 The photo essay formula ....................................................................................................................... 82
4.4 The role of captions in photo essays .................................................................................................. 85
4.5 Narrative processes in single pictures ............................................................................................... 87
4.6 The photo essay: creating a coherent narrative .............................................................................. 90
CONCLUSION ............................................................................................................................................................. 94
APPENDIX A – ‘VASSAR: A BRIGHT JEWEL IN U.S. EDUCATIONAL DIADEM’ BY ALFRED EISENSTAEDT .102
APPENDIX B – ‘THE PRIVATE LIFE OF GWYNED FILLING’ BY LEONARD MCCOMBE ...................................112
TABLE OF FIGURES ................................................................................................................................................126
BIBLIOGRAPHY .......................................................................................................................................................127
4
INTRODUCTIONINTRODUCTIONINTRODUCTIONINTRODUCTION
When Frenchman Louis Daguerre discovered in the mid-1830s that images could
be fixed on a polished silver mirror, he revolutionized the world of art. His
daguerreotypes proved to be a significant development in the historical effort to
‘mirror’ the world through fixed images. There was however one drawback that soon
ended Daguerre’s method: his images could not be reproduced. In June 1840,
Englishman William Fox Talbot presented the paper negative, which enabled
reproduction and would later become the foundation of modern photography. 1
Ongoing discoveries and improved techniques made that the uses of photography
expanded quickly. Near the end of the nineteenth century photography was no
longer just a hugely popular artistic occupation; photographs became part of the
printed press. A hundred years after the inventions by Daguerre and Talbot,
photography had become a vital mass medium for bringing the news and ‘seeing the
world’.
In November 1936, Life magazine was first published and instantly intrigued
thousands of American families, according to its editors, for its bold presentation of
news photography and its unique “sense of immediacy”.2 The number of copies
bought from newsstands was unprecedented and the letters of praise expressed
much enthusiasm. “It is simply grand”, one reader complimented the editors, “so
fascinating I just had to sit down and read it from cover to cover the minute it
arrived.”3 Another Life enthusiast wrote: “Life almost makes still pictures move and
talk.”4
Life was the most popular and only weekly publication of photojournalism prior to
the Second World War.5 It would be America’s primary photojournalism magazine
until its demise in 1972. The magazine’s founders believed the magazine would
change the world of pictorial publications radically. Founder and editor-in-chief of
1 Barbara London et al., Photography, 8th ed. (Upper Saddle River: Pearson Education, Inc., 2005), 386-70. 2 Norberto Angeletti and Alberto Oliva, Magazines that Make History: Their Origin, Development, and Influence (Gainesville: University Press of Florida, 2004), 126. 3 Life December 7, 1936, 7. 4 Idem. 5 Wendy Kozol, Life’s America: Family and Nation in Postwar Photojournalism (Philadelphia: Temple University Press, 1994), 6.
5
Life, Henry Robinson Luce, aimed at advancing “‘the art and function of pictorial
journalism’”, by working with the best staff, publishing the best pictures, and
generating the best editorial ideas possible. 6 He anticipated that there was a
prominent demand among the American public for a truly visual news experience.
In the prospectus announcing the publication to his investors Luce predicted that
“‘[t]o see, and to be shown, is now the will and new expectancy of half mankind.’”7
Life’s first issue had 96 pages and a print run of 466,000 copies. With a price of
just ten cents, copies were sold out within a few hours.8
As one of the founders of Time Inc. in 1922, Luce was a powerful mass media
publisher. In the course of the 1930s he published the bestselling magazines Time,
Fortune, and Life, which became prototypes of modern magazine publishing, the
latter reaching millions of readers in America and overseas.9 While Life was not the
first magazine to make extensive use of photography ― Vanity Fair and National
Geographic, for example, were popular quarterlies that printed photos ― it is often
credited for being the starting point of a new genre of reporting, called
photojournalism.10 The 1930s thus saw the rise of modern photojournalism. No
longer were photographs just illustrations that accompanied text. Instead, pictures
became meaningful components of journalistic routines. Photographs conveyed a
sense of objectivity, since they appeared to be neutral reflections of reality and
lacked the traces of an author that drawn pictures did have.11 For that reason
photographs grew popular with newspaper and magazine publishers. Imagery in
textual descriptions of news events and sites gradually declined, while photography
took on the function of showing readers how a person or building looked.12
As the number and size of photographs in newspapers and magazines increased,
their interrelations grew more complex.13 Some newspapers and magazines began
printing sequences of pictures and the picture story form (preludes to the later
6 Quoted in Loudon Wainwright, The Great American Magazine: An Inside History of LIFE (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1986), 33. 7 Quoted in Angeletti and Oliva, 124. 8 Ibidem, 119. 9 John Tebbel and Mary Ellen Zuckerman, The Magazine in America 1741-1990 (New York and Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1991), 158. 10 Ibidem, 227. 11 Kevin G. Barnhurst and John Nerone, The Form of News: A History (New York: Guilford Press, 2001), 138. 12 Kevin G. Barnhurst and John C. Nerone, ‘The President is Dead: American News Photography, and the New Long Journalism’, in Picturing the Past: Media, History and Photography, eds. Bonnie Brennen and Hanno Hardt (Urbana and Chicago: University of Illinois Press, 1999), 89. 13 Ibidem, 62-66.
6
photo essay) was introduced in European publications. 14 Moreover, as cinema
developed during the first decades of the twentieth century, Americans grew
familiar with stories told though images. Luce’s Life magazine invigorated this
eagerness for seeing instead of reading or hearing. Because of technological
advancements (smaller cameras, new printing techniques), photography became a
widespread tool for ‘capturing reality’, for both ordinary Americans and professional
(photo)journalists.
But Life became renowned for one genre in photojournalism in particular. The
photographic essay (or picture essay) was a genre of communication unique to
Luce’s magazine. In a photo essay, a series of pictures was typically combined with
text and captions, the words being largely secondary to the photographs. What
resulted was a way of telling news stories that differed from the manner in which
other magazines and newspapers published accounts. Luce claimed he intended to
“edit pictures into a coherent story — to make an effective mosaic out of the
fragmentary documents which pictures, past and present, are.”15 Instead of printing
words to tell a story, Life printed photographs. The magazine is accordingly
celebrated as the first American magazine to publish photo essays, a new form that
“expanded the scope of photojournalism and redefined the way we see”, for it
combined several pictures in such a way that they together formed a message.16
While photo essays in book form were not uncommon, these were not widely
consumed. Printing these essays in a popular magazine created an instant mass
public of middle-class Americans.17
Luce and his editors published work from some of the world’s best photographers
such as Alfred Eisenstaedt, Margaret Bourke-White, Robert Capa, and W. Eugene
Smith. For many news photographers, making a photo essay was a personal goal. A
way to show they could do more than make a good news photograph. Making a
photo essay entailed coming up with an idea that had “depth, breadth and visual
possibilities, then finding the subjects or locale where the idea can be translated
into pictures, and finally taking the pictures and ordering them into a cohesive
14 Michael Carlebach, American Photojournalism Comes of Age (Washington: Smithsonian Institution Press, 1997), 187 15 Dave Saunders, Direct Cinema: Observational Documentary and the Politics of the Sixties (London and New York: Wallflower Press, 2007), 6. 16 Kenneth Kobré, Photojournalism: The Professionals’ Approach (Amsterdam etc.: Focal Press, 2004), 357. 17 See for example the photo essay You Have Seen Their Faces (1937) by Margaret Bourke-White and Erskine Caldwell.
7
whole, structured to tell a dramatic story in words and pictures.”18 And while Life’s
formula was imitated by a number of other pictorial magazines, in particular Look,
these magazines never flourished, in both a creative and commercial sense, like
Life.
The introduction of photography in the press was stimulated by a widespread
believe that photographs were ‘mirrors of reality’; they were thought to give a true
reflection of the world in front of the camera lens.19 This belief in the truth of the
photograph led to an increase in the use of photography to convey news. Life’s use
of a new genre in photojournalism, the photo essay, was significant, as it broke
from traditional news storytelling in a unique and distinct manner. The photograph
no longer functioned as an illustration decorating pages otherwise grey with text.
Rather it expressed aspects of the news story that words could, or at least, did not
express. For Life, photographs were key elements in ‘writing’ stories.
This study will analyze how this development opened up a different form of
storytelling in printed journalism. In what way did the narrative style of Life’s photo
essays challenge the dominant practices found in the American newspaper and
magazine (photo)journalism of the 1930s? To help answer the main question, this
thesis will address several issues. How did the photo essay depart from traditional
journalistic practices and why, in retrospectives, is it often considered
revolutionary?20 To what extent were Life’s photographic essays narratives? And
what function did the pictures play in crafting these narratives, and what was the
significance of the accompanying words?
In answering these questions, this study brings together existing studies on 1930s
(photo)journalism and Life magazine, and develops these further by incorporating
theories on pictorial storytelling and visual grammar. The result is a more
theoretically nuanced approach to analyze the workings of Life’s famed photo
essays. Life magazine and its photo essays have been the subject of a number of
18 Howard Chapnick, The Truth Needs No Ally: Inside Photojournalism (Columbia: University of Missouri Press, 1994), 35-36. 19 Robert L. Craig, ‘Fact, Public Opinion, and Persuasion: The Rise of the Visual in Journalism and Advertising’, in Picturing the Past: Media, History, and Photography, eds. Bonnie Brennen and Hanno Hardt (Urbana and Chicago: University of Illinois Press, 1999), 50. 20 See Norberto Angeletti and Alberto Oliva, Magazines that Make History: Their Origin, Development, and Influence (Gainesville: University Press of Florida, 2004), Wendy Kozol, Life’s America: Family and Nation in Postwar Photojournalism (Philadelphia: Temple University Press, 1994), and Loudon Wainwright, The Great American Magazine: An Inside History of LIFE (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1986).
8
studies. Kozol, for example, addresses Life’s way of promoting family values
through its essays in the postwar decades.21 And Kobré provides a practical guide to
telling stories with pictures.22 Still, while the photo essay is often recalled as the
characteristic of Life’s photojournalism, the implications of this genre as a novel
means of telling stories have been explored less.
The changing role of news pictures will be considered in depth in this thesis. This
aspect of American journalism is examined in a number of other studies, for
example that by Barnhurst and Nerone, who argue that the end of detailed imagery
in textual newspaper accounts was related to the expanding role of photographs in
these publications. By examining news reports of presidential deaths in office, they
note that the “picture-as-content” took over many functions traditionally performed
by texts.23 There are also many critical studies on press photography, which deal
with the memory of photographs, war photography, photographs as historical
evidence, photography and the illusion of objectivity, and the prospects for
photojournalism in the age of television and internet.24 However, few studies on
photojournalism analyze the structure of photographs and picture narratives,
especially in terms of Life’s role in pioneering the photo essay genre.
For a long time, photographs were thought to be insufficient to produce
comprehensive narrative. Until well into the twentieth century, there was a
widespread belief that photographs could only visually illustrate parts of a story
(like paintings did in the age before photography), while only language could
construct a narrative. It was not until the 1920s, Baetens writes, that photos were
used as “full-fledged narrative elements” in ‘high-art’ literary works, for example
Man Ray’s avant-garde collage-novels.25 Still, there is debate about to what extent
pictures can be narratives. For example, an argument often heard is that while
sentences can describe a development in time, a photograph can only portray one
21 Wendy Kozol, Life’s America: Family and Nation in Postwar Photojournalism (Philadelphia: Temple University Press, 1994). 22 Kenneth Kobré, Photojournalism: The Professionals’ Approach (Amsterdam etc.: Focal Press, 2004). 23 Barnhurst and Nerone, ‘The President is Dead’, 89. 24 See for example Barbie Zelizer, Remembering to Forget: Holocaust Memory through the Camera’s Eye
(Chicago: The University of Chicago Press, 1998), and ‘Death in Wartime: Photographs and the “Other War” in Afghanistan, The Harvard International Journal of Press/Politics 10 (2005) 3: 26-55. Alan Trachtenberg, ‘Through a Glass, Darkly: Photography and Cultural Memory’, Social Research 75 (2008) 1: 111-32. Marita Sturken, Tangled Memories: the Vietnam War, the AIDS Epidemic, and the Politics of Remembering (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1997). Susan Sontag, On Photography (New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 1977). Peter Howe, ‘Photojournalism at a Crossroads’, Nieman Reports 55 (2001) 3: 25-26. 25 Jan Baetens, ‘Image and Narrativity’, in Routledge Encyclopedia of Narrative Theory, eds. David Herman et al. (London and New York: Routledge, 2005), 236.
9
instant of time. This strongly limits the narrative potential of images, some theorists
argue.26 This thesis will reflect on several theories on narratives in pictures in an
attempt to assess the photo essay’s storytelling qualities compared to written
narratives.
An influential theory on narratives is Barthes’s 1966 essay, in which he stresses the
universality of narratives and refutes the idea that only written or spoken words
can form narratives. Barthes argues that narratives can be
carried by articulated language, spoken or written, fixed or moving images,
gestures, and the ordered mixture of all these substances; narrative is present in
myth, legend, fable, tale, novella, epic, history, tragedy, drama, comedy, mime,
painting (think of Carpaccio’s Saint Ursula), stained-glass windows, cinema, comics, news items, conversation. Moreover, under this almost infinite diversity
of forms, narrative is present in every age, in place, in every society; it begins
with the very history of mankind and there nowhere is nor has been a people
without narrative.27
Barthes also analyzed the message press photographs convey, a “message without a
code”, referring to the way these images are deceivingly natural, reflecting ‘reality’
seemingly without transforming it. 28 Also, Barthes reflects upon the relations
between pictures and words, two structures that so often appear together in news
accounts and reportages. These relations are essential as text and image are
inherently connected in photo essays.
While it is an interesting debate as to whether single pictures can act as narratives,
or to what extent they hold ‘narrativity’ – a term that refers to all qualities that
make a narrative (e.g. plot development, chronology of events) – this thesis mainly
addresses the narrative potential of picture series (e.g. photographic essays). 29
Therefore, the analysis includes single photographs from a series, relations between
photographs, and relations between text and photographs, as the written word is an
essential tool in the making of a photo essay. In order to analyze the narrativity of a
series of photographs, this study will rely on literature that analyses what elements
are crucial to a visual work’s narrativity (e.g. Barthes). While a lot of academic
26 See for example Werner Wolf, ‘Pictorial Narrativity’, in Routledge Encyclopedia of Narrative Theory, eds. David Herman et al. (London and New York: Routledge, 2005), 433. 27 Roland Barthes, Image-Music-Text, trans. Stephen Heath (Glasgow: William Collins Sons & Co. Ltd., 1977), 79. 28 Ibidem, 16-17. 29 ‘Narrativity’, The International Society for the Study of Narrative, http://narrative.georgetown.edu/wiki/index.php/Narrativity, December 8, 2009.
10
attention has been focused on the narrative elements of written texts, the analysis
of pictorial narratives has received less consideration.30 Besides, the genre has often
been handled not as a specific practice but rather as a reworking of verbal
narration, analyzed from a literature theories framework.31 Some recent theorists
that have researched photographic narratives as a specific scheme include Baetens,
Wolf and Ryan.32 This thesis builds on these works to analyze the Life photo essay
in particular.
Since Life magazine was introduced by Luce as a new way of seeing the world, it
seems inevitable to incorporate the ‘old way of seeing’, in other words the traditions
of 1930s American photojournalism, in this study. This study will reflect on the
publishing and editorial motives in publishing an innovative magazine like Life.
What did the editors think they were creating compared to American journalism at
the time, and how did they conceptualize the photo essay?
To investigate these questions, samples of photo essays from the first fifteen years
of Life (1936-1950) will be studied since the focus of this thesis is primarily on the
pioneering role of Life in creating a new way for journalism to tell stories through
photos. Moreover, Life’s popularity declined after the 1950s. The photo essay
remained a key element of the magazine, but by then the form was well-established.
Considering the scope of this thesis, only two essays will be dealt with in detail and
the focus will be on the photographs more than the text. As will be seen, it is hard
to determine which picture series were photo essays and which just photo series.
For this reason, this study attempts to distinguish the uniqueness of Life’s photo
essay from other instances of photojournalism, and will try to evaluate its
development over the years by examining some of its best-known essays: ‘Vassar’ by
Alfred Eisenstaedt and ‘Gwyned Filling’ by Leonard McCombe. Why these two
essays are useful as exemplars of the Life photo essay form will be further clarified
in chapter four.
30 Marie-Laure Ryan, ‘On the Theoretical Foundations of Transmedial Narratology’, in Narratology Beyond Literary Criticism: Mediality, Disciplinarity, ed. Jan Christoph Meister (Berlin: De Gruyter, 2005), 1. 31 Mireille Ribière, ‘Guest Editorial’, in History of Photography 19 (1995) 4: 277. 32 See Jan Baetens, ‘Bibliography: Photo Narrative Today’, History of Photography: An International Quarterly 19 (4), 312-13. Werner Wolf, ‘Narrative and Narrativity: A Narratological Reconceptualization and Its Applicability to the Visual Arts’, Word & Image 19 (2003), 180-97. Marie-Laure Ryan, Narrative Across Media: The Language of Storytelling (Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 2004).
11
Chapter one of this thesis begins with a discussion of various theoretical
approaches that examine the significance of images in American news media and
society. Several studies have analyzed how images, the press photograph in
particular, communicate and how this differs from written news accounts in terms
of veracity and rhetoric. Also, this first chapter will consider both a picture’s and
picture series’ potential to form a narrative, in order to assess the manners in which
the Life photo essay communicated stories.
The second chapter considers the introduction and characteristics of American
news pictures. It will include a brief overview of the use of pictures and
photography in American newspapers and magazines from the middle of the
nineteenth century to the first quarter of the twentieth century. What was the role
of pictures compared to and within written texts? Were editors eager to print
photographs? And when can we speak of the use of pictures as photojournalism? In
addition chapter two will address the birth of Life as a innovative picture magazine.
The third chapter will give a brief impression of the start and growth of Life, and it
will analyze the change in photojournalism represented by Life. What did Luce have
in mind for the magazine, and how did the editors attempt to realize his plans?
More importantly, this chapter will consider how Life’s use of photojournalism
differed from the way other print media used photography.
Chapter four examines some of Life’s well-known photographic essays. What is a
photo essay? What did Life photo essays look like? Also, this final chapter will
include a brief theoretical framework used specifically to analyze to what extent
photo essays are narrative and how this narrativity differs from written news stories
that may use pictures as illustration only. This chapter answers questions like:
What is a narrative and narrativity? What are the relations between written text and
pictures, and why are these relations significant? Hopefully, this will provide a clear
analysis on photo series and narrativity.
To be sure, the communicative power of the photograph has been intriguing many
ever since its first appearance. The press photograph in particular has great
influence on public thinking. Photographs ‘speak’ different than words; they are
generally felt to be more direct. Sometimes one picture becomes a symbol for a
whole event or incident. In those cases, one image may be more powerful than a
12
substantial amount of text. ‘A picture is worth a thousand words’, is an often heard
aphorism, referring to the ability of single images to describe complex stories.
Whether one picture can actually replace a large amount of text remains to be seen.
13
1.1.1.1. THE SIGNIFICANCE OF THE SIGNIFICANCE OF THE SIGNIFICANCE OF THE SIGNIFICANCE OF THE VISUALTHE VISUALTHE VISUALTHE VISUAL
A THEORETICAL FRAME FOR ANALYZING PRESS PHOTOGRAPHY
One’s first encounter with the photographic inventory of ultimate horror is a
kind of revelation, the prototypically modern revelation: a negative epiphany. For me, it was photographs of [Nazi concentration camps] Bergen-Belsen and
Dachau which I came across by chance in a bookstore in Santa Monica in July
1945. Nothing I have seen – in photographs or in real life – ever cut me as
sharply, deeply, instantaneously. […] They were only photographs – of an event I had scarcely heard of and could do nothing to affect, of suffering I could
hardly imagine and could do nothing to relieve. When I looked at those
photographs, something broke. Some limit had been reached, and not only that
of horror; I felt irrevocably grieved, wounded, but a part of my feelings started to tighten; something went dead; something is still crying.
Susan Sontag, On Photography.33
In the summer of 1945, after the Allied forces had freed the European continent of
the Nazi regime and liberated the concentration camps, many Americans for the
first time saw photographs revealing the brutal realities of World War II. In the
years preceding the liberation of the camps, American journalists were reticent in
reporting what atrocities were taking place in the camps.34 They believed the stories
they heard and the hints they received to be false or exaggerated, and related
atrocity stories to government propaganda. Violent incidents are a given in every
war, the general thought was. Even though reporters in Nazi-ruled Europe heard
stories of brutality (they were not allowed into the camps prior to liberation), their
accounts were discredited in the U.S. By 1943, a third of the respondents to a U.S.
Gallup poll waved off the reports of the destruction of two million Jews.35
War photography – from Mathew Brady’s Civil War pictures to the Abu Ghraib
prison photographs of 2004 – has historically underscored the role of photography
in documenting agony where words alone proved insufficient. Zelizer’s extensive
analysis on the role of photography in remembering World War II atrocities
demonstrates that verbal accounts of the horrific events in the Nazi camps proved
hard to believe, for the scale and nature of the atrocities were for many readers
33 Susan Sontag, On Photography (New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 1977), 19-20. 34 Zelizer, Remembering to Forget, 39. 35 Idem.
14
simply unimaginable. Reporters and eyewitnesses of brutal acts were aware of this
and wished they had photographs to verify their stories.36 Moreover, those few
photographs that were published were mostly generic depictions of war rather than
photographs carrying identifiable dates, places and persons. They often lacked
specific captions and credits and were printed in no direct relation to the text.37
Though such pictures had a definite symbolic value – reminding its viewers of
universal but non-specific suffering – as historical documents they were imprecise.
When, on April 11, 1945, reporters and photographers accompanied the Allies into
the Buchenwald labor camp, the scale of the genocide finally began to come into
focus. At this point images made all the difference, even though they provided a
glance only at the final phase following years of torture.38 Photographs – large
numbers were made and printed in the U.S. press – were recognized as
“instrumental to the broader aim of enlightening the Western world about what the
Nazis had done. When [General] Eisenhower proclaimed ‘let the world see’, he
implicitly called upon photographs to help him accomplish that aim.”39 Photographs
furnished evidence and had effects different than words. As Zelizer explains,
photographs “captured the atrocities in an explicit, and therefore potentially
persuasive manner and appeared to intervene less with the target of depiction than
did words.”40 They come to us in a direct and seemingly authentic form.
Moreover, photographs have the ability to stay engraved in our memories, more so
or longer than texts. Photography has been associated with memory ever since the
emergence of the first daguerreotypes, which were named ‘mirrors with a memory’.41
What is most significant about the invention of photography is, according to Sontag,
its ability to linger in our heads, like an “anthology of images.” 42 Many press
photographs, such as those of soldiers raising an American flag on Iwo Jima, the
shooting of Lee Harvey Oswald, or the student on Tiananmen Square facing a row of
tanks, have become part of our cultural memory. They have become symbolic of
historical events, places and persons and form static representations that produce
cultural memory.
36 Zelizer, Remembering to Forget, 43. 37 Barbie Zelizer, ‘Holocaust Photography, Then and Now’, in Picturing the Past: Media, History and Photography (Urbana and Chicago: University of Illinois Press, 1999), 103. 38 Ibidem,105. 39 Ibidem, 105. 40 Ibidem, 106. 41 Vicki Goldberg, ‘Photographs and Memory’, American Photo 10 (1999) 6, 88. 42 Sontag, 3.
15
At the same time though, they can function as instruments for memory loss,
obliterating personal reminiscences “through the power of their presence.” 43 In
other words, looking at a photograph can lead to a replacement of recollections by
the memory represented in the picture. Photographs can instill memories where
none could have existed; the Holocaust pictures have created in people’s minds
recollections of events that they never witnessed. On the other hand, photographs
can replace or rewrite ‘authentic’ personal memories with what Freud has called
‘screen memories’. In fact, Freud claimed that most, if not all, early childhood
memories are created during later periods in our lives.44 Looking over family albums
may thus alter original memories of our life past, or create memories where there
were none prior to seeing the photograph.
From these observations follows the notion that pictures affect viewers different
than words affect readers. But what explains this difference? Is the message they
represent different from that of the written text, or do they ‘speak different
languages’? The purpose of this chapter will be to explore past and present
premises about the qualities of imagery, and photography in particular. What is a
photographs relation to the ‘reality’ that it depicts? How do images convey
messages, and how is this different from verbal communication? Do images have a
grammar, like sentences do? And what happens when you print a series of
interrelated photographs; can pictures tell a story the same way words can?
The question of how people produce and interpret meaning in verbal or visual
means of communication has been taken up by numerous theorists expanding on
Ferdinand de Saussure’s study of semiotics - the study of signs in language and the
processes of meaning-making. From the 1930s on, the study of semiotics expanded
to include the social processes and cultural conditions that shape the ways in
which people communicate, acknowledging that power relations in society have an
effect on the ways in which messages are coded. This field of ‘social semiotics’,
which includes the works of Roland Barthes (1915-1980) and Michael Halliday
(1925-), continues to provide the theoretical frameworks for scholars analyzing the
production and understanding of meaning in text and image.45
43 Marita Sturken, Tangled Memories: the Vietnam War, the AIDS Epidemic, and the Politics of Remembering (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1997), 20. 44 Ibidem, 22. 45 See for example Roland Barthes, Mythologies, transl. Annette Lavers (New York: Hill and Wang, 1972), and Michael Halliday and Ruqaiya Hasan, Language, Content, and Text: Aspects of Language in a Social-Semiotic Perspective (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1989).
16
1.1 The naturalness of the press photograph
“The press photograph is a message”, Barthes begins his essay “The photographic
message”, deliberately excluding more artistic photographs (e.g. abstract, surreal)
from his analysis. It is important to keep this distinction in mind, since the press
photograph carries connotations that art photography and other images, like
painting and illustration lack: it carries and attempts to convey a sense of mirroring
reality, especially in the days of early photojournalism. As Zelizer contends, for
most early twentieth century journalists, photography was “viewed as a medium not
of symbolism, interpretation, generalizability, and universality but of denotation,
recording, indexicality, and referentiality – the ability of photographs to ‘tell things
as they are.’”46 When studying visual communication, it is important to take into
account three constituents of the meaning-making process of photography: the
producer of the message, its transmitter, and its receiver.47 As this study reflects on
press photography in Life magazine, the sender would be Life’s staff (photographers,
editors, technicians, writers). The transmitter is, in short, the set of magazine pages
that ‘hold’ the message. This includes all photographs, titles, captions, and texts, as
well as its lay-out and even the magazine’s title. Lastly, the receiver is the public
which reads the magazine.
There is a definite difference in the general public’s anticipation and perception of
press photographs and that of other forms of imagery. As mentioned previously,
press photos were initially seen by publishers and public as literal copies of the
‘real world’ and gained a reputation of evidence of what happened ‘out there’. And
still, while many members of the public are aware of the fact that it is quite easy to
manipulate news photographs, they are commonly considered the visual medium
that offers the most honest reflection of the real world; a photo “testifies to that
which has been”.48 This testimonial appeal still is the main trait attributed to the
news photograph. And this ‘truth-value’ combined with photography’s symbolic
strength is what Zelizer believes was and is the photograph’s power and what
eventually made an end to the dominance of the written word in journalism.49
46 Zelizer, Remembering to Forget, 20. 47 Barthes, Image-Music-Text, 15. 48 Sturken, 21. 49 Zelizer, Remembering to Forget, 8.
17
American writer and journalist Walter Lippmann anticipated the success of the
press photograph when he remarked in 1922:
‘Photographs have the kind of authority over imagination today, which the printed word had yesterday, and the spoken word before that. They seem
utterly real. They come, we imagine, directly to us, without human meddling,
and they are the most effortless food for the mind conceivable’.50 It seems reasonable to claim that few people reading Life’s photo essays will have
thought they were fictional, staged or manipulated. The power of its photographs
lies in the impression that they are ‘natural’, as Mitchell explains such pictures are
“related to what they depict in exactly (or roughly) the same way that vision is
related to what we see.”51 Photography acquired a status as evidence, used in court
trials, government surveys (e.g. the Farm Security Administration), and newspapers
and magazines as proof. Photographs, unlike verbal texts, paintings, and
illustrations, have a particular authentic quality. Press photographs do not seem to
be interpretations of a person or event, but what Sontag calls “miniatures of
reality.” 52 Life’s photographers and editors used techniques that reinforced the
naturalness of their photographs and photo essays, such as straightforward,
descriptive captions. In the final chapter of this thesis, these techniques and their
effects on the narrativity of Life’s photo essays will be examined.
Surely, this assumed veracity of photography is largely unjust, since in the same
way that a painter decides how to paint a landscape, a photographer uses personal
taste and formal standards to design how the picture should look.53 One of the most
printed Life photographers, W. Eugene Smith, wrote in 1948:
Those who believe that photographic reportage is ‘selective and objective, but
cannot interpret the photographed subject matter,’ show a complete lack of
understanding of the problems and the proper workings of this profession. The journalistic photographer can have no other than a personal approach; and it
is impossible for him to be completely objective. Honest — yes. Objective —
no.54
50 Quoted in Zelizer, Remembering to Forget, 9. 51 W.J.T. Mitchell, The Language of Images (Chicago and London: The University of Chicago Press, 1974), 234. 52 Sontag, 4. 53 Ibidem, 6-7. 54 ‘Eugene Smith – Photojournalism’, <http://www.jnevins.com/smithreading.htm> November 18, 2009.
18
Besides the input of the photographer, the role of the camera should not be ignored.
Photographs by definition do not show what we would see without a camera, simply
because the camera functions as one eye only. What we see with both eyes (angles,
perspective, depth) cannot be recorded similarly by the camera. So, considering the
subjective quality of both photographer and camera could lead to the conclusion
that each “photograph (blown up, cropped, taken from a certain angle, lit in a
certain way) misquotes reality”, as Manguel observes.55 Moreover, the notion of
what is ‘real’ depends on the definitions of reality of particular social groups. Today,
we generally define our concept of what reality looks like according to the system of
35mm color photography or digital photography (though the digital aspect of today’s
photography nourishes mistrust). But, for a long time including the heydays of Life,
black and white photography was considered the most truthful representation of
the ‘real’. In contrast, holograms are considered ‘more than real’, while they do
reflect reality’s three-dimensional nature. 56 But, as 3-D film and photography
advance, the notion of what represents reality best will almost certainly change over
time.
Overall, the issue whether photographs are truthful reflections of reality or creative,
subjective representations is not exceptionally relevant for the development of this
thesis. Photographic delusion and deliberate manipulation is historically ever-
present; from the early years of photography pictures were staged, people omitted
from scenes in the process of printing, and light was added or deleted to (de-
)emphasize elements. Moreover, one cannot deny the fact that every photo is
framed, cropped, and sized the way the photographer or editor likes.57 What is at
stake is how the final printed photograph conveys meaning to its viewers, not so
much whose story it is and whether it is objective or subjective. Though every
person will attribute different connotations to a press photograph, one of the
essential qualities of this kind of photography is that it is believed to represent
something existent, rather than a fantasy or fiction. The question thus is what does
the viewer see and how does that what the viewer sees create meaning?
55 Alberto Manguel, Reading Pictures: A History of Love and Hate (London: Bloomsbury, 2001), 73. 56 Gunther Kress and Theo van Leeuwen, Reading Images: The Grammar of Visual Design (London: Routledge, 1996), 163. 57 Hany Farid, ‘Photography Changes What We Are Willing to Believe’, Click! Photography Changes Everything (Smithsonian Photography Initiative), <http://click.si.edu/Story.aspx?story=178> October 7, 2009.
19
As pointed out above, the press photograph has a strong overtone of being an
objective, natural illustration of the ‘real’ event that took place in front of the
camera. Still, the idea that a photograph is more objective than written or drawn
accounts because it is made by a photographer carrying a camera, instead of a
person with a pencil, has just been refuted. There thus seems to be a paradoxical
relation between the photographic message and reality; on the one hand it seems a
reflection of reality, but on the other hand it seems naïve to think there is no more
to it.
This is why Barthes argues that the photographic message consists of two levels of
meaning. First, a photograph is a literal reflection of that what is depicted; it is not
reality but a perfect “analogon” of it.58 The picture is an uninterrupted portrayal of
reality, meaning it is not translated into a sign system (as happens when reality is
translated into verbal language for example). This is what Barthes terms the
“message without a code” and it differs from coded messages, such as paintings and
films, which offer a second meaning. This second meaning is coded and what
Barthes calls the “style” of the imitation, or “the manner in which the society to a
certain extent communicates what it thinks of it.”59 In other words, a painting is
subjective because it is made not mechanically but by the hands of a person, and
because its meaning depends on the ‘culture’ and subjective interpretation of those
who view it. It carries a certain commonsense subjectivity that the press
photograph seems to lack. Life’s editors helped sustain this notion on the
photograph’s denotative power by asserting that their magazine would function “‘on
the journalistic principle of reporting objectively the folk and folkways of the world -
in pictures’” (emphasis added).60
However, the meaning of a press photograph does not end with the first-order
message. The second-order message is on first sight not evident. Since the press
photograph appears to be a “mechanical analogue of reality”, there seems to be no
place for any other meaning. It appears as though the photograph contains a
message without a code, because it transmits “information without forming it by
means of discontinuous signs and rules of transformation,” as opposed to drawings,
which are always coded, since they intervene with the objects depicted.61 The press
58 Barthes, Image-Music-Text, 17. 59 Idem. 60 Zelizer, Remembering to Forget, 20. 61 Barthes, Image-Music-Text, 44.
20
photograph appears to have only this first-order (denoted, objective, natural)
message; we are intended to see press photographs as literal reflections of reality,
and a possible second-order meaning stays invisible. Yet, besides this ‘natural’ or
denoted message, the photograph does contain a second, connoted message.
Barthes explains,
[O]n the one hand, the press photograph is an object that has been worked on,
chosen, composed, constructed, treated according to professional, aesthetic or
ideological norms which are so many factors of connotation; while on the other,
this same photograph is not only perceived, received, it is read, connected more or less consciously by the public that consumes it to a traditional stock
of signs. Since every sign supposes a code, it is this code (of connotation) that
one should try to establish.62
The photograph’s strong denotation gives the impression that there is only one
possible meaning in the picture, literally that what is photographed, and masks the
second level of meaning, its connotation. This connotation is, as Barthes claims, not
visible at the level of the message, but embedded in the levels of production
(selection, composition, etc.) and reception, where the viewer connects the signs in
the picture to connotations that he or she recognizes. The photograph “seems
transparent only because we know the code already, at least passively – but without
knowing what it is we know, without having the means for talking about what it is
we do when we read an image.”63 In short, visual communication is at all times
coded.
Seeing the world through photographs has a significant effect on the way we deal
with information. As a photograph offers just one fragment of reality, it is up to the
viewer to fill in the rest: context, relations to other events, people, beliefs. Borders
and connections between events become subjective, because frames differ from
person to person. This duality in messages of the photograph, the denoted and the
connoted, is what Barthes calls “the photographic paradox”.64 On the one hand, the
photo contains a message without a code, the reflection of the real scene. On the
other hand, this literal message is extended to make room for other meanings,
connotation, formed by the interpretation of its viewers. What Barthes sees as
paradoxical is the idea that a representation (not an interpretation) of reality leads to
62 Ibidem, 19. 63 Kress and Van Leeuwen, 32. 64 Barthes, Image-Music-Text, 19.
21
a cultural interpretation, a coding of the message. A photograph would thus be both
a natural and a cultural message.
For the purpose of this thesis, which is to look into the ways in which Life’s photo
essays challenged traditional word-image roles and relationships in American
printed press of the 1930s and 1940s, four closely-connected theoretical
approaches will be addressed. All focus on the processes through which images
make, obtain, and send messages, in relation to or opposed to verbal language. The
remainder of this chapter will focus on the following matters: 1) the rhetorical
potential of images; 2) the role of words in photographic messages; 3) the existence
of a grammar of the visual; 4) the ability to form a narrative using images only.
1.2 The rhetoric of the image
Rhetoric, the art of using language effectively and persuasively, or as Plato says in
the Phaedrus, “the art of winning the soul by discourse”, has historically been
connected to writing and speech rather than other forms of communication, such
as imagery. Breaking with this tradition, the academic study of visual rhetoric has
emerged fairly recently, but builds on theories developed by social semioticians, like
Barthes. The central question in studies exploring the ways in which visuals
influence people’s thoughts and opinions is: “How do images act rhetorically upon
viewers?”65 The field of visual rhetoric, however, goes further than visual semiotics,
including not only the process of sign-making and meaning of signs in images – the
‘vocabulary’ of images –, but also the mechanics of the visual language – its
‘grammar’. Before one can begin examining this ‘grammar’ of images, the way in
which its ‘vocabulary’ comes together to form a meaningful whole, one needs to
come to grips with the structure of the ‘vocabulary’ and the possible messages a
picture can contain.
Generally speaking, images have a greater persuasive power than verbal texts. This
is demonstrated by a theory from psychology that differentiates two forms of
cognitive processing of a persuasive message: ‘systematic processing’ and ‘heuristic
processing’. The former is a reflective, analytic, and responsive strategy, the latter
occurs when a person uses a “shortcut decision-making rule” to respond to the
65 Charles A. Hill and Marguerite Helmers, eds. Defining Visual Rhetorics (Mahwah: Lawrence Erlbaum Associates, 2004), 1.
22
message. 66 Verbal texts are most likely to trigger systematic processing, while
images, because they are comprehended as a whole and often in one quick glance,
trigger heuristic processing.67 The persuasive message in images is therefore more
direct.
Photographs differ from verbal accounts in that they have a more direct and
evidential link to the person or object that is the subject. A photograph carries
evidence of the existence of its subject; it is a reflection – whether manipulated or
not – of real people, buildings, trees, etcetera. 68 Words can represent fictional
persons and objects. Therefore they cannot provide the same unambiguous proof of
the existence of its subject(s) as can pictures. This has implications for the way
visual and verbal texts act rhetorically upon readers. Even though most of us will
believe a verbal news account of an airplane crash just as much as the photograph
showing the crashed plane, the photograph will likely “prompt a visceral, emotional
response.”69 For this reason, charity organizations often try to persuade people to
donate by showing images of starving African children, rather than just reports
disclosing the gravity of the situation.
Most of the studies in visual rhetoric that focus on photography deal with
advertisements, since these images always have a deliberate signification and
explicit purpose, selling a product or service by showing its best features in a way
that, ideally, the reader picks up the intended message.70 Though the signification
in press photographs is less persuasive, resulting from the less explicit presence of
signs, it is undoubtedly there.
But, since press photographs less deliberately impose a preferred interpretation
upon the viewer its messages are open interpretation, more than advertising images
are. Because the cultural signs in press photos are less overt, every viewer will fill in
the blanks differently as if it literally were verbal texts filled with dotted lines. For
this reason, Alberto Manguel warns that in reading pictures, our knowledge and
personal perspectives often lead to misreadings:
66 Charles A. Hill, ‘The Psychology of Rhetorical Images’, in Defining Visual Rhetorics, eds. Charles A. Hill and Marguerite Helmers (Mahwah and London: Lawrence Erlbaum Associates, 2004), 32. 67 Ibidem, 33. 68 Sturken 21. 69 Hill, 29-30. 70 Barthes, Image-Music-Text, 33.
23
‘When we read pictures – in fact, images of any kind, whether painted,
sculpted, photographed, built or performed – we bring to them the temporal
quality of narrative. We extend that which is limited by a frame to a before and
an after, and through the craft of telling stories (whether of love or hate), we lend the immutable picture an infinite and inexhaustible life. […] We construct
our story through echoes in other stories, through the illusion of self-reflection,
through technical and historical knowledge, through gossip, reverie, prejudice,
illumination, scruples, ingenuity, compassion, wit. No story elicited by an image is final or exclusive, and measures of correctness vary according to the
same circumstances that give rise to the story itself’.71
Since the pictures we see generally give us little information on the ‘story behind the
image’, we tend to form our own narratives from what we see. One photograph
cannot express in unambiguous signs the reason for photographing the scene, the
events/actions leading up to the situation in the picture, and the events/actions
following. From a photograph of a war victim, we may make up what killed the
person, but from the picture only we cannot understand what the war is about, what
parties are involved, and how the organization of these parties looks, for example. A
single photograph, Sontag argues, can never make us understand, but only “fill in
blanks in our mental pictures of the present and past.”72 If we want to understand
what we see, we need a storyline. Helmers agrees that single paintings or
photographs do not contain narratives, but are “static representations.” The viewer
or reader must interpret the frame and add “dialogue and sequential action.”73
However, our narrative interpretations are heavily influenced by our cultural
understandings and the interpretations of others; the notes of the artist on his work,
captions complementing paintings in museums or photographs in a picture
magazine.74 This leads to a crucial issue in analyzing the messages of photographs
and photo essays in particular: what role do the accompanying words (title, caption,
article) have on the meaning of the whole text, images and words?
1.3 The role of words in photographic messages
Today, words are present in almost every image, as titles and captions, or as text
balloons in comic strips. Press photographs have gained a more prominent place in
71 Quoted in Marguerite Helmers, ‘Framing the Fine Arts Through Rhetoric’, in Defining Visual Rhetorics, eds. Charles A. Hill and Marguerite Helmers (Mahwah and London: Lawrence Erlbaum Associates, 2004), 67. 72 Sontag, 23. 73 Helmers, 67. 74 Helmers, 69.
24
newspapers and magazines, but never go without written text. Still, the relation
between words and images has changed. For centuries, news pictures in Western
culture were looked upon with suspicion, treated as secondary to verbal and written
texts. 75 In an 1846 poem, Englishman William Wordsworth lamented the first
publication of the Illustrated London News, the world’s first illustrated weekly
newspaper, four years earlier. The use of illustrations for the coverage of news was
in his eyes, and in those of many other intellectuals, a sin. In his poem he
associates words with the progress of his country towards an “‘intellectual Land’”,
and describes images as “‘dumb’”, taking England “‘back to childhood’”.76
In the 1930s, Marxist Walter Benjamin believed that without the guidance of a solid
caption, the photograph would be of no use except for modish amusement. That it
could only say ‘How beautiful’ even if the picture shows impoverished
neighborhoods or polluted environments.77 Benjamin believed words would save
photographs from this fate of becoming merely enjoyable pictures, instead of
meaningful messages. He wrote in 1931,
‘The illiterate of the future’ it has been said, ‘will not be the man who cannot read the alphabet, but the one who cannot take a photograph.’ But must we not
also count as illiterate the photographer who cannot read his own pictures? Will not the caption become the most important component of the shot?78
Benjamin raised this question at a time when technological advancements in
camera mechanics and printing techniques made it possible to print large numbers
of photographs in newspapers and magazines. Did this lead to a reversal in roles of
words and images? Would from then on pictures become the most salient elements
of news stories and would words function only as ‘illustration’?
With the acceptance of the photograph as a genuine journalistic medium, the text-
photograph order did change. Historically, pictures illustrated words. Until the
start of the twentieth century, publishers thought pictures were useful as
“curiosities, to attract readers as much as to inform them.”79 Photographs remained
a source of conflict for American newspaper editors until the 1940s. Photographers
75 Hill and Helmers, 2. 76 Quoted in Hill and Helmers, 3. 77 Sontag, 107. 78 Walter Benjamin, ‘A Short History of Photography’, Screen 13 (1972)1: 25. 79 Barnhurst and Nerone, 18.
25
were called ‘newspaper illustrators’ or ‘pictorial reporters’.80 In other words, the text
was supposed to bring the news; pictures were helpful to enhance the design of
newspaper pages, but were content-wise seen as intruders. As photography became
a respected part of journalism, images took on a role of content-carrier as well.81
According to Barthes, the press photograph “no longer illustrates the words; it is
now the words which, structurally, are parasitic on the image.”82 In modern articles,
combining words and pictures, the photograph is often seen as the main element of
the total message, carrying the most vital information. The text amplifies
connotations present in the image, or adds to the denoted image other, cultural
meanings.
Still, the photograph on its own provides an unstable and variable message,
Barthes and others claim. Given that a photograph appears to be a neutral
‘codeless’ reflection of reality, its cultural signs are uncertain. Consequently, the
meaning of the image is undecided. Barthes describes images as “polysemous; they
imply, underlying their signifiers, a ‘floating chain’ of signifieds, the reader able to
choose some and ignore others.”83 Images alone are too open to several meanings.
The words that go with the photograph, mostly captions, can solve this issue of
meaning by providing verbal guidance to the viewer, for example by identifying the
main elements in the picture. In other words, the linguistic message ‘anchors’ this
chain of signifieds, to provide certainty when it comes to the meaning of signs. 84
Captions are therefore crucial elements in photojournalism. They ensure the
viewer/reader understands from the image the message intended by the producer.
This view grants much ideological power to the written word, and sees the verbal
text still as the most significant element in the informational structure.
So far, texts and images have been presented as two structures of information. A
distinction that has been institutionalized, in the press – printing photographs and
text as separate units made and supervised by different people – and in schools –
students have separate writing and photography classes.85 Barthes also sees the
totality of the representation as a combination of two separate structures: the visual
80 Zelizer, Remembering to Forget, 17. 81 For more on the role of press photographers and pictures in the press, see chapter two of this thesis. 82 Barthes, Image-Music-Text, 25. 83 Ibidem, 39. 84 For examples of captions functioning as ‘anchorage’ see the discussion on the role of captions in chapter four. 85 Barnhurst and Nerone, The Form of News,10.
26
and the textual, which are “contiguous but not ‘homogenized’”.86 Relations between
words and pictures have been largely neglected in academic studies, Mitchell
attests. Instead of looking at the interaction between words and images, we “‘insist
on separating the study of texts and images from one another by rigid disciplinary
boundaries.’”87 Mitchell sees the relation between verbal and visual language as a
constant exchange of meaning. Language in some form “usually enters the
experience of viewing photography or of viewing anything else”, but the relation
between photography and language should be seen “not as a structural matter of
‘levels’ or as a fluid exchange, but (to use Barthes’s term) as a site of ‘resistance.’”88
In photographs there is an ongoing struggle over meaning between the visual and
verbal signs. The quality of this resistance varies; in photo essays that include large
sections of verbal text, the struggle may be more evident than in photo essays
which feature only trivial captions.
The assumption that photographs are a ‘floating chain of signifieds’ supports the
idea that photographs are chaotic, unstructured messages. It makes them
dependent on the grammar of the text to order this message. But do images not
contain structuring of their own, a visual grammar?
Recently, scholars began exploring this question, looking at elements of (Western)
visual design: color, perspective, framing, composition. Also, the field of visual
grammar examines the relation between images and writing, for example in
advertisements and newspapers. All these elements work to create meaning in
images. And this is, in short, what can be called the grammar of images. Similarly
to the structural rules directing the composition of words and sentences in any
verbal language, images contain structural organization. Gunther Kress and Theo
van Leeuwen have studied the grammar of visual design and disagree with
Barthes’s assumption that images are always dependent on verbal messages. They
believe Barthes misses one vital point: “the visual component of a text is an
independently organized and structured message – connected with the verbal text,
but in no way dependent on it; and similarly the other way around.”89 Images are
thus able to express solid messages, because internal structures influence the way
we ‘read’ them, making one meaning more salient than another. 86 Barthes, Image-Music-Text, 16. 87 Quoted in Hill and Helmers, 2. 88 W.J.T. Mitchell, Picture Theory: Essays on Verbal and Visual Representation (Chicago and London: The University of Chicago Press, 1994), 282-85. 89 Kress and Van Leeuwen, 17.
27
By dissecting photographs, looking at composition, color, perspective, lines,
contrast (between foreground and background), people and objects, Kress and Van
Leeuwen point to the presence of narrative processes in images. They analyze the
semiotic code of pictures by identifying interaction between participants and
processes present in the image. Where verbal language uses verbs to indicate
action, images contain elements (as simple as bodies or limbs for example) forming
lines that realize comparable action processes. So, even though verbal and visual
languages differ in potential – some messages can only be realized by verbal
language, other messages need visual signs – both are structured and both are able
to form complete messages on their own. A more detailed look at visual grammar
will be included in the last chapter, using two Life photo essays as examples.
The theory of visual grammar thus holds that images alone are capable of showing
narrative processes and a sense of action and development, though a narrative
representation does not mean the picture contains a full story. This element of
‘narrativity’ is particularly interesting when looking at photo essays, since if one
photograph can contain elements of narrativity, one would expect a series of photos
to have an even greater potential to realize narratives. The last part of this chapter
will therefore explore the possibilities of creating a narrative in photographs and
photo essays.
1.4 Narratives in photographs
Theories about the relation between words and images, and the (in)ability of images
to construct a narrative, have been around since the pre-photographic time. In
1776, Gotthold Ephraim Lessing attacked the idea that images (in this case
paintings) could be narrative. According to Lessing, words and paintings had
distinct functions: painting for description, words for narration. This presumption
remained popular until mid-twentieth century, when the advance of mass media
and the avant-garde ended the strict border between the two media. 90 The
ideological distinction between high and low art – the image as illustration was
considered a simple low art form, not to be used in serious high art literary works –
was challenged and the use of images in narratives increased. In the Surrealist
90 Jan Baetens, ‘Image and Narrative’, in Routledge Encyclopedia of Narrative Theory, eds. David Herman et al. (London and New York: Routledge, 2005), 236.
28
literature of the 1920s, photographs were used as narrative elements, and artists
like Man Ray used photographs in collage-novels to “provide information crucial for
understanding the narrative itself.”91
Today, many critics claim that narrative is not reliant on the medium that carries it;
it is ‘transmedial’, since narratives can be represented in different media, such as
literature, painting, and photography.92 The narrative potential of photographs (and
other forms of images), however, varies from genre to genre and from picture to
picture. Some photographs have absolutely zero narrative potential (think of
abstract art), while other photographs are likely to realize some form of narrativity.
For a medium to be qualified as ‘narrative’, it has to show some crucial features.
Some of the core traits, so-called ‘narratemes’, that determine the narrativity of a
painting or photograph are according to Wolf: the presence of a “possible world in
which time and change play a vital role”, actors who experience change, and action
or events that show this change; also, chronology, causality and teleology, are some
narratemes that influence the strength of the narrative.93 If all core narratemes are
present in a picture, it seems fair to label it narrative; the absence of narratemes
weakens a picture’s narrativity.
Text and image have historically been divided into two categories: “arts of time and
arts of space.”94 Parna argues that this distinction, and thus the resulting rejection
of the notion of temporality in a picture, is inaccurate. Even though the
combination of a fixed image and a temporal quality seems paradoxical, she claims
that images can possess “both the qualities of a picture and those of a story.”95
Accordingly, the characteristic that greatly affects the narrativity of a medium is the
“spatio-temporal extension”, as Ryan argues. 96 Some media are solely temporal
(expressing the dimension of time): verbal language is one of them. Media such as
painting and photography are purely spatial (expressing the dimension of space).
The photo essay, as a combination of photography and language, is therefore a
‘spatio-temporal’ medium. Temporal media are believed to be more suitable for
91 Ibidem, 237. 92 Werner Wolf, ‘Pictorial Narrativity’, in Routledge Encyclopedia of Narrative Theory, eds. David Herman et al. (London and New York: Routledge, 2005), 431. 93 Wolf, ‘Narrative and Narrativity’, 189. 94 Karen Parna, “Narrative, Time and the Fixed Image”, in Time, Narrative and the Fixed Image, eds. Mireille Ribière and Jan Baetens (Amsterdam: Rodopi, 2001), 29. 95 Parna, 29. 96 Marie-Laure Ryan, ‘Media and Narrative’ in Routledge Encyclopedia of Narrative Theory, eds. David Herman et al. (London and New York: Routledge, 2005), 291.
29
expressing narratives than spatial media, as the latter have trouble representing
time and therefore action and movement. The image is, as Ryan argues, “prevented
by [its] purely spatial nature from explicitly representing […] the proper subject
matter of narrative: the temporal nature of human experience.”97
There is, however, a crucial difference between two forms of spatial media: single
pictures and picture series. Wolf evaluates the narrative potential of these two
‘genres’, finding that a single picture can have a narrative character in two ways.
Firstly, when the picture refers to, or is a “detailed transposition” of an existent
narrative, such as a passage in a novel. Secondly, the picture can possess
“genuinely pictorial means of conveying elements of narrativity, such as ‘tell-tale’
objects, ‘atmosphere, light, texture, and spatial relations.’”98 And, the design of a
picture can suggest temporal action, Wolf argues, through “spatial dynamics of
gestures and movements or ‘frozen action’”.99 This is similar to what Kress and Van
Leeuwen argue in their analysis of visual grammar. The limits of the individual
picture, however, prevent this genre form being fully narrative, Wolf argues. A single
picture can, for example, only suggest a process of change, not show it. The viewer
will have to make an assumption about what has preceded and what will follow.100
This contrasts with the narrativity of film, for example, which is based on the
succession of pictures and therefore more likely to form a narrative.
In agreement with Wolf, Sontag argues that we cannot understand from a
photograph alone:
In contrast to the amorous relation, which is based on how something looks, understanding is based on how it functions. And functioning takes place in
time, and must be explained in time. Only that which narrates can make us
understand. The limit of photographic knowledge of the world is that, while it
can goad conscience, it can, finally, never be ethical or political knowledge.101
Since single pictures can represent only one instant in time and no ‘before and
after’, a viewer can only imagine the stories hinted at in the picture. Single pictures,
Wolf concludes, “can never actually represent a narrative but at best metonymically
97 Ibidem, 292. 98 Wolf, ‘Pictorial Narrativity’, 431-32. 99 Wolf, ‘Narrative and Narrativity’, 191. 100 Ibidem, 432. 101 Sontag, 23-24.
30
point to a story.102 Photographs can indicate that they contain a story, but they
cannot ‘spell it out’ for its viewers.
Is this different for series of related photographs? According to Barthes, in the case
of a sequence, “the signifier of connotation is […] no longer to be found at the level
of any one of the fragments of the sequence, but at that – what the linguists would
call the suprasegmental level – of the concatenation”, thus at the level of the series
as a whole. 103 Seeing a number of photographs together can change the
connotations that would be formed when seeing just one of those photos. Moreover,
a series of photographs, such as the pictures in a Life photo essay, can offer more
easily structural elements that single photographs have problems with, such as
movement and repetition. These elements will subsequently change the connoted
message of the individual photographs.
Series of pictures, like photo essays, have intrinsically more narrative potential
than single pictures. Their serial nature alone implies narrativity, as it uses “the
convention of ‘reading’ spatial juxtaposition as an index of chronological
sequence.”104 Still, this does not mean that all picture or photographic series are
narrative. Just like single pictures, series that show abstract (instead of
representational) and static (as opposed to dynamic) elements, and no people, are
not considered narrative. And, like Barthes, Sontag, and other ‘narratologists’, Wolf
concludes that the written word is a significant stimulant of narrativity, as certain
relations and circumstances, such as precise chronology, cannot be realized in
pictorial representations.105 So, while photo essays generally contain captions and
accompanying texts, an analysis of the narrative potential of just the photographs
would not be accurate. A detailed analysis of the possible narrativity of picture
series can examine the narrativity of the pictures, but will sooner or later have to
include the relationship between image and words. The two forms are intrinsically
linked to each other, and the total message of a photo essay is formed through their
cooperation. Yet, prior to analyzing the innovations in visual communication
presented by the photo essay, a sense of the progress of press photography from its
early use to its role in the 1930s is essential. The next chapter will address this
evolvement.
102 Wolf, ‘Pictorial Narrativity’, 433. 103 Barthes, Image-Music-Text, 24. 104 Wolf, ‘Pictorial Narrativity’, 433. 105 Ibidem, 433-35.
31
2.2.2.2. PICTURES IN THE AMERPICTURES IN THE AMERPICTURES IN THE AMERPICTURES IN THE AMERICAN PRESSICAN PRESSICAN PRESSICAN PRESS
FROM EARLY NUISANCES TO 1930’S PHOTOJOURNALISM
Illustrative photography is the world citizen’s microscope on the events that will shape history... And seeing is knowing. So make way for the
photographer! Open all roads and doors to him! He is the photojournalist of your history.
Berliner Illustrirte Zeitung, 1919.106
In retrospective, it lasted almost a hundred years from the invention of the
photograph to the successful use of photography as a journalistic medium. During
that century, photography developed from an artistic endeavor for the upper-class
to the supposedly realist recorder of history, to be understood by a largely middle-
class audience. Before looking at Life’s formula and photo essays in detail, it is
useful to trace the history of photojournalism in America. A look at what role(s)
photography played in American mainstream newspapers and magazines provides
the necessary context to analyse Life’s use of photographs, and allows us to
interrogate the question: ‘How did Life’s photo essays differ from traditional uses of
photojournalism?’ What follows is a literature review covering the role of news
pictures in American society, a short history of the rise of American
photojournalism and magazine publications, as well as a background of Henry
Luce’s publishing enterprise. The next chapter will focus on Life’s formula and the
photo essay, specifically.
Evidently, the range of studies on American photojournalism and photographic
magazines is vast. Three main fields of inquiry – history, cultural studies, and
language studies – provide insights into the course of American (photo)journalism,
its cultural and ideological implications (the field of journalism, with its rituals and
habitus, as a producer of culture), and the language of images and its storytelling
traits. While chapter one explored significant cultural and linguistic theories on
photography and its role in the press, this chapter will mainly provide a historical
perspective on photojournalism.
106 Vicki Goldberg, ‘Picture This’, Life 22 (1999) 5: 12.
32
Much has been written, for example, on the documentary trends of the late
nineteenth century and the New Deal period. Carlebach investigates the beginnings
of American photojournalism at the end of the nineteenth century and its growth in
the following decades.107 Specific studies on magazines of the 1920s and 1930s,
including Luce’s Fortune, Time, and Life, have been conducted by Tebbel and
Zuckerman.108 And Angeletti and Oliva focus on the specifics of Life’s successful
formula, its take on photojournalism and the qualities of its photo essays.109
A relatively new body of research looks at photojournalism from a theoretical and
historical viewpoint, integrating critical methods from the field of cultural studies.
For example, Lutz and Collins analyze National Geographic photographs as cultural
texts and Kozol focuses on Life as a medium that shaped American ideals of family
life, by featuring photos that romanticized middle-class domesticity of the 1940s
and 1950s. Specific photographs have also been subjects of investigation, as in
Flamiano’s study of Life’s use of nudity, in particular in its 1937 article “How to
Undress”. She explores what these pictures reveal about ideologies of gender and
race.
Zelizer and Trachtenberg have both published several studies on the photograph as
a cultural and ideological product: “‘a cardinal site of cultural conflict, of contests
over interpretation and meaning and over the social power of images to control not
only perceptions across the lines of class and gender and ethnic identity but the
perception of reality itself.’”110 In Reading American Photographs: Images as History,
Mathew Brady to Walker Evans, Trachtenberg treats well-known photographs by
Brady, O’Sullivan and Evans as both products and shapers of American history in
his work about “interpretations of America --- what certain artists have had to say
about their society through photography.”111 Guimond traces how the idea of the
American Dream has been confirmed or challenged by documentary photographers
107 See Michael L. Carlebach, The Origins of Photojournalism in America (Washington: Smithsonian Institution Press, 1992) and American Photojournalism Comes of Age (Washington: Smithsonian Institution Press, 1997). 108 John Tebbel and Mary Ellen Zuckerman, The Magazine in America 1741-1990 (New York and Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1991). 109 Norberto Angeletti and Alberto Oliva, Magazines That Make History: Their Origin, Development, and Influence (Gainesville: University Press of Florida, 2004). 110 Quoted in James Guimond, American Photography and the American Dream (Chapel Hill and London: University of North Carolina Press, 1991), vii. 111 Alan Trachtenberg, Reading American Photographs: Images as History, Mathew Brady to Walker Evans (New York: Hill and Wang, 1989), xiii.
33
of the twentieth century. His examination includes magazine pictures from Life and
its competitor Look, publications that overall expressed the American way of life.
Less research has been done on the photo essay specifically as a form of narrative
reporting. Kozol does address the cultural impact of the photo essay, but focuses
mainly on the ideological message of the photo essays, and less on the narrative
mechanisms of photos, captions and texts, and how these elements work together
to form a narrative.112 Mitchell does concentrate on the ‘narrativity’ (the narrative
potential) of pictures and photo essays, but includes in his study only books. This
thesis will attempt to show if and how specifically photographs in Life’s photo
essays created narratives.113 First however, it is helpful to outline how photographic
images made their way into American journalism and how the role of news
photography changed from the year it was first employed to the year Life first
appeared.
2.1 Tracing the origins of American photojournalism: 1842-1880
To think that photography became part of the printed press from the day it was
invented is wrong. Early period photographs could not be reproduced on paper. And
besides the many technical constraints that had to be overcome, newsroom
traditions, including the practice of handmade illustrations, somewhat delayed the
rise of photojournalism.
In 1842, just a few years after the invention of photography, The Illustrated London
News became the world’s first illustrated paper. Yet, its pictures were not
photographs, but engraved drawings of almost anything that happened in
society.114 While Roger Fenton became the world’s first official war photographer in
1855, covering the Crimean War for The Illustrated London News, his photographs
were converted into woodcuts before being printed, as a method for reproducing
photographs was not yet developed. The use of non-photographic pictures in
American newspapers and magazines had been a general practice since the 1850s,
when Harper’s Weekly and Frank Leslie’s Illustrated Newspaper, the two most
112 Wendy Kozol, Life’s America: Family and Nation in Postwar Photojournalism (Philadelphia: Temple University Press, 1994). 113 W.J.T. Mitchell, Picture Theory: Essays on Verbal and Visual Representation (Chicago and London: The University of Chicago Press, 1994). 114 Goldberg, 12.
34
important illustrated periodicals of mid-nineteenth century contained, on average, a
fifty/fifty proportion of pictures to words.115 The illustrations could take a range of
forms, including sketches, ‘fine drawings’ and cartoons.
In 1873, the New York Daily Graphic became the first American illustrated
newspaper.116 The newspaper eventually started testing the halftone print process,
which entails black dots (varying in size) to create grey tones in an image. This was
the first effective way of reproducing photographs. Still, the Daily Graphic and other
newspapers relied to a great deal on handmade illustrations. Often, illustrators
created picture stories, reconstructing events in what look like a series of film stills.
These handmade etchings were heavily based on artistic conventions, using theater
as a model for the poses and expressions of the people in the drawing.117 It was not
until the 1880s that the halftone print process made it possible to effectively
reproduce photos and print them next to words on one page.118 Yet, these prints
were still of poor quality, and did not instantly replace illustrations. Only by 1897
were halftone prints of sufficient quality to effectively replace drawn illustrations.119
At that point, fast rotary presses (often copper cylinders in which the image was
engraved) ensured useful reproductions. Around 1900, Frank Leslie’s Illustrated
Newspaper ran full-page photographs on its covers.120
Different types of illustration, including photography by the end of the nineteenth
century, were used side by side. Photography did not instantly become the norm in
illustrating the news, but gradually replaced most other modes of illustration. The
shift in dominance of picture forms had not solely technical causes, but was also
due to a change in opinions on subjectivity and objectivity; photographs became
equated with fact, illustrations with opinion. 121 However, photography did not
replace other illustrations until the turn of the century, when “photography finally
displayed imperial tendencies.” 122 By the end of the nineteenth century,
photographs made up half of all illustrations in the primary American magazines.123
And several newspapers ran weekly (Sunday) rotogravure sections, which featured
115 Craig, 46. 116 Idem. 117 William Hannigan and Ken Johnston, Picture Machine: The Rise of American Newspictures (New York: Harry N. Abrams Inc., 2004), 15. 118 Goldberg, 12. 119 Craig, 48. 120 Kobré, 339. 121 Craig, 36. 122 Barnhurst and Nerone, The Form of News, 118. 123 Goldberg, 12.
35
photographs and captions only, printed by means of engravings on a copper
cylinder.124
2.2 The growth of American photojournalism: 1880-1936
As mentioned above, the halftone print process developed in the 1880s meant a
milestone in the growth of American news photography. Carlebach lists two main
factors of significance for this growth between 1880 and 1936. First, the increase in
illustrated newspapers and magazines made the printed press highly popular with
the American public, and its popularity increased the public demand for
photography as an essential part of these publications. Second, because of new
technologies (roll film, ‘miniature’ camera’s, flash powder and later flashbulbs, and
improved printing techniques), photojournalism became a much more effective and
refined practice.125 Besides technical innovations on the camera and print side, the
creation of wire services suitable for the distribution of photographs ensured a
nationwide reach for photographers.126
The 1890s also saw a change in the practice of illustrated journalism, as a new type
of magazine aimed at a middle-class (female) audience grew popular. Prior to these
inexpensive publications, that sold for five or ten cents, the American magazine
reader had a choice between pricey intellectual monthlies and cheap sentimental
weeklies. There were few popular general interest magazines before the twentieth
century. 127 Those that did exist (e.g. Ladies’ Home Journal, Collier’s Weekly)
frequently published early work from muckrackers and social reformers and
“embraced a realist ethos.”128 Photography became the ideal instrument to adhere
to this realism approach. The publication in 1890 of Jacob Riis’ How the Other Half
Lives (featuring seventeen halftones) was a “landmark moment in the marriage of
social realism, journalism, and photography,” a relationship further exemplified by
an increase in drawings and photographs focusing on people (sometimes in action)
and travel photography.129
124 Hannigan and Johnston, 15. 125 Carlebach, American Photojournalism Comes of Age, 1-2. 126 Kobré, 336. 127 Theodore Peterson, Magazines in the Twentieth Century (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1964), 2. 128 Barnhurst and Nerone, The Form of News, 132-33. 129 Ibidem, 133.
36
Press photographs grew popular with many editors as well as the American public
at the start of the twentieth century. Industrialism granted employees more time to
read, and immigrants whose English was poor liked the universal language of
photographs and movies.130 The modern popular magazine emerged: low in price
and, as a result of industrialization’s mass production and distribution, with
circulations up to one million (Ladies’ Home Journal). 131 Turn-of-the-century
‘yellow’ newspapers, such as Joseph Pulitzer’s New York World, developed a form of
journalism that combined news with entertainment and made photographs a
central part of this mix.132 The halftone process had by now gained widespread use
and photographs could be reproduced on a mass-production level.
There was another print medium drawing attention from lower class and middle-
class Americans, including recently settled immigrants. In 1919, New York’s
Illustrated Daily News (later Daily News: New York’s Picture Newspaper) became the
first American tabloid. It featured photos of crime and other shocking events, and
reached a public of almost a million in the following years. It sold for only two cents
a copy, making the news affordable for many.133 Publishers had by now realized
that “pictures sold papers, which sold ads.”134 Soon, tabloids were “crammed with
photographs.” 135 The number of photographs printed per newspaper per week
increased by 205 percent between 1920 and 1930, the decade that saw an immense
growth of American mass media to the point where it consolidated “into a national
commercial culture”.136
There was yet another reason for this immense rise in news pictures. In 1919,
newspaper magnate William Randolph Hearst formed the first news service that
distributed photographs, as a division of his International News Service. Others
followed, and by 1928 there were six major services distributing photographs. This
meant great progress, especially for smaller businesses that had trouble financing
the introduction of photographs in their publications. The costs involved in
adjusting presses, purchasing the right material and hiring photographers and dark
room personnel were vast. However, the distribution so far still relied on physical
transportation, and as more and more publishers asked for photographs in their 130 Kobré, 347. 131 Peterson, 13. 132 Carlebach, American Photojournalism Comes of Age, 14-15. 133 Kobré, 347. 134 Hannigan and Johnston, 8. 135 Carlebach, American Photojournalism Comes of Age, 144. 136 Kozol, 27-28.
37
journals, the demand for the electronic distribution of images increased. However,
at this time the telegraph was suited for the dissemination of text only.137
2.3 Photographs as instruments of ‘objective’ journalism
With the urge for more ‘objective’ reporting emerging at the end of the nineteenth
century, illustrations came to be seen as opinion rather than fact. Compared to the
staged depictions in for example the New York Daily Graphic, photography appeared
a neutral, authentic way of showing events; it presented “an evidently unfiltered
reality that was certainly not narrative.”138 While artists and authors were held
responsible for their representation of the news – political cartoons in particular
expressed the artist’s subjective view – photographers’ work was seen as a direct
reflection of reality, which required the “effacement of authorship.”139 Photographs
(or initially even sketches made after photographic models) achieved a status of
factual, as long as they appeared not to be retouched or manipulated.140 They were
presented as authorized records of events, and hence served as visual verification of
the written text. Photography’s effective use in the press was still severely limited
however, since films needed long exposure times, and were therefore often unable to
capture “the decisive moment” of news events, as action shots were hard to
make.141
Precisely when ‘objective’ news reporting became a professional ideal is hard to tell.
The road to professionalization began in the 1830s, when the penny press (cheap,
tabloid-style newspapers) established the tradition of paid journalists. Gradually, in
the years following the Civil War, as the newspaper business became big business,
journalists gained a professional status and assumed a responsibility to “contribute
to the general welfare of an increasingly democratic society.”142 The 1890s saw the
appearance of two professional branches of journalism: the yellow press based on
the ideal of journalism as ‘stories’, and the press focused on factuality and the ideal
of ‘information’ (e.g. The New York Times).143 But it was only after the First World
137 Hannigan and Johnston, 8. 138 Ibidem, 15. 139 Barnhurst and Nerone, The Form of News, 138. 140 Craig, 36. 141 Ibidem, 48. 142 Stuart Allan, ‘News and the Public Sphere: Towards a History of Objectivity and Impartiality’, in A Journalism Reader, eds. Michael Bromley and Tom O’Malley (London and New York: Routledge, 1997), 307. 143 Michael Schudson, Discovering the News (New York: Basic Books, 1978), 89.
38
War that a professional debate on the merits of ‘objectivity’ emerged, Schudson
argues. This debate was fuelled largely by the wish of many journalists to
disaffiliate from professional public relation and propaganda specialists that had
emerged during WW I.144
It took decades from the first use of photographs in the American press for news
pictures to become acknowledged as key instruments of ‘objective’ journalism.
Besides many technical imperfections that initially limited the use of photography,
there were critics who believed news publications should remain free from
photography. Ever since photographs appeared in American journalism, there were
those that endorsed them on the one hand, and those that believed images,
compared to words, were a secondary type of information, a danger for American
culture, and a bad influence on Americans’ intellect.145 And while photography has
become a common ingredient of today’s journalism, some publishers remain
cautious about including photographs in newspapers. The Wall Street Journal, for
example, has been printing ink dot drawings (‘hedcuts’) rather than photographs of
people, since 1979.146 Its first six-column front page photograph was published only
last year, showing the U.S. Airways plane that landed on New York’s Hudson
River.147
Despite the public’s love for photographs, many editors considered photography a
necessary evil. Until well into the twentieth century photographers were seen by
many journalism professionals as technicians only, useful to collect facts, not to
find a story of their own, as this was done by ‘real’ journalists. Critic Silas Bent,
journalist and lecturer, wrote in 1926 about the crude nature of press photography,
comparing tabloids to what he thought to be primitive jazz music. According to
Bent, photographs were “‘easier to read […], comprehensible to the most numerous
audience, the lowest mental common denominator.’”148 Prior to the Second World
144 Michael Schudson, ‘The Objectivity Norm in American Journalism’, in Journalism 2 (2001) 2: 159-63. 145 Hannigan and Johnston, 14. 146 ‘Picturing Business in America: Hedcuts in The Wall Street Journal’, Smithsonian National Portrait Gallery <http://www.npg.si.edu/exh/journal/> 15 February 2010. 147‘Wall Street Journal Photo First’, Editor and Publisher <http://www.eandppub.com/2009/01/wall-street-journal-photo-first-.html> 15 February 2010. 148 Quoted in Carlebach, American Photojournalism Comes of Age, 145.
39
War, even photographers themselves felt ambivalent about the role of pictures in
the press. 149
The term ‘photojournalism’ therefore does not accurately describe the state of
photographers and news pictures at the early twentieth century. Photography was
generally not considered journalism. Most news service photographers worked
anonymously, seeing no credits for their work. This was the case at businesses that
found photographs objectionable, as well as at photo-friendly papers.150 Newspaper
publishers in particular worried that readers would rather see hand-drawn pictures
made by true artists, rather than the mechanical photograph. Moreover, unlike
photographers, artists were well-respected and reputable members of the
newspaper staff.151
2.4 Photojournalism as a respected profession
Despite critics’ objections, press photography developed into a stable component of
American journalism during the 1930s and rapidly grew popular with the public.
So, what led to the establishment of photojournalism as a genuine profession?
Photojournalism is more than printing a picture on a newspaper page. Accordingly,
the early use of pictures in newspapers and magazines as page-embellishments is
not photojournalism. As Carlebach explains, the “principal unit of photojournalism
is the noncommercial combination of text and photograph on the printed page, not
the single hard-news image.” 152 In photojournalism photos and words form a
coalition in which both elements mutually form the news message. Sometimes the
image serves as the main content carrier, at other occasions the text. The picture
no longer functions as an illustration only, but is used as the preliminary element
for telling stories. Or, as Life photo editor Wilson Hicks noted, in photojournalism
the traditional order of producing words before pictures is reversed. 153 Also, in
photojournalism subjects are diverse, comprising more than the initially
predominant pictures of accidents, disasters, criminals and celebrities.
149 Zelizer, Remembering to Forget, 21. 150 Hannigan and Johnston, 16. 151 Kobré, 340. 152 Carlebach, American Photojournalism Comes of Age, 6. 153 Wilson Hicks, ‘What is Photojournalism?’ (from Words and Pictures), in Photographic Communication: Principles, Problems and Challenges of Photojournalism, ed. R. Smith Schuneman (New York: Hastings House, 1972), 34.
40
The 1930s is generally considered the era in which modern American news
photography, or photojournalism, flourished. Photographs now gained “the status
of content, fully integrated into the journalistic enterprise.” 154 Barnhurst and
Nerone discuss the changing role of news photography at a time when textual
narratives in newspapers became shorter and less descriptive. They found that the
size and the number of photos grew over time. Moreover, the amount of captions
grew, and photographers began to be considered true journalists and received credit
for their work. Also, as papers printed more and more pictures, the connections
between several photographs became more intricate. This evolved until
“photography […] carried a replete narrative load.”155
Again, this professionalization and institutionalization of photojournalism was in
part a result of some influential technological improvements in the 1920’s: the light-
weight, easy to use Leica camera; fast 35 mm film; and the flashbulb. The German
miniature Leica camera challenged the traditionally static character of news
photography. It was labeled as ‘Foto-Auge’ or photographic eye in Germany,
suggesting it could capture the world exactly as the photographer saw it.156 Because
of its fast lens (which lets more light hit the film), it could often photograph without
flashlight. The invention of the small camera, by Leica and others went hand in
hand with the use of roll film instead of glass plates. Leica was the first camera to
use 35mm film. The film enabled photographers to take as many pictures as they
wanted. In 1925, the flashbulb was first used. Though still impractically large and
fragile, the flashbulb meant a great improvement to flash powders which created
instant fire and thick smoke.157 For photographers, this meant a range of new
possibilities, such as capturing subjects in action, and photographing indoors and
in low light. Moreover, photographers could capture their subjects unobtrusively,
and so posed portraits were no longer the foremost type of picture.
While new cameras and attributes made photographers’ lives easier, distributing
photographs remained challenging. Though Hearst’s International News Photos
and other photo services, like Underwood and Underwood (1896), Acme News
Pictures (1923), and The Associated Press Photo Service (1927) took care of the 154 Barnhurst and Nerone, ‘The President is Dead: American News Photography, and the New Long Journalism’, 62. 155 Ibidem, 66. 156 Angeletti and Oliva, 120. 157 Kobré, 351.
41
circulation of photographs, it was not until the invention of the Wirephoto (the
telegraph for pictures) in 1933 that photographs were distributed electronically.
Publishers in all parts of the country now printed photographs on a regular basis.
Wirephoto, an Associated Press trademark, was soon followed by similar systems
from other news agencies. Now, readers did not have to wait days, even weeks,
before they could see what the paper had already told them in words.158 Moreover,
as readers all over the country saw the same pictures at the same time, “it was now
possible for a single image to define an event.”159 The ‘wirephoto’ enabled events to
become shared experiences.
The first event that became a truly photographic event was the catastrophe of the
Hindenburg, the largest zeppelin ever built, that burst into flames on May 6, 1937,
which was captured on film by both professional and amateur photographers. One
single photograph of this event is still fixed in Americans’ collective memory.160 The
disaster, covered in Life by a sequence of nine pictures shot by an amateur
photographer armed with a Leica, thus signaled the great power of news
photography and “presaged a new age of photojournalism, when picture stories
made by photographers with small, unobtrusive 35-millimeter cameras would come
to dominate the printed page.” 161 Also, the Wirephoto made it possible for
newspapers and magazines to increase the number of photographs on their pages,
and would provide many of the pictures published in Life.
158 Hannigan and Johnston, 17. 159 Ibidem, 9. 160 Hannigan and Johnston, 9. 161 Carlebach, American Photojournalism Comes of Age, 192.
Figure 1 The Hindenburg explosion o
In addition to these technological enhancements, photography increasingly gained
social power and photographers grew popular with the American public. Beginning
at the end of the nineteenth century, photographs ha
public opinion and the course of politics. At the start of the twentieth century,
American social reform was accompanied by a strong tradition of social
documentary photography. Jacob Riis’ 1890 book
living conditions of the poor in New York slums
halftone photographic reproductions and helped improve the city’s tenements.
Lewis Hine’s early twentieth century photographs of children working in American
factories led to a temporary ban on ch
162 Photo Sam Shere/Getty Images, <http://www.life.com/image/first/inhindenburg-disaster>, December 10, 2009.
enburg explosion on May 6, 1937.162
In addition to these technological enhancements, photography increasingly gained
social power and photographers grew popular with the American public. Beginning
at the end of the nineteenth century, photographs had been influential in chan
public opinion and the course of politics. At the start of the twentieth century,
American social reform was accompanied by a strong tradition of social
documentary photography. Jacob Riis’ 1890 book How the Other Half Lives
of the poor in New York slums, was innovative in its use of
halftone photographic reproductions and helped improve the city’s tenements.
Lewis Hine’s early twentieth century photographs of children working in American
factories led to a temporary ban on child labor in the U.S. His picture stories
Photo Sam Shere/Getty Images, <http://www.life.com/image/first/in-gallery/26252/thember 10, 2009.
42
In addition to these technological enhancements, photography increasingly gained
social power and photographers grew popular with the American public. Beginning
been influential in changing
public opinion and the course of politics. At the start of the twentieth century,
American social reform was accompanied by a strong tradition of social
How the Other Half Lives, on the
was innovative in its use of
halftone photographic reproductions and helped improve the city’s tenements.
Lewis Hine’s early twentieth century photographs of children working in American
ild labor in the U.S. His picture stories
gallery/26252/the-
43
(combinations of text and photographs) were forerunners of the 1930s photo
essays.163
This social documentary tradition continued during the 1930s with the
photography department of the Farm Security Administration.164 In 1936, the year
Life came out, a small group of New York City photographers organized the Photo
League to promote their documentary work and offer photographers darkroom
facilities. Among the contributors to the Photo League were famous Life
photographers Margaret Bourke-White and W. Eugene Smith. 165 This rise in
documentary photography, combined with a stream of large-format (photographic)
magazines such as Life that formed an outlet for these photographs, brought about
another high point in the attractiveness and assumed reliability of American news
photography. For that reason, the next decade witnessed a booming picture
magazine industry, mainly stimulated by the events of World War II.166
News photography’s institutionalization continued in the 1940s, when war
photography was more and more addressed in feature articles, and Life founded its
own school for war photographers. Moreover, 1942 was the year the term
‘photojournalism’ was mentioned by one American university, to describe their class
in journalistic training. Several universities began to offer photojournalism
tutorials. 167 In 1946, U.S. photographers united to form the National Press
Photographers Association (NPPA), an organization aimed at promoting
photojournalism and obtaining more rights for photographers, such as access into
courtrooms. On the front page of the first issue of the association’s periodical, its
editors declared:
With this issue is born a voice, one that has been mute much too long. We're no longer going to permit ourselves to be relegated to the position of
unwelcome, but necessary, stepchildren of the Fourth Estate. We've got a voice, finally, and we're going to make use of it.168
Still, in some newsrooms it would take years for photographers to become fully
accepted as journalists. In many organizations, pictures continued to be seen as far 163 Carlebach, American Photojournalism Comes of Age, 132. 164 Dolores Flamiano, ‘The (Nearly) Naked Truth: Gender, Race, and Nudity in Life, 1937’, in Journalism History 28 (2002) 3: 126. 165 Carlebach, American Photojournalism Comes of Age, 139. 166 Goldberg, 13. 167 Zelizer, Remembering to Forget, 21-23. 168 ‘Greetings to All in the Craft of Press Photography’, in National Press Photographer (April 1946), <http://www.nppa.org/about_us/history>, November 10, 2009.
44
subordinate to words, at best useful to increase sales. A year after the founding of
the NPPA, executive editor of the Knight Newspapers corporation Basil L. Walters
pointed out how in many news companies, photos were regarded “‘nuisance
jobs.’”169
2.5 Differences between newspaper and magazine photography
Except for the early twentieth-century yellow press, newspapers slowly adopted
photographs. While newspaper editors largely held on to illustration conventions,
some magazines did explore the possibilities of the photograph. Travel magazine
National Geographic (since 1888); general magazines Collier’s Weekly (since 1888)
and The Saturday Evening Post (since 1897); Conde Nast’s fashion magazine Vogue
(since 1909), interior design magazine House and Garden (since 1911) and lifestyle
magazine Vanity Fair (since 1914) sooner or later all made photography a central
part of their contents.
Between 1920 and 1930 newspapers saw a transformation in design, and a change
in the role of news photography. Barnhurst and Nerone have studied the changing
looks and roles of news photography and find that change was “neither sudden nor
linear. It came about only through experimentation – the wilder the better.”170
Among the most prominent changes was the growing use of action pictures and
picture sequences during this period, rather than portraits and landscapes. Also,
with the rise of modernism and its endorsement of “dominant imagery and emotive
detail”, photos were increasingly close-ups and tightly cropped.171 Often they were
cut into unusual shapes – triangles, or circles. By 1938, newspapers began
featuring stand-alone photos on their front pages.172
Even though many newspaper editors increased their pictorial displays, most were
still cautious not to let photographs dominate the pages. Tabloids (e.g. New York
Daily News and New York Graphic) continued their extensive use of photography,
while other newspapers published weekly picture supplements. Still, the idea that
pictures were suitable for the less-educated, along with the notion that tabloids
169 Quoted in Hannigan and Johnston, 15. 170 Barnhurst and Nerone, The Form of News, 249. 171 Barnhurst and Nerone, The Form of News, 236-37. 172 Ibidem, 236.
45
were “lower-class organs”, prevented photographs from becoming true vehicles of
newspaper journalism.173
Though some photographers worked provisionally for several publications and the
press even printed many amateur photographs, the professionalization of
photojournalism led to specializations. During the 1920s, three main strands of
photojournalism emerged: newspaper photography, magazine photography, and
(social) documentary photography. Newspaper photographers were most numerous
but received the least amount of credit for their efforts. Magazine photographers,
especially those working for successful photography-minded publications like
National Geographic and Vanity Fair, were more fortunate than their newspaper
colleagues, even seeing their names published next to their pictures. Documentary
photographers were less caught up in the daily routines of journalism, but relied on
the press to publish their pictures.174
Especially after the introduction of the 35mm camera, magazines were able to pick
large numbers of pictures from the even larger amounts photographers brought in.
Magazines had more flexible deadlines than newspapers and had therefore more
time to spend on laying out picture stories, for which there was no space in
newspapers. Photographers, both staff and freelance, were asked to bring back
large numbers of pictures that could form these stories.175 Magazines such as Time
in the 1930s ran photographs that the dailies had declined because they were not
newsworthy enough according to newspaper conventions, or because they were too
graphic for the general public. For example, Time published a photo of a naked
lynched man, which the newspapers had rejected.176
2.6 The emergence of the picture magazine
As photographs became an everyday element on news pages, some magazines
broadened their scope of photography. The 1930s saw the rise of the picture
magazine (e.g. Life, Look), a genre photojournalist Edward Steichen called a “major
173 James L. Baughman, Henry R. Luce and the Rise of the American Newsmedia (Baltimore: The John Hopkins University Press, 2001), 84. 174 Carlebach, American Photojournalism Comes of Age, 8. 175 Ibidem, 177. 176 Baughman, 83.
46
force in explaining man to man.”177 Unlike early illustrated magazines, which ran
individual pictures or series of, to some extent, related pictures, the 1930s picture
magazines ran picture stories in which, as the saying goes, the whole was worth
more than the sum of its parts. Or as Barthes argues, meaning can be found not at
the level of the individual pictures, but at the ‘suprasegmental’ level.178 The totality
of pictures and captions thus forms the message. This is what Life picture editor
Wilson Hicks believed to be the foundation on which photojournalism rests. 179
Accordingly, the role of the picture editor in designing the stories became crucial.180
In the mid-1930s, picture magazines became the prime publishers of documentary
photography, which would be mixed with a newly risen consumer culture and
appreciation of free enterprise. Magazines would run “cheery advertisements
celebrating the American ideal […] juxtaposed with studies of the poor drinking in
ramshackle bars or enjoying anarchic jamborees.” 181 Vanity Fair, Vogue and
Harper’s Bazaar combined artful, chic photographs, with news and documentary
photography.182 Life published government-sponsored pictures of (economic) crises
and so gave publicity to New Deal initiatives, such as the Fort Peck Dam
photographed by Bourke-White for Life’s first issue. According to Kozol, Life “took
the photographic language of documentary and refined it into a more commercial
language of photojournalism, in which advertising and editorial content
complemented each other.”183
Naturally, the picture magazine did not appear from nowhere. During the course of
the twentieth century newspaper and magazine editors had been experimenting
with photo series and more picture-driven stories. In 1914, The New York Times
first published Mid-Week Pictorial, a photographic supplement that had to carry the
load of surplus (war) pictures from its Sunday rotogravure section. Mid-Week
Pictorial was a pioneer among American journalism publications, using numerous
177 Steven Heller, ‘Photography Changes the Look and Content of Magazines’, Click! Photography Changes Everything (Smithsonian Photography Initiative), <http://click.si.edu/Story.aspx?story=289>, October 7, 2009. 178 Barthes, Image-Music-Text, 24. 179 Hicks, 23. 180 Kobré, 356. 181 Dave Saunders, Direct Cinema: Observational Documentary and the Politics of the Sixties (London and New York: Wallflower Press, 2007), 6. 182 John Raeburn, A Staggering Revolution: A Cultural History of Thirties Photography (Urbana and Chicago: University of Illinois Press, 2006), 195. 183 Kozol, 34.
47
large photographs to illustrate the news.184 Also, it ran photos of non-news related
topics: fashion, sports and high-school beauty queens, for example. 185 The
magazine experimented with combinations of words and photographs, occasionally
printing “more narrative and in-depth picture stories.” 186 Though Mid-Week
Pictorial’s use of pictures to form stories was groundbreaking and made it a
forerunner of 1930s American news picture magazines, the magazine shut down in
1937 when it became obvious that it could not compete with the latest picture
magazine, Life.
As mentioned previously, there were other publications than Life exploring the
possibilities of photojournalism. National Geographic printed its first photograph as
late as 1903, but two years later it ran an eleven-page photo spread, with hardly
any text. The spread was unplanned, as the magazine’s editor Grosvenor had to fill
the blank pages on the day it was scheduled to be printed. Under great time-
pressure, he quickly laid out the spread and feared for his job. His choice turned
out to be a turning point in the history of National Geographic, since the public’s
enthusiastic feedback made its editors decide to keep printing large photo spreads,
making it according to some the first American picture magazine.187
2.7 Luce’s innovative enterprise and the birth of Life
Henry Robinson Luce was born on the 3rd of April, 1898 in China. His parents were
American missionaries, sent to China to promote American values of democracy
and progress. Luce would grow up to become a supporter of American
expansionism and interventionism, and an admirer of Theodore Roosevelt. Later he
would translate his parents’ missionary work to a mission for himself, using mass
media to spread his ideals to the rest of America and eventually other parts of the
world.188 He championed the American Dream, in particular free enterprise and
democracy, and he did not approve of the New Deal and the creation of the welfare
state. In later years he became a staunch anti-Communist. Luce envisioned a form
184 Keith Kenney, ‘“Mid-Week Pictorial”: Pioneer American Photojournalism Magazine’ (paper presented at the Annual Meeting of the Association for Education in Journalism and Mass Communication, 69th, Norman, OK, August 3-6, 1986). Abstract available at <http://www.eric.ed.gov>, November 15, 2009. 185 Kobré, 347. 186 Carlebach, American Photojournalism Comes of Age,183. 187 Kobré, 345. 188 Robert E. Herzstein, Henry R. Luce: A Political Portrait of the Man Who Created the American Century (Toronto [etc.]: MacMillan, 1994), xi-xii.
48
of internationalism based on “the culture of consumption”, since American music,
movies, and speech, were recognized in all parts of the world, Luce believed. His
media were to convey this same international authority.189
Time magazine, known for its short articles designed for “the man on the go”, was
Luce’s first publication.190 Its first issue (March 3, 1923) appeared at a time when
photojournalism slowly began to make its way into newspapers and magazines. It
featured no more than eleven illustrations, but this number steadily increased in
the following years. Even though most photographs printed in Time during this
period were stiff portraits, photographer Edward Steichen called the magazine’s
blend of pictures and captions one of the “really meritorious” uses of news
photographs in the 1920s.191 Overall though, Time’s use of photography cannot be
labeled photojournalism. Throughout the first ten years of its publication,
photographs in Time – largely stiff portraits -- played no significant role other than
enliven the text and function as teasers, and were still combined with drawn
illustrations. This use of photography was common in other newspapers and
magazines as well. In 1925, almost half of all photographs printed on the front
pages of four Swedish newspapers were portraits of mostly men, as Becker finds in
a study on pictures in the twentieth century press. Hardly any of the portraits that
Becker studied showed “a social context or environment.”192
During the 1930s, the use of pictures in American magazines, including Time,
began to change. Rival magazine News-Week (now Newsweek), advertised as the
“illustrated news magazine”, first appeared in 1933 (cost 10 cents) and its frequent
and bold use of photography set a new standard in pictorial journalism.193 News-
Week’s first cover featured seven photographs from the week’s news, while Time’s
covers – always portraits – were as often drawings as photographs. News-Week’s
new approach to photography drew attention from the American public and
compelled Time to follow suit in order to maintain its circulation lead.194
189 Chris Vials, ‘The Popular Front in the American Century: Life Magazine, Margaret Bourke-White, and Consumer Realism, 1936-1941’, American Periodicals 16 (2006) 1: 75. 190 Vials, 74. 191 Robert T. Elson, Time Inc.: The Intimate History of a Publishing Enterprise 1923-1941, ed. Duncan Norton-Taylor (New York: Atheneum, 1986), 270. 192 Becker analyzed front pages from Arbetarbladet, Dagens Nyheter, Svenska Dagbladet, and Vestmanlands Läns Tidning. See Karin Becker, ‘Pictures in the Press: Yesterday, Today, Tomorrow’, Nordicom Review 2 (1996), 12. 193 C. Zoe Smith, ‘Germany’s Kurt Korff: An Émigré’s Influence on Early Life’, Journalism Quarterly 65 (1988) 2: 414. 194 Carlebach, 184-85.
49
Figure 2 Newsweek February 17, 1933.195
Figure 3 Time February 20, 1933.196
Editors at Time realized that posed portraits were not sufficient as parts of modern
photojournalism, as they were “‘about as revealing as a Congressman’s carefully
framed statement to the Press. As Time goes beyond the statement, Time’s
cameraman must go beyond the pose,’” they stated. 197 In June 1933, Time
published its first considerable picture feature: eight pages of pictures on the
London Economic Conference. 198 Other multi-page picture stories followed, but
while editors at Luce’s company noticed the potential in photojournalism, they
realized much had to be done to make photographs as powerful as words:
‘The gathering and writing of news-facts and the taking and gathering of news-photographs are carried on as two separate and unrelated functions of
journalism. Word-journalism being senior in point of time and custom, photo-
journalism is still regarded as a sort of mechanical sideline to the serious
business of fact-narration --- a social inferior which, in certain regrettable and
195 <http://bztv.typepad.com/instanthistory/2007/02/newsweek_1_a_lo.html> December 10, 2009. 196 <http://www.time.com/time/covers/0,16641,19330220,00.html> December 10, 2009. 197 Quoted in Loudon Wainwright, The Great American Magazine: An Inside History of LIFE (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1986), 16. 198 Elson, 270.
50
accidental occasions, may steal the show. The webbing of the news-photo into
the woof of journalism is an evolutionary process barely begun’.199
Luce showed his commitment to photography in his second publication, Fortune,
first published in February 1930. Aimed at the affluent American, Fortune provided
in-depth accounts on commerce and world affairs. 200 More than in Time,
photographs were an imperative element in Fortune’s coverage. Luce contacted
architectural and industrial photographer Margaret Bourke-White after seeing
photographs she made for the Otis Steel Company of Cleveland. Bourke-White
initially believed Time Inc. was not the place to be for a photographer like herself.
“‘[T]he only important use Time made of photographs was for the cover, where the
portrait of some political personage appeared each week. I was not the least bit
interested in photographing political personages’”, she states in her
autobiography.201 Still, she came to New York and heard what Luce had in mind.
Luce was determined to break with the tradition that most magazines had
preserved of randomly selecting and printing pictures with no clear purpose.202
Bourke-White therefore decided to join Luce’s team and Fortune’s first issue
displayed an impressive array of her photographs. Luce’s promises were kept:
Fortune used photography differently, making the picture “integral and
indispensable”.203 In time, pictures got almost as much space as words in Fortune
and the magazine showed work from a new generation of photojournalists.204 This
enthusiasm for photographs partly explained the success of the magazine, which
was first published during the unfortunate time of the Great Depression.
In Europe, magazines featured photographs as key components of stories as early
as the 1920s. The German Berliner Illustrirte Zeitung and Müncher Illustrierte Presse,
English Illustrated London News and Weekly Illustrated, and French Vu and Pour
Vous, experimented with picture stories and used photographs to construct
“complex narrative sequences.”205 Editor of the Müncher Illustrierte Presse Stefan
Lorant believed his magazine could print the photographic equivalent of the
traditional written essay. While magazines, both in Europe and America, had until
199 Quoted in Elson, 274. 200 Vials, 74. 201 Quoted in Carlebach, American Photojournalism Comes of Age, 186. 202 Ibidem, 186. 203 Idem. 204 Elson, 270. 205 Carlebach, American Photojournalism Comes of Age, 187.
51
then printed photograph in arbitrary or chronological order on a page, the Müncher
Illustrierte Presse experimented with photo story forms, laying out photographs
“more like a movie than a collection of still pictures in an album.”206
The development of an American publication truly devoted to photojournalism was
nothing short of a secret mission for Luce. In his successful magazines Time and
Fortune he had already shown his enthusiasm for photography, and when in the
early 1930s technology seemed to be ready for the shooting, printing and
distributing of a magazine packed with photographs, he quickly decided it had to be
his. In early 1936, encouraged by picture-fanatic managing editor of Time Daniel
Longwell, who had coined the idea of a picture magazine some months before, Luce
gave some of his editors, joined in the experimental department, a secret task:
explore the possibilities of publishing a picture magazine.207 A few months later,
Luce announced his new magazine during an official presentation to the directors.
The new magazine would be printed on better paper than that used for Time,
consist of 40 to 48 pages of editorial content and 20 pages of advertisements. Most
important, the content would differ in form, as the magazine would provide
a bigger and better collection of current news photographs than is available in all the current events magazines plus all the Sunday gravure supplements
combined. Altogether about 200 photographs with full explanatory captions.208
Though Life magazine developed to become the first American magazine to use
photography as its main narrative content (some European magazines had already
been experimenting with this form of photojournalism), it started out as a
prolongation of what Luce’s other magazines had started, a more elaborate use of
news photography.209
A formula for telling a story in pictures was not yet developed. Not by Life, not by
European magazines and Sunday newspaper supplements. Even after WWII, there
were no standards, guidelines or conventions about how to present photos and text
on a page of a newspaper, magazine or journal. According to Zelizer, photos were
sometimes “placed alongside unconnected texts, and pictures stretched somewhat
indiscriminately across columns of news text. […] Even picture-magazines, then
206 Kobré, 355. 207 Wainwright, 18-19. 208 Elson, 275. 209 Flamiano, 126.
52
heralded for innovative ways of presenting photographic images, employed layouts
displaying ‘stodgy, nonnarrative clumps of photographs.’” 210 Within series of
pictures, individual pictures were never related in a beginning-middle-end way.211
In 1929, the Berliner Illustrirte Zeitung was the first to devote more than one page of
photographs to the same subject.212 These photo stories were a prelude to the photo
essay, yet still relied on the written text to tell the story.
None of Life’s main rivals, Collier’s, Ladies’ Home Journal, or Saturday Evening Post,
used photographs extensively. Also, these magazines made far less use of realist
representational tactics than Life, and their coverage was hardly about the news.
Only Luce’s newsreel March on Time, and some other newsreels, could be seen as a
competitor to Life’s way of bringing the news visually. But again, these media were
far less concerned with realism, as many of the filmed items were staged re-
enactments rather than actual footage of the events.213 As Heller notes, the new way
of editing pictures like a movie, “narratively paced to tell a story”, made
photography far more informative and impressive than any newsreel.214 Also, early
motion pictures made the public even more familiar with realist images. Through
the 1920s, D.W. Griffith and other filmmakers introduced viewers to a manner of
storytelling in visual images only. 215 This method of creating stories in images
would be adopted by Life’s editors in its photo essays. The next chapter will address
how Life anticipated the public demand for photographs in the press.
210 Zelizer, Remembering to Forget, 28. 211 Elson, 304. 212 Angeletti and Oliva, 121. 213 Vials, 81. 214 Heller, <http://click.si.edu/Story.aspx?story=289> October 7, 2009. 215 Kozol, 43.
53
3.3.3.3. LIFELIFELIFELIFE AND ITS ‘PICTUREAND ITS ‘PICTUREAND ITS ‘PICTUREAND ITS ‘PICTURE----MAGIC’MAGIC’MAGIC’MAGIC’
A NEW THOUGHT ON AMERICAN PHOTOJOURNALISM
‘LIFE will prove there is a new editorial technique – pictorial journalism – a process of telling a story with a picture or with a series of pictures and a minimum of text. LIFE is perfectly named. Here is life set forth in a way that cannot be matched. […] LIFE will color advertising by pointing up the potency of telling a story with photographs. I will not miss a single issue of LIFE.’
Vaughn Flannery, Art Director at Young & Rubicam, 1936.216
Life was the most popular and only weekly publication of photojournalism prior to
the Second World War. Since television only became accessible to the broad public
after the war, Life’s use of photography was at once the most influential form of
visual mass communication.217 Life would be different from all other publications
that included photography on their pages, Luce predicted. He stressed that the new
picture magazine would not just print a random selection of pictures, but provide
the reader with “pictures brought together and printed clearly on good paper in
logical, coherent sequence so that you can enjoy and study them in comfortable
sitting.”218
Subjects could range from Hitler and Nazi Germany to the latest fashion trends,
from Hollywood to communist China. In short, Luce promised the reader that while
they should have a fair idea what to expect from the magazine, “‘they will never be
quite sure that they will not get a whacking surprise.’” 219 Some journalism
historians even suggest that Life, except for its excellent photo essays, showed so
much vulgarity (e.g. nudity, crime) that it should not be considered a serious
journalistic magazine. 220 But, even though some of the topics shocked readers, Life
was intended as a look-through family magazine. The editors were aware of this and
were careful not to scare readers away. In April 1938, for example, they decided to
publish pictures of a woman giving birth. They were stills from a motion picture
called The Birth of a Baby, which was banned from some theaters because it was
216 Quoted in Life December 7, 1936, 7. 217 Kozol, 6. 218 Elson, 275. 219 Quoted in Angeletti and Oliva, 125. 220 Flamiano, 122.
54
deemed too graphic. In order not to shock Life’s readers, the editors sent a letter to
all 650,000 subscribers a week in advance. It announced the story to come and
suggested parents take out the four pages in the center of the magazine that
contained the pictures, so children could read the magazine without concern.221
Life thus featured a mix of both surprising, frivolous items and serious, extensive
photo essays. This chapter will address how Life intended to realize what Luce had
in mind. It will focus on the methods and techniques the magazine used to form
coherent series of pictures. Also, Life’s representational strategies and dominant
cultural values will be considered.
3.1 The start of the magazine
In February 1936, Luce called for an urgent meeting with some of his executives.
After having seen a dummy by his close associate and chief editor Longwell for a
picture supplement in Time, he decided to go ahead with the production of a picture
magazine.222 The urge was understandable, as other magazines had equal plans.
Only months after Life’s first issue was published, the bi-weekly picture magazine
Look came out. Though successful and aimed at a broader readership than Life, it
never achieved the same vast circulation figures.223 The success of both magazines
led in subsequent years to a series of other photo magazines, such as Click, Pic,
See, and Focus. These were, however, nowhere near as thriving as their
forerunners.224
After the picture magazine project – the title Life came only later – had officially
started, Luce wrote a prospectus that told his staff and possible investors about the
plans for what he called “The Show-Book of the World”. In it he wrote,
‘To see Life; to see the world; to eyewitness great events; to watch the faces of
the poor and the gestures of the proud; to see strange things --- machines, armies, multitudes, shadows in the jungle and on the moon; to see man’s work
--- his paintings, towers and discoveries; to see things thousands of miles
away, things hidden behind walls and within rooms, things dangerous to come
to; the women that men love and many children; to see and to take pleasure in
221 Wainwright, 107-108. 222 Wainwright, 20. 223 Kozol, 6. 224 Goldberg, 13.
55
seeing; to see and be amazed; to see and be instructed. Thus to see, and to
show, is the mission now undertaken by a new kind of publication, THE SHOW-
BOOK OF THE WORLD, herinafter described.’225
Luce’s trust in the power of the camera to show the world and the commercial
potential of ‘seeing the world’ is evident in this statement. Indeed, Life’s recipe of
realist photography combined with, at times, provoking articles was followed until
its last issue. The magazine’s creative approach to photojournalism is evident in its
photo essays, as will be argued further on in this thesis.
Nevertheless, it was proven a challenge to transform Luce’s plans set out in his
prospectus to the real magazine. In their first attempt the editors mention the
struggle needed to compose a picture magazine, since “‘while the camera has
achieved high efficiency as a reporter and recorder of our time, a journalistic job
remains to be done in articulating a language of pictures.’”226 Images in the press
have been seen as inferior to the written word for centuries, especially by the
intellectual public, like the poet Wordsworth, cited in chapter one. 227 And, as
Benjamin argued five years prior to the beginnings of Life, while one had to be able
to ‘read’ photographs in order to make sense of (news) messages, the written word
in the form of captions would likely remain the most important part of the message,
as many readers were unfamiliar with the language of pictures. 228 Moreover, as
pointed out previously, the value and role of photographs (superficial decoration vs.
picture-as-content) remained a source of conflict for American newspaper editors
until the 1940s.
Most people involved in creating the first samples of Life agreed they were
unsatisfactory, because their content was vulgar (e.g. photographs of nude girls, a
black man murdered by police) and the magazine’s design appalling. Design expert
Paul Hollister commented on the second dummy, saying its fine material had been
butchered. Hollister revised the dummy’s layout and made Luce employ an art
director for Life.229 Weeks of experimentation finally led to the first issue of Life. It
consisted of ninety-six pages, an estimated two hundred photographs, and a cover
showing one of Margaret Bourke-White’s pictures of the Fort Peck Dam in Montana.
225 Quoted in Flamiano, 128. 226 Quoted in Elson, 284. Or in Wainwright, 38. 227 Hill and Helmers, 3. 228 Walter Benjamin, ‘A Short History of Photography’, Screen 13 (1972)1: 25. 229 Wainwright, 38-43.
56
Inside were stories on a Chinatown school and “Greatest Living Actress” Helen
Hayes. It had photos of the President, Fort Knox, celebrities attending a party, and
a one-legged man on a mountain. Already in this first issue, it became clear that no
topic was inapt for Life. The following years would show that the magazine’s subject
range was unlimited, though certain topics appeared to be considered more
interesting than others by its editors. So, railroads and pretty girls featured more
frequently than Native Americans and refugees.230 Also, the magazine’s content was
directed more at men than at women. The ways in which photographs were used
seemed unlimited as well. Besides photo essays, the magazine contained series of
(worldwide) news photographs, compilations of amateur photography, stand-alone
photos, or photos ordered in a family album manner.231
The main story of the first issue was this Fort Peck Dam (a New Deal initiative) and
the people that lived from its construction, the families in Fort Peck. The feature
was nine pages long and included sixteen photographs, along with captions and
some paragraphs of text. Bourke-White had surprised Life’s editors by not only
photographing the dam’s edifice, but also the daily ‘Life’ of the townspeople, thus
adding a human aspect to the story.232 The Fort Peck dam spread is therefore often
seen as the prototype for the distinctive Life style. Some even call it the first photo
essay by the magazine, although this is arguable as this thesis contends in the
following chapter. The use of photography in this first copy was a mix of old and
new customs and the editors had yet to develop new conventions for the editing of
picture series in Life. “’Time pictures’ and ‘Fortune’ pictures were embodied into the
new tradition of the photograph which Life was to inherit”, Hicks recalls.233
Before examining this typical Life-style, it is useful to know what purpose the
magazine served and for whom. Who were the masses that purchased the magazine
and what explains its immense success?
3.2 Audience and circulation
On November 19, 1936, Life’s first issue came out with some 200,000 copies of
placed on sale. In a matter of hours, all copies were sold and news dealers started
230 Herzstein, 76. 231 Goldberg, 13. 232 Kobré, 355. 233 Hicks, 53.
57
asking for more copies. The second, third, and fourth week issues were sold out
equally fast. Because the process of printing magazines was slow, especially since
Luce’s innovative ideas asked a lot from printers, there was no way for Life’s
publisher to keep up with the demand. And costs for the paper and printing
operations turned out much higher that Luce had hoped.234 One Time Inc. manager
commented: “‘Having Life isn’t like having a baby. It’s like having quintuplets.’”235 In
subsequent weeks, Life tested the demand in a local newsstand to see what the
potential national demand could be; it was estimated at five to six million copies.
Since this was an impossible number to print at that time, it was decided Life’s
circulation should start at one million per week.236
These printing difficulties, along with a shortage of coated, shiny paper, led to great
losses. Luce tried to make up for this by increasing advertising rates, which during
the first year were modestly low. However, it would take more than two years for
Life to become profitable. Advertisers were anxious at first, Wainwright notes,
because of two premises. The first concern was that Life was ‘a quickie’; people
would not spend enough time reading it and would subsequently not read its
advertisements. Secondly, ad men feared that the magazine’s editorial material
would be too captivating, giving the ads no chance. 237 Hearing about this
apprehension from advertisers, Luce and his editors worried that the magazine
contained not enough text to make readers spend a considerable amount of time on
it. However, Luce defended his trust in the success of a picture magazine and
believed what was necessary was “a near-revolution in magazine advertising.”238 He
believed advertisements should rely more on pictures and less on long texts. In a
proposal to his advertisers he wrote:
[P]ictures are faster than words . . . in advertising, pictures hurry where text
creeps. Pictures invite a look, where long texts repel. Pictures dramatize where
text narrates and describes. Pictures sell.239
This directness of pictures in bringing across messages, the fact that our minds
process pictures faster than verbal texts, as Hill and Helmers assert (see chapter
234 Baughman, 92. 235 Quoted in Elson, 297. 236 Elson, 298. 237 Wainwright, 113. 238 Ibidem, 114. 239 Quoted in Kozol, 36.
58
one), is what Luce called “picture-magic”. 240 Life soon became popular with
advertisers as they realized photographs could be effective in marketing and would
blend in with the editorial content of the magazine.
The Life photo essay formula was soon copied by advertisers, who used individual
photographs or photo series in most of the ads in the magazine. During the early
years of Life, the percentage of advertisements reached 40 to 50 percent. Some ads
were laid out according to the same formula used for photo essays: a large opening
photograph followed by a sequence of smaller photos, often forming a narrative. An
example of an advertisement bearing strong resemblance to the layout of photo
essays can be seen in figure 4. In the ad for Heinz tomato soup photographs are
laid out as a sequence and are (in combination with the captions) meant to tell a
story, as the title suggests. Despite the fact that the ad ends, rather than begins,
with a large picture, it looks similar to many photo essays and stories featured in
Life. Figure 5 shows the page following the ad, the first page of a photo essay on a
World War II battle in the Ardennes. While it is not hard to distinguish the items on
the grounds of subject matter, the style of design is very similar. Because of this,
and because of the custom to print advertisements next to or even in the middle of
essays, the line between essay and advertisement was often unclear, making it a
popular marketing strategy with many advertisers.241
240 Wainwright, 6. 241 Vials, 88.
Still, the 1937-38 recession kept advertisers wary and
Subscriptions only covered for the costs of paper and printing.
that Life should cost no more than ten cents per issue and five dollars for a yea
subscription, because he wanted it to be in reach of the American middle
Luce’s belief was that everyone liked pictures, and that many of them would be
happy to spend a dime on a magazine providing them with the best collection of
photographs in the country.244
The number of subscriptions grew rapidly. In December 1938, Time Inc. put out
Life’s Continuing Study of Magazine Audiences
analysis of Life’s target audience, circulation and pass
generally were of middle- and upper middle
242 For the archive of all Life issues see Google Books,
<http://books.google.com/books?id=J1MEAAAAMBAJ&source=gbs_navlinks_s243 Kozol, 35. 244 Elson, 276.
Figure 4 Heinz advertisement in Life, February 5, 1945. Page 20.
Figure 5 First page of a photo essay in
February 5, 1945. Page 21.242
38 recession kept advertisers wary and Life’s revenue low.
Subscriptions only covered for the costs of paper and printing.243 Luce had decided
should cost no more than ten cents per issue and five dollars for a yea
subscription, because he wanted it to be in reach of the American middle
Luce’s belief was that everyone liked pictures, and that many of them would be
happy to spend a dime on a magazine providing them with the best collection of
244
The number of subscriptions grew rapidly. In December 1938, Time Inc. put out
Life’s Continuing Study of Magazine Audiences in which it presented a thorough
s target audience, circulation and pass-along rate. Life
and upper middle-class, since working-class Americans
issues see Google Books,
http://books.google.com/books?id=J1MEAAAAMBAJ&source=gbs_navlinks_s>
Life,
59
First page of a photo essay in Life,
’s revenue low.
Luce had decided
should cost no more than ten cents per issue and five dollars for a year’s
subscription, because he wanted it to be in reach of the American middle-class.
Luce’s belief was that everyone liked pictures, and that many of them would be
happy to spend a dime on a magazine providing them with the best collection of
The number of subscriptions grew rapidly. In December 1938, Time Inc. put out
in which it presented a thorough
Life readers
class Americans
60
lacked both time and money to afford reading magazines.245 Life was the most
popular American magazine among young, well-off consumers. Thirty-seven percent
of the “top income group”, including managers, wealthy merchants, successful
farmers, read Life, compared to twenty-five percent for the Saturday Evening Post.
Life’s affluent readership was reflected and addressed in its advertising content,
which typically promoted consumer products that appealed to Americans owning
fine-looking cars and homes or those who were considering such purchases.246
Though the magazine’s total circulation figure still fell short of that of the Saturday
Evening Post or Collier’s, its higher pass-along rate resulted in more adults reading
Life than any other magazine.247 Its total audience was estimated at seventeen
million, just over fifteen percent of all American adults. 248 Life was even more
successful during the 1940s and early 1950s. By 1940 its official circulation
reached 2.86 million and in the years following it peaked at 5.8 million.249
The overall success of Luce’s innovative format was not a coincidence, stresses
German-French photographer Gisèle Freund, who worked for Life in 1936,
photographing the effects of the Depression in England. 250 She analyzed the
magazine from a psychological perspective and found that Henry Luce “wanted to
educate the masses. His magazine’s success was based on thorough study of mass
psychology. Man is above all interested in himself: any human and social condition
affecting his own Life will move him.”251 The magazine often depicted ‘ordinary’
American families in reports on broader issues in society.252 Taking the interest in
the private even further, Life became famous for taking its readers to the personal
spheres of celebrities, presidents (“The President’s Album” was a recurrent feature)
and royalty, something no other publication had dared so far. Life printed photos of
Frank Sinatra having breakfast at home with his family, and of Caroline Kennedy’s
wedding.253 Moreover, the magazine carried many documentary photographs, for
example those from the Farm Security Administration, showing the nation how the
Great Depression and Dust Bowl catastrophe affected rural America.
245 Vials, 74-76. 246 Kozol, 37. 247 The pass-along rate is an estimate of the number of people who did not buy the magazine, but did read it. 248 Baughman, 94. 249 Kozol, 35. 250 Gisèle Freund, Photography and Society (London: Gordon Fraser, 1980). 251 Freund, 138. 252 Kozol, 5. 253 Freund, 142.
61
However, Life’s success was soon toned down by the rise of a new medium of visual
information: television. In 1954, the magazine’s circulation plunged by twenty-one
percent in just six months. For those that could afford a TV, moving images and
sound proved a great alternative to photographs and words.254 Still, it would take
some years before television technology was able to provide the public with images
that could approach photographs in terms of intimacy, and aesthetics. During the
1960s, Life tried to battle television’s competition by printing color photographs.255
Eventually however, television replaced picture magazines as the most popular way
of seeing the news. In December 1972, Life was forced to stop publication as a
weekly magazine. It made a comeback in 1978 as a monthly, but with an average
circulation of 700,000 it never became more than moderately successful. Financial
difficulties due to a shrinking readership and declining advertising sales ultimately
forced Time Inc. to cease publication of Life in 2000.256
3.3 Content and aesthetics
When Life began in 1936, its staff of photographers consisted of only four: Alfred
Eisenstaedt, Thomas McAvoy, Margaret Bourke-White and Peter Stackpole. While
Luce at first believed Life could rely on the photographic news services for the rest
of its picture content, it soon turned out that it was impossible to create interesting
issues from not so interesting pictures. These news service pictures were often of
low quality and depicted recurring events, such as car accidents. Moreover, they
rarely provided series of photographs that formed a logical story. Luce realized Life
needed staff photographers, who understood the language of photographs as well as
that of journalism. Eisenstaedt, McAvoy, Bourke-White and Stackpole were joined
by other professional photographers. And Luce sent photographers like Robert Capa
and Fritz Goro on special reportages.257 Their work was of high quality and many of
Life’s photographs were published in other media. In order to get enough pictures to
fill the magazine’s seventy-plus pages, its editors relied on a new photographic
agency, Black Star. The agency provided Life with photographs, mostly by
emigrated German photographers, many of whom later became part of Life’s staff.258
254 Saunders, 8. 255 Goldberg, 13. 256 Angeletti and Oliva, 182. 257 Elson, 305. 258 Kobré, 358.
62
From the start, Luce wanted the magazine to have two “rhythms”, the rhythm of
“‘the nervous alert news-magazine’” and that of the photo essay. 259 This
combination would mean an innovation in weekly photojournalism, Luce believed.
On the one hand, Life showed features on American and worldwide news events in
items like “LIFE on the American Newsfront” and “The Camera Overseas”. On the
other, it ran many less news-related stories, some as photo essays, on anything
from famous actors to the Russian ballet and the Life of a common steelworker.
Critics, like American writer and political radical Dwight MacDonald, did not like
Life’s blend of serious and mostly trivial articles. He believed, that the magazine’s
“‘crowd-catching, circulation-building formulae make truth almost impossible.’”260
In March 1937, the more intellectual New Republic wrote of Life that “‘hardly any
mental effort is required to look at a picture and to spell out a few lines of
accompanying caption, written in primer English’”, an opinion largely resembling
the fears Wordsworth had expressed almost a century before.261
Life was not so much a news magazine as a general magazine, featuring photos of
news events as well as human interest features. According to Kozol, every issue
included two central photo stories, the ‘Big News-Picture Story’ and the ‘Big Special
Feature’.262 The Big News-Picture Story was an extensive picture-driven article on
significant news events, such as the marriage of Dutch crown princess Juliana and
the Sit-Down Strike at General Motors in Flint, Michigan. According to an article by
its editors in the March 15, 1937 issue of Life, this item is what distinguished the
magazine as “the only serious journal which devotes itself to the art of
communication-by-pictures.” 263 Only Life could show, instead of tell, what
happened in the world. In this same article, the editors boasted about their
coverage of ‘The Flood’ of the Ohio River valley in January 1937, saying it was the
first flood “to be adequately pictured”. They emphasized the significance of the Life-
way of reporting by comparing the Ohio flood to the Great Pittsburgh flood of the
year before. Between these floods, there was “a ten-year advance in picture-
journalism”, the editors claimed, and compared to the coverage of the 1937 flood,
the 1936 flood was “hardly seen at all”.264 In other words, Life had made a big step
259 Wainwright, 111. 260 Quoted in Saunders, 7. 261 Quoted in Flamiano, 128. 262 Kozol, 7. 263 Life, March 15, 1937, 4. 264 Idem.
63
forward with the development of a truly photojournalistic magazine and took on a
form of news reporting of its own, bringing the news in picture stories.
Also, Life lay less emphasis on the daily news and more on human interest stories,
which gave the magazine a sense of ‘relaxation’ according to Luce. Instead of giving
detailed accounts of the how’s and why’s of news stories, Life just showed what had
happened, making its journalistic content a comforting break from all other news
media. As Luce put it,
‘All week long a man is harassed and his brow is beetled by the headlines of the Times or the Daily Mirror – the dreadful (because newsworthy) war in
Europe or sex-murder in Hollywood – and he struggles with Time or his favorite radio broadcasters to understand and grasp the goings-on in this cockeyed
world: and then along comes Life and its whole angle on news and news value is so entirely different that he takes a holiday from his almost continuous
mental preoccupation with the other news-patterns. […] To Life the sit-down strike [at General Motors] is not Labor Problems or Big Words between a dozen
men you really don’t give a damn about. In Life, the hot news of the sit-down strike is that people sit down! Or don’t. So simple. So unlike the New York
Times. So relaxing. And yet so true.’265
This simple, straightforward format did not undermine the magazine’s importance
as a medium for pictorial journalism, Luce believed. Especially the “new trick” of
printing photographs in narrative series.266
Besides the Big News-Picture Story, Life featured another trademark photo story:
the Big Special Feature. These features were often on subjects not directly related to
the news of the week, but still of great current interest. They could for example be
on religion in Soviet Russia or on the Life of a small-town doctor.267 Some of these
Special Features were short picture stories; others (like “Country Doctor”) were
extensive photo essays. The characteristics of the Life photo essay will be addressed
in the next chapter. First, there is more to say about the way in which Life
challenged traditional uses of news photography through photographic conventions
and its representational tactics.
As was explained in the previous chapter, the use of news photographs changed
during the 1930s, becoming less illustrative and more evocative. Accordingly, Hardt
265 Quoted in Wainwright, 102-3. 266 Wainwright, 103. 267 See ‘Religion Thrives in Godless Russia’, Life May 3, 1937, and ‘Country Doctor’, Life September 20, 1948.
64
and Brennen describe Life’s use of photography during the late 1930s as the
“deconstruction of conventional language [that] succeeded with the aid of
photographic images, photo essays, and photomontage as well as film […].”268 Luce
was, most likely, not as much concerned with the deconstruction of traditional
language as with publishing a best-selling magazine. He believed pictures would sell
and when he envisioned his magazine, he had promised to try and make “‘the
damnedest best non-pornographic look-through magazine in the United States.’”269
Life’s content was formed through a range of representational strategies, Vials
writes, reproducing “middle class-consciousness” during its early years.270 One of
these strategies was Luce’s notion of ‘partisan objectivity,’ in which “blatantly
partial claims are anchored in the seemingly un-authored, ‘real’ nature of the
photograph.”271 This partisanship was part of what Schudson labeled one of two
emerging journalistic practices following the First World War, seeking ‘objectivity’
through interpretive reporting.272 This form of reporting was based on the specialist
knowledge of reporters, who sometimes acknowledged they could not report
objectively, but assumed that their expertise gave them authority to interpret
events. They believed their task was to not only inform readers, but help them
understand as well.273 This idea is what the creators of Life had in mind when
making their magazine.274
Objectivity and transparency were strong ideologies at Life. Staff photographer Carl
Mydans described the team’s wish for realist photography as “‘an insatiable drive to
search out every fact of American Life, photograph it and hold it up proudly, like a
mirror, to a pleased and astonished readership.’”275 Despite photography’s apparent
impartiality, Luce’s magazine was far from politically neutral, as it quite
consistently shed a negative light on the political left, especially after the signing of
the Hitler-Stalin treaty in August 1939. Yet, not only the left was criticized. Except
268 Bonnie Brennen and Hanno Hardt, eds. Picturing the Past: Media, History, and Photography (Urbana and Chicago: University of Illinois Press, 1999), 2-3. 269 Quoted in Flamiano, 128. 270 Vials, 80. 271 Vials, 80. 272 The second practice Schudson names is the pursuit of objectivity through setting up professional standards and adopting a “fairness doctrine” that were to constrain personal judgment. See Schudson, “The Objectivity Norm in American Journalism”, 162. 273 Schudson, ‘The Objectivity Norm in American Journalism’, 164. 274 Vials, 85. 275 Quoted in Kozol, 40.
65
for its first issue story on the building of the Fort Peck Dam, Life’s attitude toward
Franklin Roosevelt and his New Deal was generally disapproving.276
Several scholars agree that Life was mainstream, as it attempted to provide
information for all of the American middle class, rather than focus on the diversity
of people and cultures.277 Life typically used the ordinary individual in pictures to
explain complex (inter)national issues. Also, it confirmed traditional gender roles,
assumptions about good American families, who were always white, and the norm
of middle-class citizens, classifying the working-class as a distinct group different
from “Americans”. Life’s photo essays, Kozol argues, were popular because they let
the public identify with the people they saw. And by associating certain groups of
people with “America” while excluding others as outsiders in society. For example,
in stories on labor conflicts, Life distinguished the working-class as a group from
the middle-class, which remained unnamed except as “Americans”.278
Another careful examination of gender in Life is Flamiano’s study on Life’s nude
photography and the differences in presentation between male and female nudity.
By looking at several articles and the public’s responses to them, she suggests that
the magazine’s visual representation was often judgmental and bolstered racist and
sexist stereotypes. Moreover, ethnic minorities were regularly depicted (though they
appeared less frequently than white men and women) in racist ways. For example,
an October 9, 1937 feature on Americans from the South eating watermelons
showed a picture of a black nursing mother, captioned “Any colored ‘mammy’ can
hold a huge slice in one hand while holding her offspring in the other. […] What
melons the Negroes do not consume will find favor with the pigs.” This photo was
preceded by a picture showing white girls in swimsuits enjoying a picnic and
followed by one of pigs eating melons. Both pictures and caption suggest black
Americans’ place on the social ladder was below that of white Americans and just
above that of animals.279 This and other studies that foreground gender, class, and
race, treat (documentary) photography “not as a reflection of reality but as a
culturally constructed historical artifact reflecting power relations and social
conflicts.”280
276 Vials, 83. 277 Brennen and Hardt, 3. 278 Kozol, 6-16. 279 Flamiano, 133. 280 Flamiano, 122.
66
While Life has been praised for its groundbreaking use of photography, its
representation of the social world was far from revolutionary. Hardt and Brennen
conclude that
The production of Life magazine […] became a weekly celebration of America as
a middle-class experience, comforting in its public reinforcement of moral
values, patriotic in its representation of nationhood, and openly voyeuristic in its display of poverty and human misery at home and abroad. Its coverage of
people and events demonstrates the workings of the dominant ideology in the
picture press of the times.281
Still, for a somewhat conventional medium when it came to cultural values, its use
of photographs was inventive.
3.4 Editing text and photographs
Wilson Hicks was appointed as Life’s first picture editor in 1937, and had to scan
20,000 photographs every week. Every issue would publish some 250 of these.282
Hicks thought of photographs as “‘words out of a camera with which stories can be
told.’”283 He had a great influence on the development of the Life photo essay and is
sometimes referred to as the architect of the magazine’s photo essays. Yet, editing
pictures was a process of experimentation for Life editors during the first year of
publishing. Every issue looked different in some way, and the conventions for
editing pictures changed regularly. While there was a rule that pictures were not to
be retouched, many pictures were printed in oval and circle shape, or cut
diagonally. These ‘cookie cutouts’ (referring to the cutter shapes used for pressing
cookies from dough), along with the tendency to overlap pictures and remove their
backgrounds, were soon discarded.284
Life had the same omniscient attitude as Time; its captions and articles often
appear to be written from an all-knowing standpoint. Its focus on the rich and
famous was equally Time-like. 285 However, the editors’ aim was to develop a
distinctive literary style, different from the well-known ‘Time style’. In Time, words
had to bear the meaning of the article and photographs were used as supportive of
281 Brennen and Hardt, 3. 282 Herzstein, 75. 283 Quoted in Herzstein, 76. 284 Kobré, 355. 285 Flamiano, 128.
67
the text. With Life, this order had to be reversed, with the words accompanying the
photos. The new magazine needed a “fresh literary form, clear, simple and factual,
which would blend smoothly with the predominating pictures,” according to John
Billings, Life’s first managing editor.286 This change, however, took time, since most
editors came from Time and had trouble adjusting their writing habits. A copywriter
for Life, Joseph Kastner, recalls from his early years at the magazine that its editors
had trouble learning “the art of writing for pictures”, because they “didn’t know how
to read pictures.”287 Only gradually they learned that photographs could give facts
and tell stories.
Moreover, power relations in the newsrooms were still in favor of writers, as
photographers were, until well into the 1940s, excluded from editorial processes
and were hardly ever asked to do more than take the pictures. Hicks talked about
what he believed was the most urgent problem facing Life and other publications in
a 1940 speech to newspaper editors: the “raising of photographers in general to the
same level of prestige as writers.” 288 Photographers’ lower status increasingly
caused tension on the work floor.
In creating photo stories or essays, photographers and editors had to combine
forces. Photographer John Loengard, who started working for Life in 1956, gives a
valuable look at the organization of Life through the more than forty interviews he
had with former Life photographers, such as Alfred Eisenstaedt and Gordon Parks.
Photographers were not always content with their role in making the magazine. The
principle that (managing) editors, not photographers, decided on the lay-out of
picture series or essays and created story scripts was thought by photographers to
be limiting their creativity and spontaneity. 289 Editors carefully researched and
scripted stories, telling photographers what shots were needed, deciding the size
and placement of the pictures and the length of the overall essay. Sets of pictures
were soon called ‘acts’, a theatre term that in the context of Life points to the
magazine’s storytelling qualities. Acts could be anything from two photos to ten-
plus pages of photographs.290 Sometimes photographers were allowed to be involved
286 Elson, 304. 287 Joseph Kastner, ‘Writing for the Picture Magazine’, in Photographic Communication: Principles, Problems and Challenges of Photojournalism, ed. R. Smith Schuneman (New York: Hastings House, 1972), 123. 288 Wainwright, 124. 289 John Loengard, Life Photographers: What They Saw (Boston [etc.]: Little, Brown and Company, 1998), 10. 290 Hicks, 55.
68
in this process, but generally they had little influence on the final look of the photo
essay.291 Photographer W. Eugene Smith was infamous with the editors of Life for
interfering with the layout of his essays. His attitude led to many conflicts and he
quit Life twice in his career.292 During the late 1940s photographers began to shoot
photo stories without preplanning every picture.293
Some European photographers and editors, notably Alfred Eisenstaedt and Kurt
Korff (editor of the Berliner Illustrirte Zeitung), joined Time’s staff in the early 1930s
after Adolf Hitler had been appointed as chancellor of the German Reich.294 Later,
they were closely involved in the founding of Life. Having experience in compiling
pictorial magazines, both had a profound influence on the course of pictorial policy
at Luce’s corporation. Korff’s expertise on photojournalism and picture editing was
greatly admired by the Life staff. He was appointed as a special consultant in 1935
and according to Loudon Wainwright, who joined the Life staff in 1949, he taught
both Luce and Longwell to “look at pictures for a little more than the content.”295 He
advised them on three issues: which photographers should work for Life, what
subjects should be published to attract the best audience, and how photographs
should be acquired and arranged on the magazine’s pages.296
The input from German and other European photographers and editors had
significant effects on the look of the magazine. Dr. Erich Salomon, who knew Korff
in Germany, had brought along his small camera from Germany, where he was one
of the first to use this tool for journalistic purposes. His work inspired many
American photographers to start using miniature cameras and Luce referred to his
quality of photography as ‘Salomonesque’.297 Korff had advised Longwell to hire
Eisenstaedt and other émigré photographers, arguing that American photographers
were capable of taking single newspaper shots, but not specialized in covering
events as “camera reporters” for picture magazines, and thus not suitable as photo
essay photographers. 298 Yet, this German influence on Life has been largely
undocumented, apart from Wainwright’s inside history, Smith argues. Possibly the
291 Kozol, 39-40. 292 Kobré, 361. 293 Ibidem, 141. 294 Both men were Jewish and fled the Nazi regime, which affected liberal and socialist newspapers severely. Many leading editors and photographers left the country. Those who stayed were forced to produce Nazi propaganda. 295 Wainwright, 16. Or Smith, 412-13. 296 Smith, 415. 297 Wainwright, 6. 298 Smith, 416.
69
lack of credit Korff receives is due to his covert position at the magazine as a “secret
German weapon” (few staff members knew Luce had hired him) and the initial
secrecy surrounding the Experimental Department working out plans for Life.299
In short, Korff advised Luce and the editors on many occasions, and his
recommendations were generally followed, such as his suggestion to give the
magazine a short title and to publish only one photo essay per issue.300 Life’s typical
mix of exciting news photographs and human interest stories and essays was also
largely based on Korff’s initial ideas. Interestingly enough, Korff was never
appointed as editor for the magazine and left the project months before the
publication of the first issue. Though his contributions were appreciated, Longwell
believed he “‘was unable to free himself from the Berliner Illustrirte Zeitung and the
planners of Life had no desire to publish a duplicate of the German picture
publication.’” 301 Nevertheless, as American photographers and editors had little
knowledge of the language of images, Korff and other émigrés must have had a
profound influence on the development of the idiom of Life’s photo essays. And as
mentioned previously, German publications’ innovative designs resembled the later
Life style on many aspects. The next chapter will examine the make-up of Life’s
photo essays more closely.
299 Wainwright, 28. 300 Smith, 417. 301 Quoted in Smith, 418.
4.4.4.4. LIFELIFELIFELIFE AND THE IDIOM OF THEAND THE IDIOM OF THEAND THE IDIOM OF THEAND THE IDIOM OF THE
EISENSTAEDT’S ‘VASSA
‘[T]he quick nervousness of pictures is a new language as sure as Rudyard Kipling or Ernest Hemingway were.
While Life made an impact on many readers by showing p
sometimes scandalous photos, it is known best for its introduction of a
journalistic medium that, at least in the U.S.
publications. The photographic essay
came to be seen as the magazine’s
published in Life, but its best
1950s, in particular those photographed by W. Eugene Smith
‘Spanish Village’, and ‘Nurse Midwife’.
Figure 6 First pages of 'Country Doctor', 'Spanish Village', and 'Nurse Widwife’.
302 Quoted in Wainwright, 21. 303 See ‘Country Doctor’, Life September 20, 1948, 11529; ‘Nurse Midwife’ Life December 3, 1951, 134
AND THE IDIOM OF THEAND THE IDIOM OF THEAND THE IDIOM OF THEAND THE IDIOM OF THE PHOTOPHOTOPHOTOPHOTO ESSAY ESSAY ESSAY ESSAY
EISENSTAEDT’S ‘VASSAR’ AND MCCOMBE’S ‘GWYNED FILLING’
[T]he quick nervousness of pictures is a new language as sure as Rudyard Kipling or Ernest Hemingway were.’
Daniel Longwell, 1936.
made an impact on many readers by showing private, remarkable, and
sometimes scandalous photos, it is known best for its introduction of a
that, at least in the U.S., set the magazine apart
he photographic essay, which soon became a weekly feature of
magazine’s signature feature. Thousands of them were
best-known photo essays are from the late
1950s, in particular those photographed by W. Eugene Smith – ‘Country Doctor’,
h Village’, and ‘Nurse Midwife’.303
First pages of 'Country Doctor', 'Spanish Village', and 'Nurse Widwife’.
September 20, 1948, 115-26; ‘Spanish Village’, Life April 9, 1951, 120December 3, 1951, 134-45.
70
ESSAY ESSAY ESSAY ESSAY
YNED FILLING’
[T]he quick nervousness of pictures is a new language as sure as Rudyard
Daniel Longwell, 1936.302
rivate, remarkable, and
sometimes scandalous photos, it is known best for its introduction of an inventive
set the magazine apart from other
ature of Life,
of them were
late 1940s and
‘Country Doctor’,
April 9, 1951, 120-
71
Smith’s essays are known for their intimate style – his unobtrusive approach
allowed him to “capture natural, realistic and dynamic body language and facial
expressions” – and the simplicity of the topics.304 ‘Country Doctor’ shows a day in
the life of a small-town doctor paying visits to his patients. In ‘Spanish Village’ he
portrays the inhabitants of a small, deprived Spanish village called Deleitosa. And
‘Nurse Midwife’ depicts the work of Maude Callen, a midwife from South Carolina.
Even though the themes were straightforward, Smith’s essays show intricately
designed and coherent stories. This style of reporting and editing seen in Smith’s
essays was typical of more Life essays published during the mid-twentieth century.
His strategy and work inspired later photographers in making photo essays for
Life.305
This thesis focuses mainly on Life’s early attempts at challenging norms in
American photojournalism. But in order to get perspective on the magazine’s initial
contribution to the field of journalism and its evolution in the years following, it will
conduct an in-depth examination of both a photo essay from Life’s first year and
one published a decade later. The two essays that effectively exemplify the
developments in photographic reporting and storytelling conventions during these
ten years are ‘Vassar: A Bright Jewel in U.S. Educational Diadem’ (1937) by Alfred
Eisenstaedt and ‘The Private Life of Gwyned Filling’ (1948) by Leonard McCombe.306
Eisenstaedt’s essay is on Vassar, America’s first girls’ college (founded in 1861) in
Poughkeepsie, New York. This essay has been chosen as the starting point of this
analysis, since it was the first feature dubbed ‘photographic essay’ by Luce and
served as an example for the essays in the issues following. The two examples will
show that Life’s photo essays developed over the years, as photographers
increasingly determined the approach of the essay and began to follow their
subjects as ‘flies on the wall’.
McCombe’s essay considers the life of a young woman called Gwyned Filling, who
moves to New York City to pursue a career in advertising. Though Smith is often
considered the first to employ the unscripted ‘fly on the wall’ strategy – in shooting
the ‘Country Doctor’ essay, Smith “‘faded into the wallpaper and waited’”, he said –
McCombe has shown this same skill in his ‘Gwyned Filling’ essay that appeared
304 Chapnick, 305 Angeletti and Oliva, 162. 306 See appendix A for ‘Vassar’ and appendix B for ‘Gwyned Filling’.
72
prior to Smith’s best-known essays.307 Therefore, McCombe’s essay will be analyzed
in this thesis. This chapter will thus address Life’s idea of a photo essay and how
this was translated onto its pages. It will evaluate in what ways Life challenged
traditions in photojournalism and consider Life’s photo essay formula. Next it will
use (fragments of) the two photo essays mentioned to illustrate the formula used by
the editors, and consider the ways in which a photo essay communicates to its
viewers by evaluating its visual grammar and narrative potential. First however, it is
key to consider what the term ‘photo essay’ meant to Luce and what he thought
were its key qualities.
The term ‘photographic essay’ was unfamiliar before the publication of Life. In fact,
Luce may have been the first to coin the term, referring to Eisenstaedt’s essay that
was published in Life’s eleventh issue, on February 1, 1937. “Fifty or twenty years
ago, people used to write ‘essays’ for magazines”, Luce commented in his then
secret memorandum “Redefinition”, written after the twelfth issue of Life. “‘The
essay is no longer a vital means of communication. But what is vital is the
photographic essay.’”308 The photo essay on Vassar was significant for its distinct
way of presenting information, differing from the traditional written accounts
published in Time, Fortune and comparable magazines. As Luce wrote,
‘It is not an account of Vassar. It is a delightful essay on Vassar. But it is vital.
It does communicate. Both to those who know about girls’ colleges and to those
who do not, it tells something about Vassar and Education and America and Life in 1937. And it tells the kind of thing that only the most skillful (and now
obsolete) literary essayists have hitherto managed to tell in words.’309
Even though the photo essay left much unwritten and unphotographed about the
college, the girls attending it and the education they received, there is a clear
message: it suggests that the students are privileged because they attend the
richest women’s college and get excellent education. It communicates, but it does so
in a different way than other forms of journalism. It does not give detailed
(historical) information about the college and its educational program, nor does it
bring groundbreaking news; however, it does tell and show what clothes the young
women wore, what rooms they lived in and what sports they enjoyed.
307 Quoted in Angeletti and Oliva, 137. 308 Quoted in Wainwright, 99. 309 Quoted in Elson, 306. Or quoted in Wainwright, 100.
73
4.1 Two photo essays: ‘Vassar’ and ‘Gwyned Filling’
In its April 26, 1937 issue, Life printed an advertisement headed “The Camera as
Essayist”, promoting its own use of photojournalism: the photo essay. It stated:
When people think of the camera in journalism they think of it as a reporter – the best of reporters; the most accurate of reporters; the most convincing of
reporters.
Actually, as Life has learned in its first few months, the camera is not merely a reporter. It can also be a commentator. It can comment as it reports. It can
interpret as it presents. It can picture the world as a seventeenth-century essayist or a twentieth-century columnist would picture it.
A photographer has his style as an essayist has his. He will select his subjects
with equal individuality. He will present them with equal manner. The sum total of what he has to say will be equally his own.
Above in sharp reduction is Alfred Eisenstaedt’s essay on Vassar as it appeared
in Life for February 1, 1937. Together these twenty-four pictures give an impression of that college as personal and as homogeneous as any thousand
words by Joseph Addison.310 The advertisement showed a miniature version of Eisenstaedt’s photo essay, though
without the captions and text.
Eisenstaedt had been recommended by fellow German and special adviser for Luce,
Kurt Korff. He joined Life in 1936 as one of four original staff photographers.
Eisenstaedt was a “tiny, stiff-backed, furiously energetic man who had been a
private in the German Army during World War I but became a refugee from the
Nazis in 1935.”311 He had been a talented photographer in Germany and became a
full-time photojournalist in 1929. Six years later, he fled his home country and
settled in New York City. There he became famous as the exemplary Life
photographer, crafting over 2,500 picture stories and essays and seeing his photos
on a total of ninety covers. He had been accustomed to using the unobtrusive
35mm Leica camera in Germany and his mastery of this camera permitted him to
shoot his subjects at moments when they were less cautious. His ability to capture
310 Hicks, 56. 311 Wainwright, 15.
74
the core of a story in one single image, or “to find and catch the storytelling
moment”, as he put it, made him one of Life’s most published photographers.312
The ‘Vassar’ essay presents Eisenstaedt’s thoughts on the richest of several
respected women’s colleges in the U.S. While it is hard to tell how Life’s readers
responded to the essay, Luce believed it lingered in the minds of many that read it.
And its photographs probably inspired girls and women to adopt some of the Vassar
students’ customs. Department store Macy’s ran an advertisement campaign saying
it would sell all the clothes seen in the ‘Vassar’ essay.313
A little over a decade after ‘Vassar’, the May 3, 1948 essay by Leonard McCombe
titled ‘The Private Life of Gwyned Filling’ presented Life readers with the story of a
23-year old woman who, having just completed a course in advertising at the
University of Missouri, has moved to New York to begin a career. The 24
photographs suggest what a typical day in the life of Gwyned looks like. The text
tells about her daily routines, her struggle to make ends meet in New York, her
insecurities about her career, and her friendships and romances. Like Eisenstaedt’s
‘Vassar’, the essay on Gwyned Filling illustrates the potential of photo essays to
address human experiences, moods and emotions in a direct way by showing
several aspects of a person’s life rather than just writing about it.
McCombe’s essay was innovative for different reasons. First, while early photo
essays were being scripted in advance, this essay was made without a prior design.
Secondly, even more than Eisenstaedt had done a decade earlier, McCombe
photographed the daily routines of the girl as a ‘fly on the wall’, following her
unobtrusively and almost invisibly for hundreds of hours. Every day he arrived at
her room, then following her to the office, in the streets, visiting friends, arguing,
laughing, and crying.314 McCombe’s shots are more realistic (no posed pictures, but
natural movement and facial expressions, shown up-close) and spontaneous than
photographs printed in Life before. And his commitment to bringing Gwyned Filling
alive through his photographs set a new standard for Life’s photo essays. 315
McCombe set a new trend, as he “looked for different, more evocative and
312 ‘Alfred Eisenstaedt, Photographer of the Defining Moment, is Dead at 96’, The New York Times August 25, 1995. Available at <http://www.nytimes.com/learning/general/onthisday/bday/1206.html> December 17, 2009. 313 Life, March 15, 1937, 5. 314 Guimond, 243. 315 Chapnick, 30-31.
75
meaningful perspectives in any kind of scenario; […] he always tried to find the
human angle”, Angeletti and Oliva write.316 The level of intimacy seen in McCombe’s
photographs can be found in later essays, such as those mentioned by W. Eugene
Smith.
Englishman McCombe was hired at age 22 by Wilson Hicks (who was in charge of
the photographic staff and supervisor of all photo assignments) in 1946. Hicks also
assigned him to the ‘Gwyned Filling’ essay.317 Prior to working at Life, McCombe
had been an excellent war photographer in Europe for Life’s British competitor,
Picture Post, founded by Stefan Lorant in 1938. Lorant had been editor of the
Müncher Illustrierte Presse and had been experimenting with photo layouts, even
attempting to print the photographic equivalent of the written essay. Under the
supervision of Lorant, McCombe learned how to produce photographs that looked
as natural as possible, using only the light available (so, no flash). Hicks liked
McCombe’s natural style so much that a clause was added to his contract: he was
not allowed to use flash.318 Because of his achievements as a Life photo essay
photographer McCombe was honored as News Photographer of the Year in 1950.319
Throughout this chapter, these two essays, ‘Vassar’ and ‘Gwyned Filling’ will be
used as references. What follows first is a general evaluation of Life’s inventive use
of photojournalism in its photo essays.
4.2 Challenging traditions of American journalism
In shifting the focus from purely newsworthy facts to human interest details - and
doing so with the photograph as the main channel of information - Life broke with
the tradition of Time, Fortune and other news-orientated magazines. No other
publication ran stories on themes of general interest using photographs as its main
channel for communication. Tebbel and Zuckerman explain why Life’s method of
combining a large number of photographs and a relatively small amount of text to
form meant a significant change in American journalism:
316 Angeletti and Oliva, 160. 317 Wainwright, 122-23. 318 ‘History of Photography’, Britannica Online Encyclopedia <http://www.britannica.com/EBchecked/topic/457919/photography/252870/Photojournalism#ref=ref416509> February 18, 2010. 319 Life, April 10, 1950, 12.
76
‘The picture essay was a new and different method of communication, one
which took first place in the nation’s visual life until the coming of television.
Editors learned that pictures could be used in several ways. They could stand
by themselves or be used with captions and texts in various combinations, with the text subordinate. The point of journalism was to communicate, the
photograph not necessarily being used for itself alone.’320
Still, like news accounts or editorials, photo essays had to express a clear idea.
According to Luce, the photo essays in Life had to be essays “with a point, […] the
mere charm of photographic revelation is not enough.”321 This ‘notion of point’ had
also been applied to the single picture in Time. It meant that the picture should
clearly express a fact, idea or emotion. With photo essays the different ‘points’ of the
photographs should form a coherent whole, Luce stressed. This was not easily
done, except when the coherence was realized by means of a chronological
sequence. In all other cases, picture editors needed skill to arrange a logical story
from several photographs.322
During the 1930s and 1940s there was little debate over what could be called a
‘photo essay’. Nowadays, there are many definitions used by photographers and
theorists. According to Moran, it was W. Eugene Smith who first started using the
word ‘essay’ to describe his work. His definition stresses the thought that goes into
forming a sound essay:
A photo essayist […] is a photographer who manages to comprehend a subject – any subject, whether it’s coal miners in Appalachia, or love, or mercury poisoning of human beings in Minamata – and gives a lot of thought to weaving the pictures into a coherent whole in which each picture has an interrelationship with the others.323
For this reason, photo essays at first were scripted by the editors and later by
photographers themselves. “I built a story like a play,” Smith once commented,
“with ingredients, a cast […], that had meaning beyond the people involved.”324
Several studies have underscored the notion of photographic essays as very
complex products of photography, because of their intricate organization. Angeletti
and Oliva note that the purpose of this organization is to connect single related
photographs, forming “an extensive and complete look at the subject, and endowing 320 Quoted in Angeletti and Oliva, 132. 321 Wainwright, 111. 322 Hicks, 54. 323 Quoted in Tom Moran, Paul Fusco and Will McBride. The Photo Essay: How to Share Action and Ideals through Pictures (London: Thames and Hudson, 1974), 14. 324 “The Classic Stories”, Life 22 (1999) 11: 133-48.
77
it with more depth and coherence than a single photo or several shots scattered
through a paper could ever achieve.” 325 Moran provides us with a practical
approach to the art of the photo essay, illustrating the essence of this form by
showing examples from Paul Fusco (staff photographer for Look) and Will McBride
(art and reportage photographer for Look, Life, and several European magazines).
He begins his introduction by stating:
An essay is one of the most personal and powerful forms of narration a
photographer can use. Its series of images, telling a story along straightforward
literary lines or resonating with each other to develop a theme in freer form, offers a visual adventure that is at once deep and broad.326
Moran’s observations sum up the several possible forms and purposes of the photo
essay, ranging from basic photojournalistic explorations to very personal
imaginative stories.
But, why did Luce coin the term ‘photo essay’ to describe some of the photo
sequences he published? And what precisely is a photographic essay? While the
photo essay is said to be invented by Life, the magazine was certainly not first in
laying out photo series. An 1886 interview by a French artist called Nadar is
referred to by Moran as the blueprint of the later photo essay. French newspaper Le
Journal Illustré printed the interview as the first sequence of photographs on a
single subject, in halftones. Each picture was captioned with the words of the man
interviewed at the moment of exposure.327 As mentioned in the previous chapter,
German publications began experimenting with picture layouts in the late 1920s.
The photo essay as it was first developed in Germany was made up from several
photographs showing different facets or viewpoints. German picture magazine
photographers shot “overalls (also called establishing shots) of a scene, middle
range shots of the action, and close-ups of the participants – shooting from high
and low camera angles rather than eye level.”328 Mostly, one central large picture
was supported by smaller pictures, and editors “created visual flow by making the
photograph’s dominant lines lead the viewer’s eye from one image to another
[…].”329 The effect that one picture can have on the meaning of another while one
325 Angeletti and Oliva, 132. 326 Moran, Fusco and McBride, 8. 327 Moran, Fusco and McBride, 14. 328 Kobré, 355. 329 Kobré, 355.
78
reads a photo essay is what Hicks calls “the principle of the third effect”. The
individual messages of the pictures and the reader’s interpretative response
combine to form a meaning that differs from the meaning the reader would have
obtained from observing one picture.330 W. Eugene Smith, who made 322 essays
during the seven years he worked for Life, has expressed a very clear definition of
what makes a successful essay:
[J]ust having a long story doesn’t make an essay. You can take a group of
pictures all in the same place, on the same subject, and lay them out to make
a powerful visual statement, but if they don’t reinforce each other – if they don’t show those interrelationships that make the whole more than the sum of
its parts – you’ve what I’d call a portfolio.331
Still, the question remains why Luce decided to call this formula in his magazine a
photo essay, and why we still refer to it as such within photojournalism.
The traditional written essay can be defined as “an analytic, interpretative, or
critical literary composition […] usually dealing with its subject from a limited and
often personal point of view.” 332 Luce referred to seventeenth- and eighteenth-
century essayists such as Joseph Addison in explaining the quality of photographs
to comment on the subject depicted, making the photograph more than an
‘objective’ reporter.333 Because the essay as written form was dominant in 1930’s
magazines and newspapers as accompaniments of photographs, the pick for photo
essay seemed natural. Moreover, the written essay and the visual essay share a
common connotation, that of representing reality. And both forms are generally
charged with a personal point of view. 334 One key characteristic of an essay,
whether it is a political manifesto or an observation of daily life, or a photographic
essay, is the Sense that presents a “partial, incomplete, framed [representation] of
the truth.” 335 This personal, subjective quality, the quality of photography to
interpret – challenging news photography’s status as mere ‘reporters’ – is what Luce
saw as the main innovation in Life’s photo essays.
330 Hicks, 46. 331 Quoted in Moran, Fusco and McBride, 15. 332 ‘Essay’, Encyclopaedia Britannica, <http://www.britannica.com/EBchecked/topic/192869/essay#> December 9, 2009. 333 Hicks, 56. 334 W.J.T. Mitchell, Picture Theory: Essays on Verbal and Visual Representation (Chicago and London: The University of Chicago Press, 1994), 288-89. 335 Ibidem, 289.
79
Definitions of the term ‘essay’ are still fairly vague however, and many forms and
styles exist, depending on the context and the intent of the author. Two of many
forms of essays are the descriptive and the narrative essay. The descriptive essay
provides lots of sensory details about how something looks, sounds or makes one
feel. Or, it describes what something is, or how an event happened. The narrative
essay differs from the descriptive because it tells a story. Therefore it is often
associated with articles or short stories. Generally, the narrative provides a
personal experience, often written in the first person.336
Since the term ‘essay’ has no one strict meaning, the derivative term ‘photo essay’ is
hard to define as well. Some would use the term for every linked series of
photographs. But in the same way that all literary essays are series of words, but
not all series of words are essays, all photo essays are sets of photographs, but not
all sets of photographs are photo essays. One thing that can be said about every
photo essay is that it needs coherence, either through a sequential order or a
thematic consistency, in order to form a whole. Also, in photo essays the
photographs are not merely illustrative, and according to writer for Time and
Fortune James Agee -- author of Let Us Now Praise Famous Men, a book on
sharecroppers in Alabama made in collaboration with photographer Walker Evans -
- equality between photograph and text is a requirement for a photo essay, as are
the photograph’s independence and collaboration between photographs and text.337
All four requirements – coherence, equality, independence and collaboration – are
generally met in Life’s photo essays, as both photograph and text are key
informational structures, reciprocally supporting or extending each other’s
messages to form a logical story. Still, similar to the different forms of written
essays that exist, one photo essay can differ from another in style or type of essay;
it can be descriptive and narrative.
There is still an issue of classification that needs to be considered: the difference
between a ‘picture story’ (or ‘photo story’) and a ‘photo essay’. While the terms
‘photo essay’ and ‘photo story’ are often used interchangeably, it should be noted
that there is a slight difference between the two forms of photojournalism. And,
perhaps using terms and definitions borrowed from literature studies is not
336 ‘Guide to Different Kinds of Essays’, Gallaudet University, Washington DC <http://aaweb.gallaudet.edu/CLAST/Tutorial_and_Instructional_Programs/English_Works/Writing/Essays/Different_Kinds_of_Essays.html> December 9, 2009. 337 Mitchell, 290.
80
sufficient for the examination of photo narratives. Ribière observes that
photographic narration has not been “approached as a specific practice and
discussed within an appropriate theoretical framework.”338 To make this discussion
easier, she lists several terms and definitions used in studying narratives in
photography. A picture story, Ribière writes, is a “type of photographic account,
found in the illustrated press from the 1930s onwards. It usually consists of a
limited number of photographs depicting a current affairs event.”339 A photo essay is
“derived from a picture story, [but] an extended photographic exploration of a theme
of general interest rather than the description of an event. It is closely associated
with Life and the work of W. Eugene Smith.” 340 Besides the essay and story,
photographic narratives include other forms, for example the photo novel (roman-
photo) and the more common family album.
Photo stories in Life contained a “strong beginning-to-middle-to-end narrative drive
that described, say, a day in the life of an interesting personality,” Moran notes.341
An example of this form is a two-page story on the wedding of society woman
Kathleen Spence, showing her day in photographs from putting on her bridal gown
to cutting the cake.342 The photographer has made a report on the day and provides
purely factual information in chronological order. He has not chosen a particular
point of view, no real angle of interpretation, from which to approach the event.
Figure 7 Wedding of Kathleen Spence (fragment).343
338 Ribière, 277. 339 Idem. 340 Idem. 341 Moran, Fusco and McBride, 14. 342 Life, July 15, 1940, 10-11. 343 Idem.
81
The photo essay, on the other hand, can be laid out as a story with a beginning,
middle, and end, but sometimes it lacks this quality. Essays without this strong
linearity can be read in any order, since there is no indication where to begin and
where to end (other than the commonsense left to right, top to bottom order). An
essay is often longer than a story, but more importantly it “serves more as a vehicle
for the photographer’s interpretation of some larger theme.”344 In short, the element
that distinguishes the photo essay from the photo story is the presence of a
interpretive point of view that allows for a broader narrative, instead of that of the
sequence of events only. This is well illustrated by McCombe’s essay on Gwyned
Filling. This essay still has a beginning-middle-end build-up (strengthened by
headlines such as “Her Day Begins with a Frantic Race against the Clock”), though
less direct than the wedding story, but the photographer has made his own
interpretation of the events he witnessed. McCombe has left out certain aspects of
Filling’s life and commented in detail on other facets.
Yet, the interpretive aspect of photo essays may complicate the question to what
extent photo essays are narratives. Kobré distinguishes photo stories from photo
essays by claiming that essays are essentially not narrative, because they do not set
out to tell a story, but provide an opinion, like a written magazine or newspaper
editorial. He states that narrative stories need a ‘complication’ (any issue that a
person encounters, e.g. falling ill or being arrested) and a ‘resolution’, which is a
change in the situation that ends the complication.345 So, a photo narrative (story)
could be about the life of an alcoholic, with pictures laid out like movie stills of him
spending his days on the streets (complication) until he decides to check into a
rehabilitation clinic (resolution). An essay on the same topic would not tell the story
of this alcoholic, Kobré claims, but instead expose the various effects of alcohol
abuse as a point of view. The essay would thus contain the opinion of the
photographer, and lack time-sequenced events.
However, as the ‘Gwyned Filling’ essay shows, photo essays can contain both a
sequence of events and the photographer’s point of view. The first five pages of the
essay at least read like a chronological account of a day in her life. But in the end it
is McCombe’s idea of a young career woman which provides the essay’s foundation;
he decided to show her hopes and fears, her happy and bitter moments. His focus
344 Moran, Fusco and McBride, 14. 345 Kobré, 147-55.
82
on Filling’s emotions made the essay effective in transmitting feelings, and
McCombe’s style and focus on ordinary people became common for Life’s photo
essays.346
4.3 The photo essay formula
Narratives in Life’s photo essays are created by the photographs and the supportive
captions and texts, which present events logically to form a story flow. Moran has
argued that
Pictures in a photo essay can be orchestrated to explore a theme deeply in
rounded detail. They do more than describe; they interpret, pulling some reaction from the viewer. By setting up resonances between pictures, a
photographer can often transmit information - emotional, factual, idealistic –
on several levels at once.347
Numerous photographers thought of themselves as storytellers. McCombe has said
that “‘in telling a story, I use my camera the way a writer uses a typewriter. I take
pictures to build a setting and plot. Most of all, I try to develop characters – to make
people come alive.’”348
Not every sequence or collection of pictures makes a coherent story. In order to
suggest the pictures on a page are connected to form a story rather than operating
as individual pictures, such as those on a gallery wall, the layout needs to link the
total of pictures together. Photographers use several pictorial devices to accomplish
a visual story, Kobré writes. Most often, viewers will see in the pictures the same
person(s), object(s), mood, theme, perspective or camera technique. 349
Concentrating on one person is the easiest way to connect pictures and Life has
used this technique frequently, for example in its ‘Gwyned Filling’ essay or in
Smith’s famous photo essay ‘Country Doctor’.
Life’s early photo essays were thought through according to an exact formula. While
editors laying out the essay had some artistic freedom, photographers were often
told in detail what pictures were worth publishing. Dow’s analysis of the structuring
of Life photo essays is one of the most detailed accounts available. Tracing the
346 Angeletti and Oliva, 159. 347 Moran, Fusco and McBride, 14. 348 Kozol, 43. 349 Kobré, 145.
83
information that the magazine’s first bureau chief in Detroit, Robert L. Drew, taught
in workshops, she lists eight types of photographs the photographer had to bring
back from the shoot.
1. An introductory or ‘overall’ photo, usually a wide angle, often an aerial. 2. A middle-distance or ‘moving in’ shot --- a sign, a street, a building. 3. A close-up, usually hands, face, or detail. 4. A sequence or how-to shot. 5. A portrait, usually with an evocative background. 6. An interaction shot of persons conversing or action portrayed. 7. The signature picture --- the decisive moment, the one picture that
conveyed the essence of the story. 8. The clincher or ‘goodbye’ shot signifying the end of the story.350
Though this list does not necessarily correspond to the photographs used in the
end product, most of these picture types can be found in Life’s essays. The
magazine typically began its essays with a half- or full-page photograph, often used
to introduce the characters in the story, followed by a series of small and large
photos and ending with a full-page picture. Some photographs were accompanied
by short captions only, other photographs (especially the introductory photo) came
with a few paragraphs of text, explaining what topic was illustrated by the
photographs.351
This formula is roughly identifiable in Eisenstaedt’s ‘Vassar’ essay. The essay opens
with a 1.5 page aerial photograph of campus, including the residence hall, library,
and other university buildings. Next to this photo is a middle-distance shot of the
Taylor Hall gate, through which one enters and leaves campus. The essay then
moves in further (though never gets up close) by showing a medium close portrait of
Vassar’s president MacCracken, and three pictures of girls walking on campus on
the subsequent page. A picture sequence with a beginning-middle-end structure or
‘how-to’ shot is not apparent in Eisenstaedt’s essay.
Portraits are numerous; besides those of the girls and the President, it includes
portraits of Prof. Reed and Warden Dodge. Action is portrayed in a photograph of
girls reading their mail on the way to class and one of a girl stepping on her bike.
Still, action is scarce in this essay as most pictures are static portraits or do not
include people at all. As the last point of Dow’s list suggests, essays were drawn to a
close through a clincher or ‘goodbye’ picture. However, the last photo in ‘Vassar’ – a
350 Quoted in Angeletti and Oliva, 135. Or see Kobré, 146. 351 Kozol, 43.
84
girl lying in bed reading a newspaper – can hardly be seen as a closer to the essay.
And the caption “Nothing at Vassar gets more study than hometown papers”
provides equally little closure. In fact, the essay ends so suddenly that it is easy to
confuse the photographs on the next page as still being part of the essay.
As listed above, the editors of Life were looking for the ‘decisive moment’ in every
photo essay, that ‘one in a million moment’ which would tell the story best. Yet, it is
hard to tell if, and if so, which picture they believed to be this signature picture in
the ‘Vassar’ essay. Most likely it is the picture showing several girls in class, taking
notes during a Political Science lecture, as it shows the girls (and their clothes) and
their main reason for attending Vassar (its excellent educational program) in one
picture. Yet, since the focus of the essay is spread over multiple aspects of Vassar
life and because it contains many static pictures, it may be inaccurate to designate
this picture as a real decisive moment.
Though Life had listed its requirements for a successful photo essay, sometimes
photographers and editors purposely deviated from these guidelines. W. Eugene
Smith has said that in the build-up of a good essay, an experienced essayist
sometimes rejects the charm of a great, strong photograph, because it might
distract from rather than introduce the theme. Using a strong image would in some
cases be like “‘putting a strong speech in the first act and throwing the whole play
off balance.’”352
More importantly, and this is where the ‘Gwyned Filling’ essay differs significantly
from previous Life essays, the strict scripting of essays by writers had disappeared
by the end of the 1940s. The fact that magazine editors decided on the content and
looks of photo essays had been bothering more and more photographers. Especially
Smith was infamous with the editors of Life for interfering with the layout of his
essays.353 In 1947, four prominent photographers – Robert Capa, Henri Cartier-
Bresson, George Rodger and David "Chim" Seymour – founded the photo agency
Magnum as an alternative to picture magazine formulas. The agency functioned as
a co-operative in which photographers were free to organize their own projects and
pursue their own ideas, working without strict guidelines. Also, copyright of the
photos was now held by the photographers and not by the magazine that published
352 Quoted in Moran, Fusco and McBride, 15. 353 Loengard, 117-18.
85
the pictures. Therefore, the photographers had control over what magazines their
pictures were featured in.354 As a result of the growing freedom for photographers,
Life’s formula for making photo essays and the control of the editors over the
content and layout of essays declined.
Though McCombe was assigned to the project, he had much more say in the
realization of the plan. The ‘Gwyned Filling’ essay does not begin with an overview
picture, but rather with a medium close-up of Gwyned watching a fire in the city.
The picture introduces the theme of the essay, yet is not as emotively strong as
some other pictures in the essay. More so than ‘Vassar’, the ‘Gwyned Filling’ essay
has a sense of action, caused by sequences of pictures with a beginning, middle,
and end. For example on page 104 and 105, showing pictures of Gwyned and her
roommate respectively waking up, taking a bath, having breakfast and running for
the bus. The final shot of this sequence shows the viewer Gwyned has reached the
office. Because of these action series, this essay is more easily read as a narrative
than Eisenstaedt’s ‘Vassar’. It shows progress of time as the characters are in
movement. This aspect of narrativity will be explored further in paragraph 4.6.
4.4 The role of captions in photo essays
Photo essays were a product of interpretive reporting, but their credibility was not
rooted in the special expertise of the magazine’s staff. In fact, journalists working
for Life were hardly ever saw credit lines for their work. Instead, as Vials has stated,
credibility existed in “the constructed notion that the photograph had the power to
transparently represent the real”, even though photographic narration is artificial in
nature, because of its reliance on a design and a sequential layout. 355 This goes
against photography’s traditional principle of natural representation and capturing
the unique moment as it happened. 356 Yet, the notion of realism, the picture’s
modality was enforced by its caption.
The seemingly natural way of captioning the photos enforced the notion of the
photograph representing the real rather than a fantasy. Magazine pictures
354 ‘History of Magnum’, Magnum Photos <http://inmotion.magnumphotos.com/about/history> February 19, 2010. 355 Vials, 86. 356 Baetens, 283.
86
frequently had purely informational captions.357 Often, photographs in essays were
accompanied by “phrases such as ‘Here is...,’ ‘Here are pictures...,’ or ‘These are...,’
as if it were the mere exhibitor of found objects.”358 In the ‘Vassar’ essay, for
example, two pictures of girls walking on campus, one of them in the rain, are
captioned: “What a Vassar girl wears on a fair day” and “What a Vassar girl wears
on a rainy day”. It is precisely the use of these captions that makes Life’s photo
essays look natural and ‘realist’. This realism derives, as Vials explains, from the
relation between the photographs and the captions, both independently structured
but cooperating messages. While the photos provide the unbiased starting point for
the partisan comments in the text, the captioning “provides the larger theory which
ultimately leads us to reality.”359
Writing in a realist and clear-cut fashion was not so much a choice as a necessity
for Life. According to one of its writers Joseph Kastner, the reason for captioning
photos by pointing out things “anybody could see” was that Life’s “public was even
more illiterate in terms of photography than we [the writers].”360 Caption writers
thus deliberately used techniques that made sure the reader would see what was in
the picture, talking them into it. Barthes has called this type of captions
‘anchorage’. Instead of adding subsequent meanings to the photographic message –
which Barthes calls ‘relay’ – captions providing anchorage guide the identification
and interpretation of the message; it answers questions like ‘what can be seen in
the picture?’361 These captions are used as tools for controlling the use of the
message and provide certainty when it comes to the meaning of the signs in the
photos. Therefore, the caption plays a crucial role in the making of meaning in a
photograph. And a different caption can lead to a very different interpretation of the
same picture. As Hunter suggests, this new caption can turn “what was news into
history, what was propaganda into art, or vice versa, altering the relation of the
photograph to actuality, confounding hopes for a single, authoritative, stable
meaning.”362 Captions, though seemingly neutral, thus are important as guides for
the interpretation of the photographs.
357 Kress and Van Leeuwen, 72. 358 Vials, 86. 359 Vials, 87. 360 Kastner, 123. 361 Barthes, Image-Music-Text, 39-40. 362 Hunter, 14.
87
Unlike the ‘Vassar’ essay, the photographs in the twelve-page ‘Gwyned Filling’ essay
are not directly captioned, except for the opening picture. Rather, they are laid out
in conjunction with the text, which does provide observations already present in the
pictures. For example, beneath the photo of Gwyned holding a tissue under her
nose (page 108), the text reads:
At rare intervals, particularly after a day of hectic travel around the city, Gwyned is overtaken by one of her most embarrassing misfortunes nosebleeds. Here she copes with one in a restaurant, gracefully tilting back her head and inwardly running through all the salty Missouri expletives she can remember.
Even though readers are still told what can be seen in the picture, the photographs
in the ‘Gwyned Filling’ essay seem to function more independently from the text
than the pictures in ‘Vassar’, as the absence of a separate and closely placed
caption near the picture makes it less ‘anchored’.
4.5 Narrative processes in single pictures
As mentioned in chapter one, series of images have more narrative potential than
single images. Several authors conclude that a single image alone cannot represent
a narrative, but only hint at it. A narrative image (snapshot or action shot) contains
elements suggesting action and progress, Kress and Van Leeuwen argue. They
distinguish this type of images from conceptual images (e.g. many landscapes,
portraits, diagrams), which cannot suggest action and movement.363 In order for a
picture to show narrative processes it needs to contain a ‘vector’, suggesting
movement and (inter)action. A conceptual picture never contains a vector, a
narrative picture always does. A vector is a diagonal line suggesting action, formed
in a picture by “bodies, limbs, tools, roads [and] arrowhead lines”, for example.364
Wolf refers to this element in pictures as ‘frozen action’.365 Such a vector can realize
a narrative representation, Kress and Van Leeuwen contend, by functioning in the
same way as ‘action verbs’ in written language. While written and visual texts are
constructed according to two different semiotic modes, they can realize comparable
semantic relations, communicating similar messages. 366 For instance, a road
running diagonally in a photograph represents the verb ‘driving’, at least when
363 Maree Stenglin and Rick Iedema, ‘How to Analyze Visual Images: A Guide for Tesol Teachers’ in Analysing English in a Global Context: A Reader, eds. Anne Burns and Caroline Coffin (London: Routledge, 2001), 199. (194-208) 364 Kress and Van Leeuwen, 57. 365 Wolf, ‘Narrative and Narrativity’, 191. 366 Kress and Van Leeuwen, 46.
88
there is an ‘actor’ on the road, such as a car. The ‘actor’ is the person or element in
the picture from which the vector departs.367
An example similar to that of the road and the car driving on it is the picture of girls
walking on two paths on the Vassar campus (page 26). The diagonal lines realized
by the paths and the ‘actors’ walking on them form a narrative representation. This
representation can be both ‘transactional’ (aimed at someone or something) or ‘non-
transactional’ (not directed at anything). In the case of a transactional
representation the path would lead to a house, for example, resembling a sentence
like “The girls are walking to the house”. If the path does not lead towards such a
goal, the picture still contains an action process but this time not between two
participants (people, objects). In the case of the Vassar picture the girls do not walk
towards an obvious goal, since the viewer can only vaguely see a building in the
background and can only guess that the path leads to that building. Only the
caption, saying the girls walk towards Rockefeller Hall, can turn the action process
into a transactional one. Several of these action processes can occur in one picture;
there are major and minor processes, like main clauses and subordinate clauses in
other languages.368
In addition to action processes, narratives can be represented by reactional
processes, meaning the vector is an imaginary line formed by the direction a person
looks.369 An example of this reactional type of narrative representation can be found
in the ‘Gwyned Filling’ essay. Its first photograph shows Gwyned among a small
crowd, watching something outside the picture’s frame. Her look suggests
something is happening, though the viewer cannot see what and again has to rely
on the caption to provide details on that matter. Like action processes, reactional
processes can be transactional or non-transactional. Sometimes photographs are
purposely cropped to omit the person or thing looked at, placing more emphasis on
the reaction of the person(s) in the picture than the event they are witnessing.370
Bearing in mind the above examples of narrative representations in single pictures,
Wolf’s conclusion (already mentioned in chapter one) that individual pictures “can
never actually represent a narrative but at best metonymically point to a story”
367 Ibidem, 59. 368 Ibidem, 61-63. 369 Ibidem, 64. 370 Ibidem, 67.
89
seems accurate.371 While the pictures do contain the ‘narratemes’ of actors and
some extent of action, other traits of narrativity, such as causality and teleology
cannot be represented by the picture alone.372 The pictures suggest action, but
cannot tell the whole story. For important details they rely on written words, in this
case the captions. Therefore it seems reasonable to conclude that for photographs
and photo essays the written word is a vital stimulant of narrativity.373
How a picture is interpreted by its viewer thus partly depends on the words
accompanying it. But there are more factors influencing the meaning of images.
First of all, the image itself contains codes articulating notions on the social world it
represents, such as the nature of social relations between the participants in the
picture and the viewer. In other words, pictures are constructed and read according
to a visual language that is understood by both the producer and the viewer.374
These codes are present in the placement and salience of elements in the image, as
well as the framing of a picture. These aspects all direct the viewer toward a certain
preferred reading.
However, the interpretation of images is not only guided by structures in the picture
itself. Intertextual signs greatly affect the message of visual communication, as Hill
and Helmers demonstrate. Everyone relates signs he or she sees to signs that are
already known; it is often due to a “familiar script” that we understand the message
of a picture, as Wolf notes.375 Often this happens unconsciously; at other times, the
viewer will know exactly what the picture reminds him or her of. A photo by Thomas
E. Franklin of the planting of the American flag in the World Trade Center rubble
reminded many viewers of Rosenthal’s photograph of U.S. Marines raising a flag at
Iwo Jima. This last photograph had become a symbol of American strength, and is
one of the most reproduced photographs ever. Through this intertextuality, the
photo of Ground Zero (officially titled ‘Ground Zero Spirit’ but widely known as
‘Raising the Flag at Ground Zero’) becomes a symbol similar to the Iwo Jima
picture, with many powerful connotations, such as American vigor and hope.
Franklin’s photograph would almost certainly have a different meaning for someone
who has never seen the Iwo Jima photo.376
371 Wolf, ‘Pictorial Narrativity’, 433. 372 Wolf, ‘Narrative and Narrativity’, 189. 373 Wolf, ‘Pictorial Narrativity’, 433-35. 374 Kress and Van Leeuwen, 115-16. 375 Wolf, ‘Pictorial Narrativity’, 434. 376 Hill and Helmers, 5-7.
Figure 8 'Ground Zero Spirit', 2001 (left) and ‘
4.6 The photo essay: c
While certain single pictures can
express a familiar story, the potential for a single image alone to create a coherent
story is very limited. Some of these limits do not apply to photo essays, as they
contain series of photographs. There
narrativity in photo essays, such as using a chronological structure, causality and
teleology, and editing according to a method called ‘suturing’
First of all, in contrast to individual pictures, photo essays
through their beginning-middle
less often showed clear linearity, a beginning
stories. Still, the fact that photo essays are
left to right and from top to bottom, means that the essays use, as Wolf argues, “the
convention of ‘reading’ spatial juxtaposition as an index of chronological sequence
377 'Ground Zero Spirit', 2001. Photo by Th<http://www.cromwellfd.com/images/PicsPatchesNew/GroundZeroSpirit3.jpg> February 19, 2010. ‘Raising the Flag on Iwo Jima’, 1945. Photo by Joe Rosenthal, <http://www.iwojima.com/raising/lflage2.gif> February 19, 2010.
'Ground Zero Spirit', 2001 (left) and ‘Raising the Flag on Iwo Jima’, 1945.377
The photo essay: creating a coherent narrative
single pictures can suggest a narrative and, through intertextuality,
express a familiar story, the potential for a single image alone to create a coherent
story is very limited. Some of these limits do not apply to photo essays, as they
contain series of photographs. There are several techniques that help
, such as using a chronological structure, causality and
teleology, and editing according to a method called ‘suturing’.
t to individual pictures, photo essays can create
middle-end structure. As mentioned, Life’s photo essays
less often showed clear linearity, a beginning-middle-end structure, as photo
the fact that photo essays are (generally) ‘read’ picture by p
left to right and from top to bottom, means that the essays use, as Wolf argues, “the
convention of ‘reading’ spatial juxtaposition as an index of chronological sequence
'Ground Zero Spirit', 2001. Photo by Thomas E. Franklin, <http://www.cromwellfd.com/images/PicsPatchesNew/GroundZeroSpirit3.jpg> February 19, 2010. ‘Raising the Flag on Iwo Jima’, 1945. Photo by Joe Rosenthal, <http://www.iwojima.com/raising/lflage2.gif> February 19, 2010.
90
377
suggest a narrative and, through intertextuality,
express a familiar story, the potential for a single image alone to create a coherent
story is very limited. Some of these limits do not apply to photo essays, as they
several techniques that help create
, such as using a chronological structure, causality and
create narrativity
’s photo essays
end structure, as photo
‘read’ picture by picture, from
left to right and from top to bottom, means that the essays use, as Wolf argues, “the
convention of ‘reading’ spatial juxtaposition as an index of chronological sequence
<http://www.cromwellfd.com/images/PicsPatchesNew/GroundZeroSpirit3.jpg> February 19, 2010.
91
and thus imply a crucial narrative feature.” 378 Related to chronology are two
essential qualities that help create a coherent story: causality and teleology. 379
Using the ‘Vassar’ essay as an example, one will find that there are no real causal
connections between the pictures; there are no relations of cause and effect, every
photo seems to stand on its own. Neither is there a sense of purpose and closure in
the series of photographs, so the narrateme of teleology is also absent from
Eisenstaedt’s essay. This absence of causality and teleology undermines the essays
narrativity and prevents it from realizing a coherent story.
In the essay on Gwyned Filling, one will find more elements that help create a
coherent narrative. First of all, this essay has a stronger sense of chronology and
causality, as at least some of the photographs, such as those on pages 104 and
105, suggest that time elapses (Gwyned wakes up, takes a bath, has breakfast,
runs for the bus). An even more efficient method of making this essay coherent is
the use of recurrent actors.380 The fact that many of the photographs in this essay
show the same person (Gwyned) makes it much more coherent than the ‘Vassar’
essay, in which several ‘unknown’ actors are featured.
Yet, as Kozol argues, there was another method of making an essay a coherent
narrative. Life’s editors used a technique filmmakers call ‘suturing.’ In film suturing
is meant to draw the viewer into the story, making the viewer forget there is a
camera between his or her own world and that of the movie. Suturing means
cutting the story up in short scenes and editing them to form a seamless,
apparently natural story. The term,
refers to how the story-world of a film stitches together an imaginary reality, […] one that possesses a semblance of coherence and wholeness, that, while
attending to it (and seemingly participating within it), we do not reflect upon as
something that has been fabricated – that has been constructed.381
Similar to films made with this technique, photo essays present stories by jumping
from shot to shot. In doing this, the photo essay can offer only “fragments of a
narrative”, Kozol argues, as it remains a fragmentized whole.382 Still, viewers are
directed to perceive the essay as a cohesive statement by suturing techniques, such 378 Wolf, ‘Pictorial Narrativity’, 433. 379 Wolf, ‘Narrative and Narrativity’, 187. 380 Wolf, ‘Pictorial Narrativity’, 434. 381 ‘Suture’, University of Wisconsin, Eau Claire <http://www.uwec.edu/ranowlan/suture.html> December 11, 2009. 382 Kozol, 46.
92
as the realistic appearance of the photographs and the connections made between
them through the text.
As the ‘Gwyned Filling’ essay illustrates, the intimate yet unobtrusive photographs
create an imaginary reality and let the viewer connect emotionally with the girl in
the pictures. Recognizable images of characters and their emotions make it easier
for the viewer to connect the different fragments into one narrative, resembling the
normalcy of his or her social world. 383 In assessing the potential for photo essays to
form a coherent story, Baetens underlines the difference between photography and
photographic narration. In photography, for example a press photograph, one image
is used to show an event. This photo’s edges “signify an absolute break”, while in
case of photographic narration, where a sequence of images is shown on a page – as
is the case with a photo essay – the edges of a photo provide only a relative break
since it is either preceded, followed or enclosed by other images.384 These images are
more easily connected to each other by the viewer to form a narrative.
Still, others see the irrefutable breaks between photographs (they remain separate
items) as barriers preventing the photo essay from ever becoming a full narrative. In
contrast to written or motion picture stories, photographic narratives are troubled
by these breaks, as they undermine the sense of linearity. Vials argues that while
suturing depends to some extent on linearity, there is no linearity at all in the photo
essays Life published. In his view, the editors did not even try forming a sense of
start and end, but worked according to the idea of “radical simultaneity.”385 Though
this is true for some essays, this study has shown that some photo essays did
contain a level of linearity (e.g. ‘Gwyned Filling’ essay). As Life developed through
the years, experimentation and changing conventions led to several forms of photo
essays, some forming a stronger narrative than others.
Even though picture series, like those in Life’s photo essays, have much more
potential to form coherent narratives, some of the core qualities of narrativity, such
as certain temporal relations and circumstances (e.g. precise chronology, without
‘gaps’) cannot be realized in pictorial representations.386 Therefore, as with single
pictures, words are essential for the creation of full narratives. Much more than
383 Kozol, 47. 384 Baetens, 283. 385 Vials, 89. 386 Wolf, ‘Pictorial Narrativity’, 433-35.
93
verbal texts, pictures alone ask from the ‘reader’ that he or she fills in the gaps that
are inevitably there, to construct a complete narrative. Still, as the two examples –
‘Vassar’ and ‘Gwyned Filling’ – have shown, near the end of the 1940s the editors of
Life had grown much more familiar with the language of pictures, and had acquired
the skill of using them to tell coherent stories.
As this chapter has shown, photo essays are complex, carefully ordered stories that
communicate a personal view on a particular theme. Topics of Life photo essays
were varied, as were its lay-out styles. Life challenged traditional journalism by
shifting the focus from purely newsworthy facts to human interest details in its
photo essay. Moreover, the editors used the photograph as the main channel of
information. Equality of photograph and text is what typified the photo essay and
meant a change from pre-1930s journalism. The photo essay in Life was, however,
developed with the help of knowledge form Germany, where magazines had
experimented with visual storytelling since the 1920s. Life’s photo essays had the
potential to form a narrative, though some showed more overt narrativity than
others. Still, its captions and written text played a significant role in forming a
coherent narrative, and therefore it seems inaccurate to conclude that photo series
alone can form a complete narrative. Visual communication and verbal
communication are formed by two distinct structures that both can and cannot
represent certain aspects. Their cooperation in photo essays is thus crucial for the
wholeness of the story.
94
CONCLUSIONCONCLUSIONCONCLUSIONCONCLUSION
For about three decades, Life was the leading American news medium, having at its
disposal large financial resources and the world’s best press photographers. From
the late 1930s to the 1960s, the magazine was the most popular means of seeing
the events that happened around the globe. 387 Like other influential news
publications, Life continually worked on improving its magazine journalism. In an
increasingly competitive news market, including other magazines, newspapers,
radio and television, Life aimed at bringing the news in a different and more
captivating way than everyone else.388 Even though its choice of topics and its
suggestive style was often criticized, Life was an institution in American and
international journalism. Nevertheless, while the magazine was selling over five
million copies a week and had a total readership of about forty million consumers,
it collapsed in 1972 after 36 years of publication.389 Life died on December 29,
1972, leaving many readers and publishing industry insiders in despair.
Business had been troubling for the magazine since the late 1960s. While television
had been a modest competitor during the 1950s, its immense growth at the start of
the next decade challenged the stable success of Life. When, in 1963, television
news broadcasts were expanded from fifteen to thirty minutes, and when two years
later color broadcasts became common, Life’s leading position in the field of news
reporting was taken over. 390 This fierce competition from television cost Life
subscribers but above all advertising revenues. As Wainwright reflects, by the start
of 1972 “everything was running against the survival of the magazine,” as the costs
of production and mailing had increased significantly, key advertisers (particularly
of foods) crossed over to television, and shrinking issues failed to convince
readers.391 Life’s prospects were grim; over the last four years the magazine had lost
forty million dollars, and equal losses were predicted if the magazine continued,
even with cuts in circulation.392 Life’s management had made several attempts to
save the magazine, but even the most fervent Life fanatics had to admit that Life
387 Kozol, 185. 388 Angeletti and Oliva, 164. 389 Ibidem, 166. 390 Kozol, 185. 391 Wainwright, 473. 392 Ibidem, 481.
95
was over. On the cover of its last issue, just below the dateline, one word brought
the news of its demise: “Goodbye”.393
In its 36 years of publication, Life had become famous for its unique way of using
photography in reporting news and features. For the most part, 1930s American
journalism still revolved around the written word. Photographs traditionally
functioned as illustration, carrying no crucial information for the story itself. But,
the rise of the press photograph between 1880 and 1936 was eminent. The halftone
print technique and other new technologies, including roll film, small camera’s,
flash powder and bulbs, and finer paper led to an increase in the popularity of
press photography from the end of the nineteenth century onward. For magazines
adhering to a realist philosophy, photography meant a fitting medium. The modern
popular magazine and yellow newspapers further encouraged the acceptance of
press photographs in the American press, and news services distributing
photographs widened their appeal. While photographs for a long time had to share
the pages of magazines and newspapers with other forms of illustration, the urge
for ‘objective’ reporting emerging over the course of the twentieth century gave
photography a boost.
However, the making and use of press photographs became a respected profession
only by the 1930s. The photograph-as-content made its way into news accounts
and features, validating the term ‘photojournalism’. Press photographers gradually
gained more respect from their fellow journalists, and the Hindenburg disaster (May
1937) became the first truly photographic event, as the image of the burning
zeppelin lingers in Americans’ collective memory. The professionalization of press
photography continued during the 1940s, when World War II photography showed
its merits, and universities began offering special photography courses. Still, in
many news organizations, pictures continued to be seen as far subordinate to
words, at best useful to boost sales.
As the first magazine to edit photographs into logical, coherent stories, Life
outplayed other picture magazines of the 1930s. While magazines like National
Geographic and Vanity Fair combined pictures, captions and text into spreads, and
European magazines experimented with picture stories and narrative sequences,
Life was the first American magazine using photography as its main narrative
393 Angeletti and Oliva, 166.
96
content. The public felt an eagerness for visual storytelling, fuelled by earlier picture
magazines and even more by early motion pictures. A number of picture magazines
emerged after Life proved successful; none of them came close to Life’s circulation
figures, though Look was somewhat of a competitor. Life’s circulation started at one
million, though the estimated demand was higher. Slow printing processes
prevented the magazine’s management from selling more issues.
Evidently, Life’s immediate appeal and success as a visual news medium were
unmatched by any other publication. Therefore, it seems fair to say that in the days
preceding successful television news broadcasts, Life had a huge and unsurpassed
influence on how Americans viewed the news of homeland and world events. Its
circulation reached 5.8 million, combined with an exceptionally high pass-along
rate. Readers of Life were presented with a magazine that celebrated white middle-
class values and confirmed traditional gender roles and assumptions about good
American families. Objective reporting was an important purpose for the editors of
Life. Photographs were to give the public the idea that they worked as a mirror,
showing them exactly what American society looked like. This familiarity of the
ordinary citizen that was generally depicted in Life’s photo essays was greatly
appreciated by its readers.
Apart from the magazine’s newsstand success, its editors initially struggled to
convert Luce’s ideas into a well-written and visually strong product. Advertisers
worried that Life was ‘a quickie’, that readers would quickly leaf through it and
would subsequently not read its advertisements. Other ad men feared that Life’s
editorial material would be too captivating, giving the ads no chance. These
concerns made the editors question the text-image proportion, fearing that there
was too little text on Life’s pages to have readers spend a considerable amount of
time on it. Yet, they held on to their initial intentions of making a magazine filled
with photographs, and advertisers discovered that photography could be an
effective marketing tool.
Life’s early editorial content was of variable quality, its editors admitted. With only
four staff photographers they depended on news service pictures that were often not
captivating. So, Luce searched for more professional photographers. Many of those
he published and contracted were European, mainly German, photographers.
European magazines such as the Berliner Illustrirte Zeitung, the Illustrated London
97
News, and Vu featured photographs as key components of stories as early as the
1920s. German editors in particular had acquainted themselves with the
techniques for pictorial storytelling. As editor of the Müncher Illustrierte Presse,
Lorant attempted to print the photographic equivalent of the traditional written
essay. Instead of printing photographs in arbitrary or chronological order on a page,
Lorant experimented with photo story forms, laying out photographs like movie
stills. The photo essay as it was first developed by German publications had much
in common with the later photo essay as it appeared in Life.
The input from German editors and photographers (e.g. Korff, Eisenstaedt) was vital
for the development of Life’s distinctive style of photojournalism. Without the
guidance of Korff (who first joined Time in the early 1930s) and others, Life’s editors
might not have been this successful at laying out coherent stories and essays. And
without the work of many émigré photographers, the looks and content of photo
essays would most likely have been less inventive. So while Life was America’s first
and foremost publication of photo essays, it was largely created on the basis of
German knowledge.
Luce’s ultimate photojournalism project had two ‘rhythms’, that of the quick news
facts and that of the photo essay. The magazine featured short, sometimes
somewhat odd, news items or stories alongside extensive, carefully ‘written’ photo
essays. Thus, Life’s pages contained both the daily (or weekly) news and human
interest stories. The inclusion of human interest items was to give the magazine a
sense of ‘relaxation’, Luce explained.394 Presumably, he was right about this, as the
photo essays typically differed from other Life items in length (some were over ten
pages), lay-out (less frantic than other pages) and subject matter (they generally
contained less offensive pictures than printed elsewhere in Life).
Photo essays were representative of the deconstruction of traditional language,
visible in the changing role of news pictures from illustration only to photography
as content. Written text had been challenged as the dominant structure in news
stories during the 1930s and in photo essays words were no longer superior to
photographs as storytelling elements. In Life, the traditional word-picture order was
reversed, with the words now accompanying the photos. Changing this order was
difficult for the editors, as reading pictures was new to most, as well as telling
394 Wainwright, 102.
98
stories in pictures. So, the first years of Life are characterized by experimentation
and changing lay-out conventions.
While Luce and Life’s editors had worked out plans for the ways in which
photographs should be used in news stories and longer features, Luce used the
term ‘photographic essay’ only after several issues had appeared. The photo essay
would replace the traditional written essay as an essential means of
communication, Luce believed. Eisenstaedt’s essay on Vassar was according to
Luce a perfect example of how photo essays communicated differently from common
articles in magazines like Time and Fortune. Instead of providing comprehensive,
factual accounts, photo essays were thematic interpretations, offering a story from
the point of view of the photographer and, at least initially, primarily that of the
editor scripting and editing the essay. In photo essays, the camera functions not
merely as a reporter. At the same time, it works as a commentator, in the same way
an essayist expresses personal thoughts to ‘picture the world’, Luce claimed.
The ‘Vassar’ essay was interesting because of its unobtrusive, natural style of
photography. This was one of Eisenstaedt’s praised talents, his ability to create a
sense of intimacy in his photographs. Since he was accustomed to using a small
35-millimeter camera, he could keep a low profile as photographer and shoot his
subjects without making them feel apprehensive. This quality of natural
photography was even more visible in McCombe’s 1948 ‘Gwyned Filling’ essay.
While early photo essays, such as ‘Vassar’, were made according to detailed scripts,
this essay was made without a prior design. McCombe was given the freedom to
follow the young woman for hundreds of hours, shooting whatever he thought was
interesting. Even more than in Eisenstaedt’s essay, this resulted in photographs
that looked like they were made by a ‘fly on the wall’. Like the ‘Vassar’ essay, the
essay on Gwyned Filling demonstrates the quality of photo essays to communicate
human experiences, moods and emotions in a direct way by showing meaningful
moments in a person’s life, rather than writing about it.
Life’s dependence on photography as a means of communication challenged
traditional journalism, which was mostly dominated by words. While photographs
became common elements in the early twentieth century press, they generally
served as illustrations only. The development of professional photojournalism
during the 1930s and the founding of Life in particular brought about a change in
99
the perception of news by the American public. As the first chapter of this thesis
has shown, images generally have a greater persuasive power and come to us in a
more direct form than verbal texts. Photographs furnish evidence and are able to
communicate in a more explicit way. Moreover, pictures have the ability to linger in
our heads, and many press photographs have become part of our cultural memory.
Photographs became popular as elements of the press because of their connotation
of being objective. Initially they were seen by publishers and the public as copies of
the ‘real world’ and gained a reputation of evidence of what happened ‘out there’.
This ‘truth-value’ is what made many publishers adopt photography in their news
publications, as supplement to the verbal messages. To be sure, photographs are
not objective and the relation between the photographic message and reality is a
paradoxical one; on the one hand the photograph seems a reflection of reality (what
Barthes calls an ‘analogon’), but on the other hand it contains a level of
connotation, which is the result of the production and reception of the photograph.
In making and receiving a message, subjective cultural values influence the
outcome. A photograph is thus both a natural and a cultural message.
However, since the power of the press photograph lies in its ‘objective’ quality, Life’s
photographers and editors used techniques that reinforced the naturalness of their
photographs and photo essays, including straightforward, descriptive captions. The
apparently natural way of captioning photographs strengthened the idea that the
press photograph represents the real world, rather than a fantasy. Besides, writing
in a realist manner, telling the viewer what could be seen in the picture, was a
logical thing to do for Life’s editors, as both the American public and the magazine’s
staff were unaccustomed to the visual language of photography.
It seems reasonable to conclude that the language of photography differs from the
language of written English. And as written language was the familiar means of
forming narratives, the study of the narrativity of photographs has been a rather
recent affair. Still, the notion that narrativity can solely be present in verbal
language has been widely rejected, as many critics claim that the quality of
narrative is not reliant on the medium that carries it. Rather, it is ‘transmedial’. Yet,
the narrative potential of photographs varies from genre to genre and from picture
to picture. As with words, narrativity is depended on the grammar of images, which
is made up by elements like color, perspective, framing, composition. Some pictures
100
can realize a narrative representation by means of a vector, a diagonal line
suggesting action, formed in a picture by the direction of bodies, limbs, roads or a
person’s gaze, for example. A vector functions in the same way as ‘action verbs’ in
written language.
Still, while some argue that a single picture can represent a narrative, the examples
presented in this thesis have shown that a picture alone can point to a narrative,
but cannot represent a complete story. For that, it depends on the words
accompanying it. A single photograph can suggest action, but cannot tell the whole
story. Unlike single pictures, series of pictures can represent change, action,
movement, as in the ‘Gwyned Filling’ essay. Life’s editors used a technique called
‘suturing’, which means to cut up the story in short scenes and edit them to form a
seamless, apparently natural story. This helped to draw the viewer into the story,
making him or her believe that what they see is an extension of the world in which
they live. Also, identifiable images of people and their emotions help the viewer to
connect the different fragments into one narrative, resembling the normalcy of his
or her social world. While the breaks between photographs (they remain separately
framed items) can be seen as barriers preventing the photo essay from becoming a
full narrative, it seems fair to conclude that series of photographs can represent a
high level of narrativity.
Still, the photograph on its own provides an unstable and variable message, as
Barthes and others claim. In order to fix the message of a photograph it needs
words. As this study has shown, the caption plays a crucial role in the making of
meaning in a photograph by filling in the gaps in the visual message. Consequently,
a different caption can lead to a very different interpretation of the same picture.
While studies on the relations between words and pictures are scarce it seems clear
that both structures are constantly interacting in messages such as the photo
essay. So, in order to thoroughly analyze the messages of photo essays, both words
and photographs, and their relations, must be evaluated. And as photo essays
generally contain captions and accompanying texts, an analysis of the narrative
potential of just the photographs would not be accurate. Bringing this study, which
has to a certain extent included the verbal part of photo essays in its analysis, to a
close, one can conclude that the written word is still a significant, if not vital,
stimulant of narrativity. The narratives represented by Life’s photo essays are
formed by a collaboration of the photographs, their captions and the written text.
101
So, while Life’s photo essays challenged traditional word-dominated journalism by
publishing narratives that had photographs as their main structure of content,
their effective and successful manner of communication would likely have been far
less effective and successful if they had been without words.
102
APPENDIX AAPPENDIX AAPPENDIX AAPPENDIX A
‘VASSAR: A BRIGHT JEWEL IN U.S. EDUCATIONAL DIADEM’
BY ALFRED EISENSTAEDT
Life February 1, 1937
Cover and pages 24-31.395
395 All issues of Life can be found online at Google Books, <http://books.google.com/books?id=R1cEAAAAMBAJ&source=gbs_navlinks_s>
103
Cover
104
Page 24
105
Page 25
106
Page 26
107
Page 27
108
Page 28
109
Page 29
110
Page 30
111
Page 31
112
APPENDIX BAPPENDIX BAPPENDIX BAPPENDIX B
‘THE PRIVATE LIFE OF GWYNED FILLING’
BY LEONARD MCCOMBE
Life May 3, 1948
Cover and pages 103-114.396
396 All issues of Life can be found online at Google Books,
<http://books.google.com/books?id=R1cEAAAAMBAJ&source=gbs_navlinks_s>
113
Cover
114
Page 103
115
Page 104
116
Page 105
117
Page 106
118
Page 107
119
Page 108
120
Page 109
121
Page 110
122
Page 111
123
Page 112
124
Page 113
125
Page 114
126
TABLE OF FIGURESTABLE OF FIGURESTABLE OF FIGURESTABLE OF FIGURES
Figure 1 The Hindenburg explosion on May 6, 1937. .................................................................. 42
Figure 2 Newsweek February 17, 1933. .............................................................................................. 49
Figure 3 Time February 20, 1933. ............................................................................................................ 49
Figure 4 Heinz advertisement in Life, February 5, 1945. Page 20. ....................................... 59
Figure 5 First page of a photo essay in Life, February 5, 1945. Page 21. ..................... 59
Figure 6 First pages of 'Country Doctor',’Spanish Village’ and ‘Nurse Midwife’ ........... 70
Figure 7 Wedding of Kathleen Spence (fragment). .......................................................................... 80
Figure 8 'Ground Zero Spirit', 2001 (left) and ‘Raising the Flag on Iwo Jima’, 1945. 90
127
BIBLIOGRAPHYBIBLIOGRAPHYBIBLIOGRAPHYBIBLIOGRAPHY
Allan, Stuart. ‘News and the Public Sphere: Towards a History of Objectivity and
Impartiality’. In A Journalism Reader. Edited by Michael Bromley and Tom
O’Malley. London and New York: Routledge, 1997: 296-319.
Angeletti, Norberto, and Alberto Oliva. Magazines that Make History: Their Origin,
Development, and Influence. Gainesville: University Press of Florida, 2004.
Baetens, Jan. ‘Bibliography: Photo Narrative Today’. History of Photography: An
International Quarterly 19 (4): 312-13.
Barnhurst, Kevin G. and John C. Nerone, ‘The President is Dead: American News
Photography, and the New Long Journalism’. In Picturing the Past: Media, History
and Photography. Edited by Bonnie Brennen and Hanno Hardt. Urbana and
Chicago: University of Illinois Press, 1999: 60-92.
------ The Form of News: A History. New York: Guilford Press, 2001.
Barthes, Roland. Image, Music, Text. Translated by Stephen Heath. Glasgow:
William Collins Sons & Co. Ltd., 1977.
Baughman, James L. Henry R. Luce and the Rise of the American Newsmedia.
Baltimore: The John Hopkins University Press, 2001.
Becker, Karin. ‘Pictures in the Press: Yesterday, Today, Tomorrow’. Nordicom
Review 2 (1996), 11-23.
Benjamin, Walter. ‘A Short History of Photography’. Screen 13 (1972)1: 5-26.
Brennen, Bonnie, and Hanno Hardt, eds. Picturing the Past: Media, History, and
Photography. Urbana and Chicago: University of Illinois Press, 1999.
Carlebach, Michael L. The Origins of Photojournalism in America. Washington [etc.]:
Smithsonian Institution Press, 1992.
------ American Photojournalism Comes of Age. Washington: Smithsonian Institution
Press, 1997.
Chapnick, Howard. The Truth Needs No Ally: Inside Photojournalism. Columbia:
University of Missouri Press, 1994.
128
Craig, Robert L. ‘Fact, Public Opinion, and Persuasion: The Rise of the Visual in
Journalism and Advertising’. In Picturing the Past: Media, History, and
Photography. Edited by Bonnie Brennen and Hanno Hardt. Urbana and Chicago:
University of Illinois Press, 1999: 36-59.
Elson, Robert T. Time Inc.: The Intimate History of a Publishing Enterprise 1923-
1941. Edited by Duncan Norton-Taylor. New York: Atheneum, 1986
Farid, Hany. ‘Photography Changes What We Are Willing to Believe’. Click!
Photography Changes Everything (Smithsonian Photography Initiative)
<http://click.si.edu/Story.aspx?story=178> October 7, 2009.
Flamiano, Dolores. ‘The (Nearly) Naked Truth: Gender, Race, and Nudity in Life,
1937’. Journalism History 28 (Fall 2002) 3: 121-36.
Freund, Gisèle. Photography and Society. London: Gordon Fraser, 1980.
Goldberg, Vicki. ‘Photographs and Memory’. American Photo 10 (1999) 6: 88-89.
------ ‘Picture This’. Life 22 (1999) 5: 12-15.
Guimond, James. American Photography and the American Dream. Chapel Hill and
London: University of North Carolina Press, 1991.
Hannigan, William, and Ken Johnston. Picture Machine: The Rise of American
Newspictures. New York: Harry N. Abrams Inc., 2004.
Heller, Steven. ‘Photography Changes the Look and Content of Magazines’. Click!
Photography Changes Everything (Smithsonian Photography Initiative)
<http://click.si.edu/Story.aspx?story=289> October 27, 2009.
Herman, David, Manfred Jahn and Marie-Laure Ryan, eds. Routledge Encyclopedia
of Narrative Theory. London and New York: Routledge, 2005.
Herzstein, Robert E. Henry R. Luce: A Political Portrait of the Man Who Created The
American Century. Toronto [etc.]: MacMillan, 1994.
Hicks, Wilson. ‘What is Photojournalism?’ (from Words and Pictures). In
Photographic Communication: Principles, Problems and Challenges of
Photojournalism. Edited by R. Smith Schuneman. New York: Hastings House,
1972: 19-56.
129
Hill, Charles A. and Marguerite Helmers, eds. Defining Visual Rhetorics. Mahwah:
Lawrence Erlbaum Associates, 2004.
Hunter, Jefferson. Image and Word: The Interaction of Twentieth-Century
Photographs and Texts. Cambridge [etc.]: Harvard University Press, 1987.
Kastner, Joseph. ‘Writing for the Picture Magazine’. In Photographic Communication:
Principles, Problems and Challenges of Photojournalism. Edited by R. Smith
Schuneman. New York: Hastings House, 1972: 122-125.
Kenney, Keith. ‘“Mid-Week Pictorial”: Pioneer American Photojournalism Magazine’.
Paper presented at the Annual Meeting of the Association for Education in
Journalism and Mass Communication (69th, Norman, OK, August 3-6, 1986).
Abstract available at <http://www.eric.ed.gov> November 15, 2009.
Kobré, Kenneth. Photojournalism: The Professionals’ Approach. Amsterdam [etc.]:
Focal Press, 2004.
Kozol, Wendy. Life’s America: Family and Nation in Postwar Photojournalism.
Philadelphia: Temple University Press, 1994.
Kress, Gunther and Theo van Leeuwen. Reading Images: The Grammar of Visual
Design. London: Routledge, 1996.
Loengard, John. Life Photographers: What They Saw. Boston [etc.]: Little, Brown
and Company, 1998.
London, Barbara, et al. Photography, 8th ed. Upper Saddle River: Pearson
Education, Inc., 2005.
Manguel, Alberto. Reading Pictures: A History of Love and Hate. London:
Bloomsbury, 2001.
Mitchell, W.J.T. (ed.). The Language of Images. Chicago and London: The University
of Chicago Press, 1974.
------ Picture Theory: Essays on Verbal and Visual Representation. Chicago and
London: The University of Chicago Press, 1994.
Moran, Tom, Paul Fusco and Will McBride. The Photo Essay: How to Share Action
and Ideals Through Pictures. London: Thames and Hudson, 1974.
130
Parna, Karen. “Narrative, Time and the Fixed Image”. In Time, Narrative and the
Fixed Image. Edited by Mireille Ribière and Jan Baetens. Amsterdam: Rodopi,
2001.
Peterson, Theodore. Magazines in the Twentieth Century. Urbana: University of
Illinois Press, 1964.
Raeburn, John. A Staggering Revolution: A Cultural History of Thirties Photography.
Urbana and Chicago: University of Illinois Press, 2006.
Ribière, Mireille. ‘Guest Editorial’. In History of Photography 19 (1995) 4: 277.
Ryan, Marie-Laure, ‘On the Theoretical Foundations of Transmedial Narratology’, in
Narratology Beyond Literary Criticism: Mediality, Disciplinarity. Edited by Jan
Christoph Meister. Berlin: De Gruyter, 2005.
------ ed. Narrative Across Media: The Language of Storytelling. Lincoln: University
of Nebraska Press, 2004.
Saunders, Dave. Direct Cinema: Observational Documentary and the Politics of the
Sixties. London and New York: Wallflower Press, 2007.
Schudson, Michael. Discovering the News. New York: Basic Books, 1978.
------ ‘The Objectivity Norm in American Journalism’. Journalism 2 (2001) 2: 149-
70.
Smith, C. Zoe. ‘Germany’s Kurt Korff: An Émigré’s Influence on Early Life.’
Journalism Quarterly 65 (1988) 2: 412-24.
Sontag, Susan. On Photography. New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 1977.
Stange, Maren. Symbols of Ideal Life: Social Documentary Photography in America
1890-1950. Cambridge [etc.]: Cambridge University Press, 1989.
Stenglin, Maree and Rick Iedema, ‘How to Analyze Visual Images: A Guide for Tesol
Teachers’. In Analysing English in a Global Context: A Reader. Edited by Anne
Burns and Caroline Coffin. London: Routledge, 2001: 194-208.
Sturken, Marita. Tangled Memories: the Vietnam War, the AIDS Epidemic, and the
Politics of Remembering. Berkeley: University of California Press, 1997.
131
Trachtenberg, Alan. Reading American Photographs: Images as History, Mathew
Brady to Walker Evans. New York: Hill and Wang, 1989.
------ ‘Through a Glass, Darkly: Photography and Cultural Memory’. Social Research
75 (2008)1: 111-32.
Tebbel, John, and Mary Ellen Zuckerman. The Magazine in America 1741-1990.
New York and Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1991.
Vials, Chris. ‘The Popular Front in the American Century: Life Magazine, Margaret
Bourke-White, and Consumer Realism, 1936-1941.’ American Periodicals 16
(2006) 1: 74-102.
Wainwright, Loudon. The Great American Magazine: An Inside History of LIFE. New
York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1986.
Wolf, Werner. ‘Narrative and Narrativity: A Narratological Reconceptualization and
Its Applicability to the Visual Arts’. Word & Image 19 (2003): 180-97.
------ ‘Pictorial Narrativity’. In Routledge Encyclopedia of Narrative Theory. Edited by
David Herman et al. London and New York: Routledge, 2005: 431-35.
Zelizer, Barbie. Remembering to Forget: Holocaust Memory through the Camera’s
Eye. Chicago: The University of Chicago Press, 1998.
------ ‘Holocaust Photography, Then and Now’. In Picturing the Past: Media, History
and Photography. Edited by Bonnie Brennen and Hanno Hardt. Urbana and
Chicago: University of Illinois Press, 1999: 98-121.
Newspapers and magazines
Life
The New York Times
Websites
Encyclopaedia Britannica, <http://www.britannica.com> December 9, 2009.
132
‘Eugene Smith – Photojournalism’, <http://www.jnevins.com/smithreading.htm>
November 18, 2009.
‘Greetings to All in the Craft of Press Photography’, in National Press Photographer
(April 1946), <http://www.nppa.org/about_us/history> November 10, 2009.
‘Guide to Different Kinds of Essays’, Gallaudet University, Washington DC
<http://aaweb.gallaudet.edu/CLAST/Tutorial_and_Instructional_Programs/English
_Works/Writing/Essays/Different_Kinds_of_Essays.html> December 9, 2009.
‘Suture’, University of Wisconsin, Eau Claire
<http://www.uwec.edu/ranowlan/suture.html> December 11, 2009.
The International Society for the Study of Narrative,
<http://narrative.georgetown.edu/wiki/index.php/Narrativity> December 8, 2009.