life magazine and the photo essay

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AND AND AND AND CHALLENGING THE ROL Fin Journalis R D D D D THE PHOTO ES THE PHOTO ES THE PHOTO ES THE PHOTO ES LE OF PICTURES IN THE AMERICAN nal thesis by Ieke Oud S1332112 sm Master (‘dagbladjournalistiek’) Rijksuniversiteit Groningen February 22, 2010 Dr. C.J. Peters Prof. dr. M.J. Broersma SSAY SSAY SSAY SSAY N PRESS

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Life Magazine and the Photo Essay

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Page 1: Life Magazine and the Photo Essay

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

Page 2: Life Magazine and the Photo Essay

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.

Page 3: Life Magazine and the Photo Essay

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

Page 4: Life Magazine and the Photo Essay

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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.

Page 5: Life Magazine and the Photo Essay

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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.

Page 6: Life Magazine and the Photo Essay

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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.

Page 7: Life Magazine and the Photo Essay

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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).

Page 8: Life Magazine and the Photo Essay

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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.

Page 9: Life Magazine and the Photo Essay

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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.

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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).

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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

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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.

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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.

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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.

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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).

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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.

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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.

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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.

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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.

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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.

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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.

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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.

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‘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.

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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.

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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.

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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.

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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.

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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.

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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.

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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.

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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.

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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.

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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.

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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.

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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.

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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.

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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.

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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.

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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.

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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.

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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.

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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-

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(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.

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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.

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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.

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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.

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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.

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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.

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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.

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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.

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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.

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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.

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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.

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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.

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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.

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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.

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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.

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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.

Page 59: Life Magazine and the Photo Essay

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

Page 60: Life Magazine and the Photo Essay

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.

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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.

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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.

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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.

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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.

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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.

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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.

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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.

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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.

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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.

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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-

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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’.

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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.

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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.

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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.

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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.

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‘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.

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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.

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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.

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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.

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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.

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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.

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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.

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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.

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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.

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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.

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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.

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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.

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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.

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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.

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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.

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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.

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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.

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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.

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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.

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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.

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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

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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.

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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

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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

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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.

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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.

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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>

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Cover

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Page 24

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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>

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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

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