The first news photograph ever printed had to be copied as an engraving
On 25 June 1848 someone photographed barricades in Paris during the June Days uprising. Presses could not yet reproduce photographs, so L'Illustration published it in July as an engraving. Another three decades passed before a New York paper printed a genuine halftone news photo, on 4 March 1880.
Photojournalism tells news stories through images, mainly stills but sometimes video. What sets it apart from documentary, street or celebrity photography is a strict ethical code demanding honesty and impartiality. Like writers, photojournalists are reporters, but they must decide in an instant while hauling equipment through danger, bad weather, crowds and restricted access.
Illustrated news predates photography: The Times printed a picture of Lord Nelson's funeral in 1806, and the Illustrated London News became the first weekly illustrated paper in 1842, using engravings. During the Crimean War the ILN printed work by Roger Fenton, the first official war photographer, who recorded troops, battlefield landscapes and commanders. Mathew Brady's American Civil War images reached readers of Harper's Weekly only as engravings, limiting their audience.
Pictures began to carry stories on their own in the late 1870s. John Thomson and the radical journalist Adolphe Smith published Street Life in London from 1876 to 1877, pairing photographs and text on the city's street people and establishing social documentary as a branch of the craft. Flash powder, invented in 1887, let Jacob Riis shoot indoors for his 1890 book How the Other Half Lives. By 1897 halftones could run on full-speed presses, and from 1921 the wirephoto moved pictures almost as fast as words. In 1886 C. S. Fly joined a US Army column and made about 15 glass-plate exposures of Geronimo and the free Apaches during surrender talks.
Its golden age, roughly the 1930s to the 1950s, was enabled by the compact 35mm Leica of 1925 and flash bulbs from 1927 to 1930. Germany's Berliner Illustrirte Zeitung had already begun printing photographs inside its pages in 1901, and it went on to pioneer the photo-essay, dedicated picture staff, a photo library and candid shots from small cameras, becoming the model for the modern news magazine.
Source: Photojournalism
