Photojournalism, documentary photography that tells a particular story in visual terms. Photojournalists work for daily and periodical newspapers, magazines, and other publications, as well as for wire services. Photojournalists cover news and cultural events in areas such as sports, business, politics, war, and the arts. They strive to document news events as they happen.
Photography was used to capture newsworthy images soon after its invention in the 1830s. English photographer Roger Fenton documented British troops during the Crimean War (1853-1856) in Europe, and American photographer Mathew Brady photographed battle scenes during the American Civil War (1861-1865). At that time, photography was still an expensive and time-consuming endeavor. The growth of photojournalism was due to two major factors occurring near the end of the 19th century. The first was the perfection in the 1890s of the halftone process of printing photographs. The halftone process reproduces photographs as a series of light and dark dots, and it allowed newspaper publishers to reproduce photographs quickly and inexpensively. The other factor was the introduction by American inventor George Eastman of small cameras that used rolls of film, rather than the bulky and fragile glass plates in use at the time. Convenient cameras gave photojournalists the freedom to record news events easily and quickly.
One of the foremost early photojournalists was Frenchman Henri Cartier-Bresson, who from 1930 worked to document what he called the “decisive moment.” Cartier-Bresson believed that the dynamics in any given situation eventually reach a peak, at which time a photograph will capture the most powerful image possible. He mastered the ability to sense ahead of time that exact peak moment to trip the shutter.
Hungarian-born American war correspondent Robert Capa began his career photographing the Spanish Civil War (1936-1939). Like Cartier-Bresson, Capa was interested in recording the impact of war on civilians, as well as battle scenes. During World War II Capa covered the landing of United States troops in Normandy, France, on D-day in June 1944. He also covered the war in Indochina between the French and the Vietnamese (he was killed in 1954 while covering that war).
In the late 1930s pictorial magazines such as Life and Look in the United States and Picture Post in England were established. These publications featured photographic essays with text based on and subordinate to the pictures. This widely popular form is particularly associated with Life’s famous staff photographers Margaret Bourke-White and W. Eugene Smith. An example of Bourke-White’s work now recognized as an important American historical document is an 11-page spread devoted to life in Muncie, Indiana. These magazines went on to provide extensive photographic coverage of World War II and the Korean War (1950-1953), with pictures taken by Bourke-White, Capa, Smith, David Douglas Duncan, and several other American photojournalists.
Subsequently, using photographs to bring about social change, Smith documented the horrible effects of mercury poisoning in the 1960s in Minamata, a Japanese fishing village contaminated by leakage from a local industrial plant. Two documentary photographers who have produced extraordinarily expressive works are South African Ernest Cole, whose House of Bondage (1967) explored the miseries of the apartheid system in South Africa, and Czech Josef Koudelka, noted for his splendidly composed narrative pictures of Eastern Europe’s Roma (Gypsies).
