But wood engravers were not draftsmen. They were skilled technicians, who faithfully followed with their burins the drawing which the artist had made on the block, cutting away the wood between the lines. To make a wood engraving of a photograph, a drawing of it had first to be prepared. So long as it was necessary to go through this intermediate step, relatively few illustrations were cut from photographs, and although artist-correspondents could make a living specializing in the pictorial reporting of news, it was hardly possible for a photographer to do so. The photographic reporting of war left Brady penniless, and Fenton gave up photography as a profession in 1862, and spent the rest of his life as a lawyer.
The entire economy of news photography was changed with the introduc-
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| Arnold genthe: San Francisco Fire, 1906. Negative in California Palace of the Legion of Honor, San Francisco: print courtesy Ansel Adams |
tion of the halftone process, by which a facsimile relief block was made mechanically. The first use of the process in a daily newspaper appears to have been in the New York Daily Graphic for March 4, 1880. In this issue of the newspaper samples were given of all the various ways of reproducing pictures. Special attention was drawn to a facsimile, made by Stephen Henry Horgan, of a photograph by Henry J. Newton, showing “Shantytown,” the squatters’ camp which then disgraced uptown New York. The editors said.
We have dealt heretofore with pictures made with drawings or engravings. Here we have one direct from nature . . . We are still experimenting with it, and feel confident that our experiments will in the long run result in success, and that pictures will eventually be regularly printed in our pages direct from photographs without the intervention of drawing.
Yet it was years before prejudice could be overcome. While Stephen Horgan was art editor of the New York Herald in 1893, he suggested to its owner, James Gordon Bennett, that halftones could be printed in the paper. Bennett consulted his pressman, who told him that the idea was impossible and pre-
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| Warnecke: Shooting of Mayor William J. Gaynor of New York, 1910. Courtesy New York World-Telegram |
posterous. Horgan was fired. He had more success at the Tribune, and in 1897 halftones were first printed on speed presses.
By the turn of the century the public began to expect to see the news in photographs. Agencies were set up for the distribution of photographs, and photographers began to specialize in covering events of the day.
Obviously all news is not photogenic. Diplomats seated around the table may be reshaping the world, but it is the exceptional photographer who can make the reader feel the drama underlying such a conference. The immediate drama of accidents, the exaggerated emotions brought out on faces under the tension of disaster or crime, the violent split-second action of sports can be imparted vividly by the camera. The photographer needs not so much artifice, subtlety of light and shade and sense of composition as boldness, strong nerves, and a mastery of his camera so complete that handling it is an automatic reflex.
Although the technique of the news photographer does not differ from that of any other cameraman, the special demands made on his skill, daring and ingenuity in getting unusual pictures, and the need of turning out a print with all possible speed, make his work a special branch. Almost invariably he uses a Speed Graphic camera taking cut films 4x5 inches in size. Because he can seldom count on finding his subject well illuminated, and because he cannot risk underexposure, his camera is fitted with a synchronized electric photoflash.
Sensing the exact instant to release the shutter becomes instinctive. A second’s hesitation, and a picture scoop may be missed. When William Warnecke of the New York World went on a routine assignment to photograph Mayor William J. Gaynor of New York as he was about to sail to Europe on a vacation in 1910, he arrived after the other cameramen. Hurriedly he asked the Mayor for a last minute pose. Just then an assassin fired two shots of a revolver at the Mayor. Warnecke, in the midst of the confusion, remained cool, and photographed that sickening moment when the victim staggered into the arms of his companion.
Chance often gives news photographers their opportunity, yet great news photographs are not accidentally made. Twenty-two photographers, representing New York and Philadelphia newspapers, were gathered at Lakehurst, N.J., on May 6, 1937, for a routine assignment: the dirigible Hindenburg was due, and although it was the airship's eleventh Transatlantic crossing, the event was still considered newsworthy. At dusk the great silver giant sailed majestically in from the Atlantic, and the cameramen were preparing to compose “art shots” for the feature editors, when suddenly flames shot out from the hull. In forty-seven seconds the great dirigible lay on the ground, a mass of twisted flaming wreckage. In those forty-seven seconds, every one of those photographers produced pictures that are still memorable. Jack Snyder of the Philadelphia Record said,
I’ve been carrying my camera around for sixteen years, but I never got an opportunity for really good pictures before. I waited for hours for the Hindenburg in a pouring driving rain, as I wanted to get a close-up. I thought, “I’ll get close to the mooring mast to see her tied up.” Then I heard a crackling over my head, a sort of roaring crackle, and then w-h-a-a-a-m. There was a terrible flame and the heat singed my hair.
He rushed for shelter, but not before he had clicked his shutter. Another photographer worked so fast that he threw the filmholders on the ground at his feet after exposing only one of the two films which each contained, for fear that in his excitement he might make a double exposure. A messenger collected the holders; they were flown to New York. The metropolitan newspapers, all of them, told the story of the tragedy not in words but in pictures, which were often enlarged half a page in size. The New York World-Telegram carried twenty-one photographs; the New York Post had seven pages of pictures, the Daily Mirror, nine. Never had a disaster been so thoroughly covered by photography.
The news photographer works under pressure, both in taking the picture and in processing it. After telling the layman how a negative is developed and printed in less than five minutes, James C. Kinkaid, in his book Press Photography, adds: “That is fast work, and it requires concentration, especially when the rasping voice of the editor bellows through the door of the darkroom, ‘How long do we have to wait for that print?’ ”
The press photographer thinks in terms of a single picture or a group of single pictures. He specializes in “spot news,” and seldom has opportunity to plan a sequence of pictures which will build up a total effect greater than the sum of the parts. This approach to photography has been stimulated by the picture magazines.
Picture stories are not, of course, new: examples are legion. The pictorial press of the forties used picture essays: the first number of the Illustrated London News took its readers to Queen Victoria’s masked ball in eight pictures; the following week it traced the overland route from India to England, and showed in pictures Horace Walpole’s Strawberry Hill.
The rapidity with which pictures could be taken with a camera made it
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| SAM shere: Explosion of (he Hindenburg. Lakehurst, N.J., 1937. Courtesy International News Service |