Photojournalists

In 1862, Alexander Gardner (1821–82) photographed the dead horse of a Confederate colonel during the American Civil War. A century later, Gordon Parks (1912–2006) depicted, close up, the sweat-covered face of prizefighter Muhammad Ali. And in 1994, Mary Ellen Mark (1940–) photographed Ku Klux Klan members as, in darkness, [Page 1060]they raised a wooden cross before burning it. From world capitals to small towns and in between, photojournalists since the beginnings of photography in the nineteenth century visually have provided information, inspiration, entertainment, and—above all—timely and meaningful news. Photojournalists, John Szarkowski of the Museum of Modern Art wrote, “give us the look and the smell of events that we did not witness” (Szarkowski 1999, 142). The content of these images, historian Michael Carlebach has said, is “as varied as journalism itself” (Carlebach 1992, 2). From wars and disasters to breaking political news to photo stories about how people live their lives, photojournalists document the commonplace and the surprising.

Photojournalists once lugged bulky cameras that relied on glass negatives. Tripods steadied cameras that required long exposures. With equipment advances, photojournalists used steadily smaller cameras and better film. By the 1920s and 1930s—well before the advent of television and the Internet with a constant flow of pictures—newspapers and photo magazines demanded more photographs to accompany written stories as the public appetite for images grew. By the early twenty-first century when visual images saturate the world, digital cameras allow for speedy transfer to websites where pictures—still or moving, black and white or color—combine with sound in slide shows about current events. Regardless of the technology, century, or continent, the discerning eyes and minds of photojournalists distill the essence of the news into visual form, and their images work in concert with captions and stories.