Photojournalism is distinguished from other close branches of photography (e.g., documentary photography, social documentary photography, street photography or celebrity photography) by complying with a rigid ethical framework which demands that the work be both honest and impartial whilst telling the story in strictly journalistic terms. Photojournalists create pictures that contribute to the news media.
The beginning of modern photojournalism took place in 1925, in Germany. The event was the invention of the first 35 mm camera, the Leica. It was designed as a way to use surplus movie film, then shot in the 35 mm format. Before this, a photo of professional quality required bulky equipment; after this photographers could go just about anywhere and take photos continuosly, without bulky lights or tripods.
The combination of photography and journalism, or photojournalism--a term coined by Frank Luther Mott, historian and Dean of the University of Missouri School of Journalism--really became familiar after World War II (1939-1945). Germany's photo magazines established the concept, but Hitler's rise to power in 1933 led to suppression and persecution of most of the editors, who generally fled the country. Many came to the United States.
The first photojournalism cover story was kind of unlikely, an article about the building of the Fort Peck Dam in Montana. Margaret Bourke-White photographed this, and in particular chronicled the life of the workers in little shanty towns spring up around the building site. The Life's editor in charge of photography, John Shaw Billings, saw the potential of these photos, showing a kind of frontier life of the American West that many Americans thought had long vanished. Life, published weekly, immediately became popular, and was emulated by look-alikes such as Look, See, Photo, Picture, Click, and so on. As we know, only Look and Life lasted. Look went out of business in 1972; Life suspended publication the same year, returned in 1978 as a monthly, and finally folded as a serial in 2001.
But in the World War II era, Life was probably the most influential photojournalism magazine in the world. During that war, the most dramatic pictures of the conflict came not so often from the newspapers as from the weekly photojournalism magazines, photos that still are famous today. The drama of war and violence could be captured on those small, fast 35 mm cameras like no other, although it had to be said that through the 1950s and even 1960s, not all photojournalists used 35s. Many used large hand-held cameras made by the Graflex Camera Company, and two have become legendary: the Speed Graphic, and later, Crown Graphic. These are the cameras you think of when you see old movies of photographers crowding around some celebrity, usually showing the photographer smoking a cigar and wearing a "Press" card in the hatband of his fedora. These cameras used sheet film, which meant you had to slide a holder in the back of the camera after every exposure. They also had cumbersome bellows-style focusing, and a pretty crude rangefinder. Their advantage, however, was their superb quality negative, which meant a photographer could be pretty sloppy about exposure and development and still dredge up a reasonable print. (Automatic-exposure and focus cameras did not become common until the 1980s.)
During World War II W. Eugene Smith and Robert Capa became well known for their gripping war pictures. Both were to be gravely affected by their profession. In fact, Capa was killed on assignment in Indochina, and Smith was severely injured on assignment in Japan.
Shortly before the war, with the world realizing the power of the camera to tell a story when used in unposed, candid situations, the federal government's Farm Security Administration hired a group of photographers. In fact, the FSC was set up in 1935 by Franklin D. Roosevelt to help resettle farmers who were destitute due to the Depression and massive drought in the Midwest. Because these resettlements might be a controversial task, the director, Roy Stryker, hired a number of photographers to record the plight of the farmers in the Midwest.
The photographers later, many of them, became famous--the collected 150,000 photos now housed in the Library of Congress. The power of these often stark, even ugly images showed America the incredible imbalance of its society, between urban prosperity and rural poverty.
Photography is driven by technology, always has been. Because, more than any other visual art, photography is built around machines and, at least until recently, chemistry. By the 1990s photojournalists were already shooting mostly color, and seldom making actual prints, but use computer technology to scan film directly into the design. And by the beginning of the new millennium, photojournalists were no longer using film: digital photography had become universal, both faster and cheaper in an industry preoccupied with both speed and profit. Color became the standard for "legacy media," newspapers and magazines, as well as for web news sites. Because color printing technology requires a higher quality image, photojournalists have had to adapt their methods to accept fewer available light images. Too, most publications are looking for eye-grabbing color, not necessary in black and white, and color demands correction to avoid greenish or orangeish casts from artificial light. All of this has meant photojournalists, even with the most sophisticated new cameras, are sometimes returning to the methods of their ancestors, carefully setting up lights, posing their subjects. You will often find, if you compare published photography today to that to 25 years ago, many fewer candid photos, less spontaneity, fewer feature photos of people grabbed at work or doing something outside. In fact, more and more, the subject is award of the camera, just as they were before the 1960s, the beginning of the age of the quest for naturalism in photojournalism.
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