‘Real Pictures of Current Events’

Abstract

Objectivity has been regarded as a central ideal of American journalism in the early twentieth century. The concurrent emergence of photography in the press is rarely associated with this development. The article explores the photographic legacy of journalistic objectivity by discussing a crucial phase in the development of reproduction media for images, the transition from wood engravings to halftones. The former was the dominant mode of ‘illustrated journalism’, the latter became the dominant mode of reproducing photojournalism in print in the twentieth century. The halftone process introduced an equivalence between photographs and their reproductions, obliterating the mediation that had taken place in a code of reproduction that was almost imperceptible. In the contested adoption of the halftone process, it is argued, a shifting valuation of photographs can be observed that prefigures the formulation of objectivity as a transparent code of mediation in journalism.

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