photographic journalism

Early journals concerned themselves principally with the technical side of photography, especially chemistry, and necessarily contained few if any pictures. Today, such articles tend to appear (if at all) in the specialist scientific press. A few modern journals of photographic criticism prefer not to trouble themselves with too many actual photographs, relying mainly on text, but the growth of photomechanical reproduction in the late 19th century led to a more visually orientated style for the less theoretically minded reader. Several magazines founded in the 1850s accommodated this shift in emphasis and are still published today. The most popular British weekly, Amateur Photographer, was launched in 1884 but incorporates Photographic News, founded in 1858. Although the important Philadelphia Photographer began in 1864, the main mass-market American magazines appeared much later: Popular Photography in 1937, Shutterbug in 1971, American Photographer (later American Photo) in 1978. (The French Photo and Italian Fotografia reflex began, respectively, in 1967 and 1980.) The latest development, apparent since the 1990s, has been the proliferation of consumer-orientated magazines dedicated to digital photography.

Magazines relying purely or principally on visual content have never been as commercially successful as ‘how-to’ magazines telling (or purporting to tell) amateur and sometimes professional photographers how to improve their work, whether aesthetically or (more usually) technically. The principal reason for this is the influence of advertisements. Without these, the price of a typical photographic magazine would be anything from twice as high (for the most expensive magazines) to ten times higher (for mass-circulation magazines). The job of the photographic journalist, therefore, is principally to hold the advertisements apart: the editorial content of a magazine varies from about one-third to three-quarters of the publication, the rest being occupied by advertisements. Advertisers, of course, prefer articles that deal with (and therefore sell) materials and equipment. The best writers on the subject have always been enthusiasts, most of whom started as amateurs and remain so at heart; the least successful are normally journalists who have turned to photography, instead of the other way round. In the better how-to magazines, technical expertise is the basic criterion for hiring staff or freelances, with skill at actually making photographs either taken for granted or accorded a secondary role. The drawback to this approach can be a somewhat mechanical or formulaic approach which can rapidly ossify: an editor with a feeling for both current and future readership is essential, but he (more rarely she) must not concentrate on the future too much because this will alienate the often traditionalist photographer who subscribes to the magazine.

‘Opinion’ or ‘op-ed’ columnists are almost unknown in the photographic press in the USA, where there is a terror of alienating advertisers, but even in Britain few seem willing to court controversy as a means of keeping the readers interested and involved in the issues of the day. This again can lead to an overly predictable reliance on technical matters.

— Roger W. Hicks