In some fields, the ability to send photographs may be as important as the ability to take them. One example is astronomical and space photography, where space exploration from the 1960s progressed hand in hand with the capacity to transmit remotely captured imaging data over vast distances. Another is photojournalism.
In the early years of news photography, photographs were transported from the scene of action to the press by the best physical means available, from fast camels to steamships and eventually aeroplanes. In 1904 the Daily Mirror used a specially equipped railway van to make half-tone process blocks of photographs from the north of England en route to London. But that year successful attempts were made to send images electrically by photo- or picturetelegraphy (or ‘facsimile telegraphy’), a method first described by Alexander Bain in a patent of 1843. Now the German physicist Arthur Korn (1870-1945) transmitted a still photograph over telephone lines between Munich and Nuremberg, using an array of selenium cells to convert the image into electrical signals. In 1907 pictures were sent from Berlin to newspapers in Paris and London, and two years later the Daily Mirror was using Korn's apparatus to send horse-racing pictures from Manchester to London. Over the next three decades, further improvements were invented by Édouard Belin (1876-1963) in France and AT&T and Bell in the USA. Korn also pioneered the transmission of images by radio (1922).
All the early systems incorporated a revolving scanning drum at one end and a synchronized receiving one at the other, and much other cumbersome and complex equipment. Sending pictures was slow, mainly because of delays in getting a line, and many transmissions failed; picture quality was poor and costs were high, especially compared with air transport. Doubtless this explains why newspapers other than the exceptionally technology-minded Mirror did not leap to adopt phototelegraphy. However, it was increasingly widely used in Britain by 1928, and on 1 January 1935 the Associated Press (AP) news agency, which had already occasionally used the AT&T wire-transmission system, inaugurated the AP Wirephoto network. The first picture sent was of a plane crash in the Adirondacks. However, a more dramatic demonstration of the system's usefulness was the rapid distribution of pictures of the Hindenburg disaster in May 1937. It also proved its worth in the Second World War, especially in the vast expanses of the Pacific where photographers often operated thousands of kilometres from base. Joe Rosenthal's historic photographs of the raising of the American flag on Iwo Jima, for example, taken on 23 February 1945, were dispatched by plane and naval radio to San Francisco, where they were distributed on the Wirephoto network only 17.5 hours after the event.
After 1945, further improvements were made to the analogue system, producing simpler equipment, more automation, shorter transmission times, and a larger and more flexible network. However, increasing volume of traffic and growing use of colour necessitated more fundamental changes. Satellites were increasingly in use by the 1970s, and in 1978 AP introduced an integrated system of digital picture handling (‘Electronic Darkroom’). This was superseded in 1989-90 by the even more sophisticated and automated Leaf Picture Desk. By this time, colour pictures could be transmitted in 15 seconds, compared with 40 minutes previously. Rival organizations such as Agence-France Presse, United Press International (UPI), and Reuters introduced their own systems. Next came the digitization of picture taking itself, and further enhancement of the individual photographer's autonomy. By 2000, digital cameras were becoming universal in photojournalism, backed up by portable computing and transmission equipment. Photographers in the field during the Iraq War of 2003, for example, used a combination of digital cameras, laptops, and high-speed satellite modems to take and transmit images, their effectiveness limited only by their ability to replenish the batteries for all this equipment.
— Robin Lenman
Bibliography
- Fulton, M. (ed.), Eyes of Time: Photojournalism in America (1988).
- Mitchell, W. J., The Reconfigured Eye: Visual Truth in the Post-photographic Era (1994).
- Coopersmith, J., ‘The Changing Picture of Fax’, in B. Finn (ed.), Presenting Pictures (2004)
