Photojournalism

Photojournalism is the practice of telling news stories primarily through photographs, made under the same accuracy and fairness standards as written reporting. Its documentary roots run through Jacob Riis, whose 1890 book How the Other Half Lives used photographs of New York slum life to argue for reform, and Lewis Hine, who photographed child labor for the National Child Labor Committee in the early twentieth century. The practice became a mainstream news form in the 1920s and 1930s with faster cameras, thirty-five millimetre film and flash bulbs, and above all with the launch of Life magazine in 1936, which built its identity around photo essays. War photographers such as Robert Capa, who covered five conflicts between the Spanish Civil War and the First Indochina War and co-founded the Magnum Photos agency in 1947, extended the form internationally. The word photojournalism itself is usually credited to Cliff Edom, who founded the photojournalism program at the University of Missouri School of Journalism and ran its Missouri Photo Workshop from 1946.