Broken Bridges and Breathless Images: Circulating Wirephotos in Midcentury America

Abstract

This article examines the association between Wirephotos – the brand name that became a generic term for news photographs sent by telegraph, telephone or radio, also sometimes described as radiophotos – and objectivity. It suggests that many wirephotos functioned by making visible not places or events, but the drama of communication, understood as the challenging process of articulating messages across space and time. The article also considers Edward Steichen’s use of Associated Press photographer Max Desfor’s wirephotos in the exhibition Korea – The Impact of War, at the Museum of Modern Art in New York in 1951. It thinks through Steichen’s use of the metaphor of ‘bridging’ to describe the work of press photography and asks what it can tell us about photographic circulation and communication, particularly in mid-twentieth-century USA. By playing on the repertoire of meanings associated with bridges, Desfor’s Flight of Refugees Across Wrecked Bridge in Korea can be read as reflecting on its own medium’s limitations. As it circulated and recirculated in different formats, Desfor’s bridge photograph dramatised communication’s difficulty, and the always-present potential of failure in press photography’s effort to bridge distance.