Civic Picturing vs. Realist Photojournalism The Regime of Illustrated News, 1856–1901

Abstract

The visual culture of the American press developed from the printerly newspaper of the eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries, through the Victorian newspaper of the late nineteenth century, and to the modern newspaper which had emerged by the 1930s. Both printerly and Victorian newspapers used a design sense that we call “vernacular,” emphasizing apparent balance and symmetry, filling space with an increasingly varied typography. Newspaper design was not given to establishing hierarchy or categorization; the news was largely unsegmented, presenting an impression of an unmapped and perhaps unmappable world. At first, even the boundary between advertising and editorial content was not clearly demarcated. This syncretic presentation of content on paper expressed in visual form the habits of news workers. Newspaper design did not exist apart from the routines and practices of journalism, as it often does today, but as an extrusion of standard modes of news gathering. Thus, form followed practice. The active roles of reporting grew out of the more passive news-gathering tasks of colonial printers, who received correspondence and culled other sources, print or oral, to fill their pages. As the printerly age gave way to the age of Victorian papers, these roles coalesced, in fact if not in name, as the correspondent and the scavenger. The correspondent was a manly observer of events and personages in distant and (usually) powerful places; he (rarely she) was a persona, though usually pseudonymous, who conveyed subjective impressions with an air of authority and confidentiality, much like the colonial letter writer. The scavenger was not a persona, but a completely anonymous news hound, combing first the exchange papers then the police courts, the theaters, and the taverns for bits of information that might be conveyed in a sentence or a paragraph, or which might be turned into a story of a column or so. The correspondent was a gentleman, the scavenger a pieceworker, often paid by the line or the columninch. The content of the news was miscellaneous, matching its presentation. Typography was the dominant voice of news, and images were interlopers, useful as respite and also as information, 1 Kevin G. Barnhurst and John Nerone, “Design Trends in U.S. Front Pages, 1885–1995,” Journalism Quarterly 68 (Winter 1991): 796–804; John Nerone and Kevin G. Barnhurst, “Visual Mapping and Cultural Authority: Design Changes in U.S. Newspapers, 1920–1940,” Journal of Communication 45:2 (Spring 1995): 9–43.