Word: camera
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Dates: during 1980-1989
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...earliest significant body of war coverage was the work of Roger Fenton, a well-to-do Englishman who left a career in law to devote himself to the camera. Fenton's scenes of the Crimean War, made in 1855, were discreet by the bloody standards of battlefield imagery to come: no pictures of combat, no punctured flesh that might offend Victorian sensibilities. No matter, they represented a watershed. With these views of officers at leisure and a stark gully littered with cannonballs, the curtain had gone up on the theater of combat...
...years of fighting to come, Brady would field his own small army of camera reporters. They included Alexander Gardner, Timothy H. O'Sullivan and George N. Barnard, who would become some of the best-known photographers of the century. (All three eventually left Brady's employ in a huff over his practice of attaching his own name to their work.) Their pictures gave war a new face, stark and squalid, the face of the openmouthed dead on the fields of Gettysburg...
...brief time of peace, photojournalism waged war against privacy. A decisive weapon appeared in 1924: the Ermanox, a miniature glass-plate camera with a wide-aperture lens. The camera could operate in dim light and without great intrusion. Erich Salomon, a German with a talent for discretion, stalked diplomatic salons and private railway cars with his tripod-held model. In the U.S., a New York Daily News photographer, Tom Howard, strapped a miniature camera to his ankle and violated the mystery of Ruth Snyder's electrocution...
Balzac had a "vague dread" of being photographed. Like some primitive peoples, he thought the camera steals something of the soul -- that, as he told a friend "every body in its natural state is made up of a series of ghostly images superimposed in layers to infinity, wrapped in infinitesimal films." Each time a photograph was made, he believed, another thin layer of the subject's being would be stripped off to become not life as before but a membrane of memory in a sort of translucent antiworld...
Photojournalism was at war with itself over its essence. Studies of the battlefield were replaced by reflections on life-style: the camera discovered suburbia. In the view of dissidents like Smith, however, news photography had vitiated itself through overproduction. Continuous wire-service transmission and the conservatism of the postwar picture press had covered the world with images leached of their expressiveness and meaning. As Smith put it, "we are deluged with photography at its worst -- until the drone of superficiality threatens to numb our sensitivity to image...