Public Images

Celebrity, Photojournalism, and the Making of the Tabloid Press

Ryan Linkof

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2020
• ISBN:
  9781000213119
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Languages & Linguistics
• Subtopic: Journalism
• Index: Languages & Linguistics

The stolen snapshot is a staple of the modern tabloid press, as ubiquitous as it is notorious. The first in-depth history of British tabloid photojournalism, this book explores the origin of the unauthorised celebrity photograph in the early 20th century, tracing its rise in the 1900s through to the first legal trial concerning the right to privacy from photographers shortly after the Second World War. Packed with case studies from the glamorous to the infamous, the book argues that the candid snap was a tabloid innovation that drew its power from Britain's unique class tensions. Used by papers such as the Daily Mirror and Daily Sketch as a vehicle of mass communication, this new form of image played an important and often overlooked role in constructing the idea of the press photographer as a documentary eyewitness. From Edward VIII and Wallis Simpson to aristocratic debutantes Lady Diana Cooper and Margaret Whigham, the rage of the social elite at being pictured so intimately without permission was matched only by the fascination of working class readers, while the relationship of the British press to social, economic and political power was changed forever.Initially pioneered in the metropole, tabloid-style photojournalism soon penetrated the journalistic culture of most of the globe. This in-depth account of its social and cultural history is an invaluable source of new research for historians of photography, journalism, visual culture, media and celebrity studies.

1 TABLOIDISM: PHOTOJOURNALISM IN LONDON, 1904-38

Writing in his autobiography, Felix H. Man, one of Britain’s premier photojournalists and star photographer of Picture Post magazine, remarked that when he moved to England in the mid-1930s from his native Germany, “there was only one daily paper which was interested in pictures . . . This was the Daily Mirror . . . My colleagues at the Mirror were most charming people, keenly interested in photo-journalism. They were already using Leica and Contax cameras, an exceptional thing at this date for newspaper photographers.”¹ Man had himself worked for the Daily Mirror before taking up his position at Picture Post, a magazine that brought a new kind of populist photojournalism to Britain, inspired by Continental magazines such as Berliner Illustrierte Zeitung and Vu. What is remarkable about his recollection is not so much that he cites the Daily Mirror as a leader in photographic news reporting—the newspaper’s pioneering status as the world’s first “all photographic newspaper”² is well documented—but that he identifies a tabloid newspaper as a form of “photo-journalism.” Tabloid newspapers such as the Daily Mirror are rarely discussed in the context of photojournalism, let alone identified as pioneers in the field.³ This chapter tracks the development of two overlapping phenomena: the emergence of the tabloid press as a distinctive form of journalism and mass communication, and the progress and increasing sophistication of photographic news reporting. These two forms of mass communication are intimately interrelated, and cannot be understood in isolation.⁴ As Man’s statement makes clear, the tabloids played a key role in British photojournalism. Instead of parallel stories, involving two distinct forms of production—one respectable, one not—I show how they interacted and cross-pollinated, especially in Britain.

The tabloids emerged just after the dawn of the twentieth century during a moment of fervent innovation in journalism and mass communication. The founders of the first tabloids synthesized a number of trends in reporting and popular entertainment to create a unique news form. The tabloids bore the influence of the technological innovations of illustrated reporting, the “feminine” appeal of women’s journalism, stage entertainment, sensational exposés, human-interest narratives, and the influence of cinema.⁵ This heady concoction cohered into a news form that would eventually conquer the globe.

The Daily Mirror and Picture Post are important characters in this story, and the lives of both journals will be explored in depth below.⁶ The two photographically illustrated periodicals—while very different in their origin, execution, and address—are understood as part of the same history. For that reason, the dates bracketing this chapter—1904 and 1938—coincide with the founding of both journals. In the history of photojournalism in Britain—and in some ways the world—these dates are foundational.

New Journalism and "tabloidism"

Many of the developments in illustrated reporting at the end of the nineteenth century resulted from the innovative pressures of the so-called New Journalism, seen most saliently in W. T. Stead’s Pall Mall Gazette and T. P. O’Connor’s Star.⁷ Inspired by aspects of American and French mass journalism, British muckrakers upended many of the commonplaces of staid Victorian news reporting.⁸ The New Journalism, with its tendency toward brevity and sensational reporting, was designed to appeal to women, working-class, and lower-middle-class readers, many of whom had never before been the target audience of newspaper proprietors.⁹

By the end of the nineteenth century, new kinds of newspaper readers consumed the news differently than had been common a generation before.¹⁰ Smaller format newspapers with abundant images appealed to mobile, urban audiences; the small size convenient for reading on trains on the commute to and from work. The Star’s O’Connor suggested that

the Newspaper is not read in the secrecy and silence of the closet as is the book. It is picked up at a railway station, hurried over in a railway carriage, dropped incontinently when read. To get your ideas through the hurried eyes into the whirling brains that are employed in the reading of a newspaper there must be no mistake about your meaning . . . you must strike your reader right between the eyes.¹¹

New Journalism was a response to, and a central component of, the accelerated pace of modern, urban life.

New Journalism in Britain is most closely identified with the newspapers of Alfred Harmsworth (later Lord Northcliffe), who laid claim to inventing tabloid journalism. Though Harmsworth did little that was novel, he had the most success of any of the news moguls in synthesizing the various strands of journalistic innovation occurring in the late nineteenth century, seen most saliently in his spectacularly successful newspaper for the masses, the Daily Mail.¹²

It was when Harmsworth came to New York—at the invitation of Joseph Pulitzer—that he might be said to have invented tabloid journalism. Given editorial control of Pulitzer’s World for one day—January 1, 1901—Harmsworth radically reduced the size of the newspaper (to about the size of a magazine) and insisted that no article in the paper exceed 250 words. He labeled his abbreviated news format “tabloid journalism,” borrowing the term from a popular pharmaceutical combining “tablet” and “alkaloid.”¹³ The tabloid was concentrated news: pre-digested content meant for rapid and mobile consumption. The resulting issue sold out quickly, requiring a second printing.¹⁴ Though impressed by the tabloid’s success, Pulitzer did not maintain Harmsworth’s tabloid format, and returned to business as usual. Harmsworth, certain of the viability of his new format, brought his innovation back to London, where he would soon put it to use in the creation of his own tabloid newspaper.

In response to Harmsworth’s reinvention of the World, the American journalist Maurice Low published a piece in the journal Forum under the title, “Tabloid Journalism: Its Causes and Effects.” The first instance in which the term “tabloid journalism” was used in a published forum, the piece illustrates some of the qualities, and the criticisms, that would come to be associated with tabloid journalism for the next century. Of this novel journalistic form, Low wrote, “This is an age of tabloids, which is only another name for concentration . . . It is all characteristic of the rush, hurry, superficiality.” The tabloid newspaper was the perfect form of communication for urban audiences:

Mr. Harmsworth . . . saw in London a mine so rich and so easily to be worked that its golden possibilities were staggering. Education in England had succeeded admirably in turning out every year an ever-increasing host of half-baked sciolists of both sexes . . . Crude, immature, raw, and unable to assimilate the little knowledge which had been tabloidly furnished to them, the result of education, in nine cases out of ten, was to give them a vague longing for something which they could not define or express.¹⁵

“The psychological explanation of tabloidism,” Low continued, lay in the fact that “the whole world at this day [is] trying not to think, but simply to amuse itself.”¹⁶ “Tabloid,” from its very origins, was a word associated with a form of news intended to amuse, meant as entertainment for distractible working- and lower-class audiences.

The association with photographic reporting was not yet a part of the language of Low’s “tabloidism.” Low was precocious in his use of the term, as it would not become common until the 1920s, at which time its identification with photography would be unavoidable. Even in this early analysis of tabloid journalism, however, the emphasis on condensation, pith, and the easily digestible snippet designed for consumption by a barely literate public dovetailed quite nicely with the revolutions in halftone printing taking place at the turn of the century. The transformations in mass journalism would have their most demonstrable impacts on illustrated news formats.

The "new illustrated journalism"

A reliable and affordable technique for reproducing photographs on the printed page developed haltingly over the course of the mid- and late nineteenth century.¹⁷ Known as the halftone process, this mechanical engraving technology translated photographs onto metal plates, allowing for the reproduction of images alongside text.¹⁸ By the mid-1890s, improved halftone screens, new kinds of paper and ink, and anastigmatic camera lenses fed a boom in illustrated news formats. The advent of photographic agencies, which made halftone images much more readily available, only further accelerated this growth.¹⁹ A spate of newspapers—the Daily Graphic (1889), the Sketch (1893), the Golden Penny (1895), the Penny Pictorial Magazine (1899), the Illustrated Mail (1899), and the Sphere (1900)—embraced the halftone on an unprecedented scale.²⁰

The founding of the illustrated weekly newspaper Sketch in 1893 would help formalize a new and influential form of photographic reporting. The newspaper was a product of New Journalistic methods and the advances in halftone printing. It was formed as an “amusing” spin-off of the sober Victorian institution Illustrated London News.²¹ As historian Gerry Beegan has shown, the Sketch established a novel form of reporting defined around photographic representations of modern urban life, theatre, Society, and celebrity journalism.²² It was tabloid in size—smaller than a broadsheet and folded in half as with a magazine—and meant for casual reading in trains, at cafes, and as a conversation piece at home.

Clement Shorter, the man responsible for the Sketch, played a crucial role in the history of photojournalism. He claimed to have been “the first man in the chair of a picture paper to become a fanatical champion of the photograph and the process block.”²³ In its columns and on its masthead, the Sketch highlighted its commitment to photographic reporting at the expense of wood engraving. Shorter even claimed (inaccurately) that the Sketch was the first newspaper in the world produced entirely by halftone, without engraved illustrations.²⁴

Shorter’s autobiography provides a revealing look into conceptions of photographic reporting at its moment of origin. His commitment to the photograph was a product of his belief in the superiority of the photographic image. He wrote, “I saw the public would have a photograph with its air of absolute likeness to the original rather than an engraved portrait in which much of the likeness was destroyed by the intervention of a handcraftsman.”²⁵ Never mind the fact that, as Beegan has shown, the process of producing the halftone involved much “intervention” into the photographic image. For Shorter, the halftone provided a more authentic experience because it was physically bound to photography, with its claims to truthfulness and instantaneity.²⁶ The engraved image, though perhaps more artful, was simply inefficient for modern newspaper conditions.

Shorter wanted his new style of photographically illustrated journalism to reach audiences that he thought were ignored by mainstream journals. Of the original idea behind the newspaper, he w...