Page 112 - Convergent Journalism an Introduction Writing and Producing Across Media

DIGITAL STILL PHOTOGRAPHY

Figure 7.2 Images from
the Civil War era, like
this one, were often
taken well after an
event had concluded.
Action shots were
impossible because it
took half an hour or
more to capture a
single frame.
(Photograph courtesy
of the U.S. Library of
Congress, Prints &
Photographs Division.)

102 his pictures because newspapers and magazines of the time had no way
of directly printing a photograph.

The Democratization of Photography

George Eastman’s company, Kodak, introduced film on a flexible roll,
and you can probably see how this was a big improvement over the
single-image glass plates. The snapshot cameras introduced in 1888
would allow 100 pictures to be made on a single roll of film.
Eastman’s marketing plan, based on the slogan “You press the
button, we do the rest,” had another impact on visual communica-
tion. Virtually anyone, anywhere, was now able to make pictures. This
“democratization of photography” led to the beginnings of our more
visually oriented society by helping to create a more visually literate
audience.
About this same time, social reformers discovered the power of
the photograph. Jacob Riis, a reporter for the New York Evening Sun
who exposed the plight of new immigrants in the 1880s and 1890s,
and Lewis Hine, a crusader against child labor a quarter century later,
employed pictures to put a face on these issues. Hine used information
about the children’s health, size, and age along with notes from their
conversations to give greater emphasis to the pictures (see Figure 7.3).