Golden Years 1920-1950

In the Roaring Twenties news photography began an extravagant era of expansion. After the bloodiest war in history, the world had fled to private pursuits. A craving remained, however, for images of disaster and tragedy — and something more: insights into the humdrum reality that most people were delighted to embrace. Photography responded with a huge boom in publication. Pictorial magazines and photographic journalism entered a period of creative magnificence.

The flood of picture taking brought profound changes to magazine illustration. Pictures assumed a narrative life of their own. Photographers were inspired by the analytical vision of abstract art and even more by the use of multiple perspectives in movies. Photography retained its enormous claim to objectivity in recording the world, but personal vision gained a new importance. German critics summed up the rapid evolution with the term Foto- auge (photo-eye), or photography as a mechanical form of seeing.

Not coincidentally, by the late 1920s German publications were leaders in that pursuit. The Berliner Illustrirte Zeitung, or BIZ, boosted circulation to 2 million with a new journalistic form, the photo story. Under editor Kurt Korff and publishing director Kurt Safranski, anywhere from two to five pages of BIZ, heavily dappled with photos, were devoted to a single topic: the daily routine at a Trappist monastery, the drama of a parachute jump. BIZ, London’s Picture Post (edited by Stefan Lorant) and the elegant French magazine Vu drew upon a breed of independent artist-photographer, often with one foot in Bohemia, to capture the arresting aspect of the everyday. Among the foremost practitioners were the German emigre Tim Gidal and Hungarian-born Andre Kertesz, whose enigmatic views of the Eiffel Tower and Paris streets imbued any human presence with an ephemeral tension.

In a 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 in 1928.

Within a year came widespread use of the famed Leica, which replaced fragile glass plates with spool-wound 35-mm film. Meanwhile, film was getting “faster,” allowing pictures to be taken in almost any light. Thus equipped, the photographer had become, like the modern soldier, a self- contained, highly mobile warrior. His lines of communication were greatly extended in 1935 when the Associated Press inaugurated its first Wirephoto transmission service.

As Europe’s picture-magazine empires flourished, Henry R. Luce took notes. His FORTUNE, launched in 1930, became a showcase — due largely to the talents of Margaret Bourke-White — of the American industrial recovery. That extraordinary photojournalist had also tapped into a remarkable social- documentary archive: the historical unit of the Farm Security Administration, established in 1935 under the autocratic hand of Roy Stryker. FORTUNE published stark images by some of the greatest chroniclers of the Depression: Dorothea Lange, Walker Evans, Carl Mydans, Arthur Rothstein.

Luce wanted more. for three years he studied how to create a picture magazine. Adolf Hitler helped by forcing BIZ’s Korff and Safranski to flee into exile. They taught Luce staffers technique and recommended photographers like the durable “Eisie,” Alfred Eisenhstaedt. In November 1936, the first issue of LIFE appeared on newsstands, and the magazine was an instant success.

LIFE captured Saturday-night dances on the Great Plains and the crash of the airship Hindenburg. Increasingly, the magazine covered war: in China, Spain, then Europe, then the Pacific. A generation of engage photojournalists, led by Henri Cartier-Bresson, the flamboyant Robert Capa and David Douglas Duncan, marched alongside the cataclysm. The sensibilities they had forged in peacetime brought a powerful dimension to the record of atrocity: a sense of intimacy with the intersection where individuals create and suffer history.