New Challenges 1950-1980

By the dawn of the 1950s, the photojournalist was monarch of all he surveyed. No medium other than photojournalism challenged the status of the great picture magazines like LIFE and Look. The best photojournalists who survived World War II and then Korea were acknowledged giants. The 1947 founding of the photographers’ cooperative Magnum had established the principle that picture takers should own the rights to their work. (Previously, rights had belonged to whoever commissioned a project.) Photojournalism could even claim a | theoretical foundation, as in Henri Cartier-Bresson’s idea of the photographer as instant organizer of reality.

Within a decade, the professional glow had faded. Television, a latent threat to the press since its first practical demonstration in 1929, had undercut the prosperity of the picture magazines: Look vanished in 1971; LIFE suspended publication in 1972. Tensions erupted between editors — text oriented, even at picture magazines — and some of the more deeply committed photojournalists over what to cover and how. Eugene Smith, one of the masters of the LIFE photo-essay, broke away from the magazine in 1954 to seek, in his view, more profound forms of expression. He spent nearly 20 years in obscure poverty composing lengthy, obsessive projects, finally regaining acclaim with Minimata, his expose of industrial mercury poisoning in Japan.

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.”

Even where Smith’s lament seemed most apt, it was never entirely true. For much of the 1950s, the civil rights movement gestated in Southern black churches. Most important U.S. publications failed to take much notice. But Flip Schulke persevered by contracting with black-owned Ebony and Jet. With the deployment of troops in Little Rock in 1957 and the rise of civil disobedience, the work of Schulke, Leonard Freed, Dan Weiner and others received wide exposure.

In 1954 Robert Capa was killed by a land mine at Thai Binh, as one Indochina war ended and another began. News photography in the U.S. focused instead on the 1958 Marine landing in Lebanon, Ike’s departure, the enthralling arrival of the Kennedys. For the first time, the White House was deemed worthy of full-time photo coverage. In 1963, as historical events darkened, photojournalism regained some of its tragic power. The A.P.’S Malcolm Browne methodically photographed a Buddhist monk burning himself to death in a Saigon protest. A Dallas Times-Herald photographer caught the instant of Lee Harvey Oswald’s death.

So did television. On the Viet Nam battle field, news photography finally ceded immediacy to its rival. Could picture taking, no longer history’s first witness, ever again be more than stenography? Eddie Adams, Philip Jones Griffiths, Don McCullin and Larry Burrows, among others, answered yes, as they found the war’s significance in the interstitial details: the fear in a Vietnamese prisoner’s eyes, the deathly immobility of a wounded U.S. soldier.

As the war progressed — in Asia and at home — U.S. photographers left coverage elsewhere in the world to newly formed, predominantly French news agencies: Gamma, Sygma, Contact. Fiercely competitive, the agencies brought to news photography in Beirut, Tehran and other battlefronts a brand of reckless intimacy that television could not yet duplicate.

Increasingly, the photographers also brought high-speed color film to the fray. By the end of the ’70s, color photos of the week’s events had become the staple of TIME and Newsweek, which had moved into the void left by the collapsing picture magazines. For many traditionalists, color marked a final capitulation to the values of television. But a group of younger photojournalists would begin to paint the news in bold colors. Like the U.S. after Viet Nam, these new practitioners were no longer satisfied by the old certainties.