Photography

The beginning of modern photojournalism took place in 1925, in Germany. The event was the invention of the first 35 mm camera, the Leica. It was designed as a way to use surplus movie film, then shot in the 35 mm format. Before this, a photo of professional quality required bulky equipment; after this photographers could go just about anywhere and take photos unobtrusively, without bulky lights or tripods. The difference was dramatic, for primarily posed photos, with people award of the photographer's presence, to new, natural photos of people as they really lived.
Added to this was another invention originally from Germany, the photojournalism magazine. From the mid-1920s, Germany, at first, experimented with the combination of two old ideas. Old was the direct publication of photos; that was available after about 1890, and by the early 20th century, some publications, newspaper-style and magazine, were devoted primarily to illustrations. But the difference of photo magazines beginning in the 1920s was the collaboration--instead of isolated photos, laid out like in your photo album, editors and photographers begin to work together to produce an actual story told by pictures and words, or cutlines. In this concept, photographers would shoot many more photos than they needed, and transfer them to editors. Editors would examine contact sheets, that is, sheets with all the photos on them in miniature form (now done using Photoshop software), and choose those he or she best believed told the story. As important in the new photojournalism style was the layout and writing. Cutlines, or captions, helped tell the story along with the photos, guiding the reader through the illustrations, and photos were no longer published like a family album, or individually, just to illustrate a story. The written story was kept to a minimum, and the one, dominant, theme-setting photo would be published larger, while others would help reinforce this theme.
The combination of photography and journalism, or photojournalism--a term coined by Frank Luther Mott, historian and dean of the University of Missouri School of Journalism--really became familiar after World War II (1939-1945). Germany's photo magazines established the concept, but Hitler's rise to power in 1933 led to suppression and persecution of most of the editors, who generally fled the country. Many came to the United States.