657507

research-article2016
JOU0010.1177/1464884916657507JournalismCreech

Article

Journalism
1–17
A newsmaker’s tool: The © The Author(s) 2016
Reprints and permissions:
35mm camera and journalism’s sagepub.co.uk/journalsPermissions.nav
DOI: 10.1177/1464884916657507
material epistemology jou.sagepub.com

Brian Creech
Temple University, USA

Abstract
As devices become a more visible and integral part of media practice, it is important
for researchers and scholars to attend to the ways in which philosophies, professional
discourses, and technical limits structure the ways these technologies are deployed. The
35mm camera is a technological waypoint between earlier large-format cameras and
contemporary digital photography and offers a useful historical example for interrogating
the relationship between seemingly inert technical operations and journalism’s modes
of meaning production. To that end, this article offers a theoretical perspective for
interrogating the 35mm camera through the lens of Latour, with the aim of developing
a schema for integrating devices into the cultural study of media and communication.

Keywords
35mm camera, Bruno Latour, journalism and epistemology, journalism and technology,
photojournalism history

Introduction
In the nearly 90 years since Leica’s introduction of Leica I, the first commercially avail-
able 35mm camera, journalistic photographs have enjoyed an almost synonymous rela-
tionship with truth and reality. In the corpus of journalism of history, the camera takes on
a particular truth-bearing power, as if by capturing light on film in a way akin to the
workings of the human eye, the camera acts as an almost mechanical corollary to the
human ability to perceive the truth.

Corresponding author:
Brian Creech, Department of Journalism, Temple University, 2020 North 13th Street, Room 316,
Annenberg Hall 011-00, Philadelphia, PA 19122, USA.
Email: brian.creech@temple.edu
2 Journalism

However, many scholars have pointed out how photography has had to be disciplined
in journalism’s norms, often in contested ways (Barnhurst and Nerone, 2001; Cookman,
2009; Zelizer, 1995a). Although many studies have focused on the content, aesthetics, and
cultural character of news photographs, the devices that abet their production have
remained an understudied topic within the broader mass communication scholarship. This
article argues that a varied collection of discursive and material practices construed the
camera’s mechanical abilities as subservient to the individual photographer’s perspective,
creating the terms by which 35mm photography became an epistemologically legitimate
form of journalism. Given contemporary concerns about the disruptions in journalistic
practice that new technologies portend, it is worth considering how prior technologies,
like the 35mm, came to appear invisible and inert. To that end, this article offers a theoreti-
cal perspective for interrogating journalistic devices through the lens of Latour (2004,
2013), whose recent works argue that technologies offer ontological and epistemological
limits and opportunities for acts of human representation. In the examples analyzed for
this article, prevailing discourses connecting the camera to the human body as a form of
technologically aided and professionally disciplined perception rendered the 35mm cam-
era, like earlier large- and medium-format cameras, as a device capable of producing
journalistic truth. It is this individualized notion of trained perception and witnessing that
persists in contemporary debates about technology and journalism.
To investigate the camera and theoretically explicate its relationship to journalism’s
truth demands, I cast a broad historical net, looking at a wide range of discourses and
documents from the 1930s through the 1970s that deal with the camera’s technical opera-
tions, its place in the profession, and its aesthetic possibilities. The point here is not to
substantiate the series of events that led to the camera’s uptake in journalism. Instead, I
seek to interrogate what Williams (1961) would call the ‘structure of feeling’ that sur-
rounds the camera and show how a range of overlapping discourses situate it, revealing
the practices that converge at the individual photographer and offer a means for under-
standing the camera’s place within journalism’s particular mode of truth production. This
means avoiding periodizing the uptake of the camera in favor of showing the interplay
between material and discursive conditions that construct the device in journalism’s cul-
tural memory (Ekstrand, 2013).

The 35mm camera in historical context

By situating the 35mm in historical context, we can see how, over time, its technical
operations influenced and became a part of journalism’s modes of truth production.
Many inventors manufactured cameras that shot on 35mm film in the early 20th century,
but Leica is often celebrated for designing a camera that could produce an image from a
35mm negative that could be enlarged and maintain fidelity (McKeown, 2000). First
designed in 1914 and introduced commercially about 10 years later, the Leica’s compact
size and ease of use made it widely popular among amateur photographers (Matheson,
1972). By the late 1930s, manufacturers such as Contax, Olympus, and Nikon began
introducing their own 35mm cameras and competition led to many of the technological
advancements that now seem synonymous with 35mm photography: faster shutter
speeds, distance measuring rangefinders, single-lens reflex (SLR) focus, interchangeable
Creech 3

lenses, and internal film roll winding mechanisms (Goldsmith, 1979). World War II is
often described as an important time in the development of the camera as camera manu-
facturers, due to supply shortages related to the war, ‘were obliged to experiment with
numerous methods of exposure and development to overcome the inherent shortcomings
of materials available at the time’ (Matheson, 1972: 17).
Although German and Hungarian photographers were important early adopters of the
35mm, professional journalists in America were slow to take it up, as the early Leica
models resembled ‘a precision-made toy’ (Goldsmith, 1979: 162). This speaks to a
broader gendering around camera technology, as new devices are often first derided as
merely consumer products to be used in domestic life, neither reliable nor durable enough
for the masculine demands of professional media production (Henning, 2007). At first,
photographers found 35mm negatives more difficult to develop and less accommodating
to mistakes in focus and movement than larger format cameras, but advances in film
development in the early 1930s made reproduction and touch-up easier to manage
(Goldsmith, 1979).
American photojournalists predominantly used large-format cameras through the
1950s, although individual photographers like Ernst Haas, Robert Capa, Max Desfor,
and David Douglas Duncan often shot with smaller cameras and have been credited with
developing important technical advancements during the early days of small format pho-
tography (Gernsheim and Gernsheim, 1965). Chronicling the history of the camera for
the George Eastman Company, Gustavson (2009) identifies World War II and the Korean
War as important moments for the camera’s uptake, as a growing audience demanded
images from the wars and the US military’s logistical structure abetted the delivery of
images from reporters stationed alongside troops. Often embedded in warzones, photo-
journalists used 35mm cameras because large-format cameras would have left them
exposed during combat (Fulton, 1988). These photos are often credited with revealing
the human side of modern war and went a long way toward establishing the kind of
detail-oriented, multiple-shot aesthetic that would come to define smaller format photog-
raphy (Hirsch, 2000; North, 2005). In domestic news production, Weegee (1987), who
used a large-format Speed Graphic to photograph crime for New York tabloids through
the 1940s and 1950s, is often cited as an important precursor for later 35mm photogra-
phers. His aesthetic represented a perspective distinct from other news images, in that he
strived to get close to his subjects and focus on details to capture ‘stories as they hap-
pened’, as opposed to capturing images of principal actors after the fact (para 1).
Broad uptake of the 35mm as a journalistic device was often slowed due to the cost of
replacing old systems with new technology. Only major publications had the capital to
invest in new systems, and both 35mm photos and larger format photos ran side by side
on the pages of Life and Look magazines through the 1940s (Ilan, 2013). These photos
were often presented in ways that made the camera formats mostly indistinguishable from
one another. Through the 1950s and 1960s, magazines played an important role in creat-
ing audience appetites for 35mm photography by establishing methods for reproducing
35mm negatives in ways that drew reader attention to shadows, colors, and personal
moments (North, 2005). Throughout the 1950s, photo editors and experts debated the
costs and merits of bringing 35mm photography into newsrooms across the pages of the
National Press Photographer’s Association’s membership magazine, News Photographer,
4 Journalism

often arguing that audiences were growing more image-literate and that by investing in
35mm development and reproduction, a smart publisher could beat the competition.
Investment and infrastructure were an important part of the camera’s uptake, and as
the 35mm camera appeared in the hands of more photographers, the professional values
and standards that guided written accounts and prior image production practices stood in
tension with the camera’s technical and aesthetic possibilities. Borchard et al. (2013)
have shown that audiences in the early days of news photography deemed artist render-
ings of major events and personalities epistemologically superior to news photos because
they revealed the hand and perspective of a trusted observer. Practices of image represen-
tation in the news, Barnhurst and Nerone (2001) argue, offered the audience a mode of
subject-constitution in line with the demands of modernity implicit in written reports,
revealing the relationship between the individual citizen and major events of the day as
one of rational certainty about what had happened and why it was important. The reporter
was an important mediator between news and the audience, but as new photographic
technologies appeared, they shifted the aesthetics of representation in ways that hid the
presence of the reporter. Photos became a more prominent part of news through the 20th
century, standing as the documents of events as they happened and gaining an epistemo-
logical authority through the tacit assertion ‘that nothing intervenes between the reader
and a scene’ (p. 176). Tensions between modes of representation that alternately reveal
and hide the role of photojournalists in witnessing and authoring the news have not been
adequately dealt with in the practice of journalism, as Zelizer (1995a) has noted, and it is
between these tensions that contemporary practices emerge fitful and unresolved, but
superficially capable of incorporating new developments.
As photographic technologies changed, journalism’s cultural, professional, and ethi-
cal practices subsumed the consequences of these changes into institutionalized modes
of production (Zelizer, 1995b). The development of the wire photo and the infrastructure
that allowed photos to be shot, transmitted, and published in various newspaper editions
across the country created a need for standardized rules of photographic representation
(Hannigan, 2004). Although it may have been easy to assume that a photograph’s refer-
ential nature allowed it to show reality as it happened, many recognized photography ‘as
a craft in need of the intervention of journalists’ (Zelizer, 1995a: 87). Bringing photogra-
phy into compliance with journalism’s normative values meant that photographers in
newsrooms had to adopt the language of legitimacy often dictated by their word-centric
counterparts, using similar concepts of story and news value to explain a photograph’s
contribution (Lowrey, 2002). As this history shows, the uptake of photography and the
35mm camera in journalism is fraught with many potential fissures around the authority
of representation, where the institutionalized values and practices of journalism attempted
to contain the myriad possibilities of the 35mm camera.

The relationship between photography, technology, and

truth
News photography, as opposed to other forms of photography, offers a useful case of the
uptake of technology in journalism because the assertion that photographs have the
potential to bear an unimpeachable, humane truth obscures the complex technical and
Creech 5

discursive operations that work to make that assertion true. As Friedman (2014) argues,
the truth of a news report or photograph is often presumed, but the practices that create
these materials are often abetted by technologies of documentation and transcription,
which bear their own epistemological rules. Media texts are bound up with the material-
ity of their production, and it is from within this assemblage of textual and material limits
that the epistemological legitimacy of any given representation emerges (Siles and
Boczkowski, 2012). Technologies are not merely the inert enablers of media production;
by negotiating technical limits, individuals put into action the practices that inscribe truth
into a legible cultural form.
The work of Bruno Latour looms large in the following analysis, as in other work
exploring the relationship between journalism and technology. Actor–network theory,
which argues that material objects form important parts of productive social networks,
has offered journalism studies scholars range of useful concepts for studying the role of
technology in the culture and practice of journalism. Anderson (2008, 2013) uses Latour
to show that the material arrangements of news production, once disrupted, often threaten
the enduring values that define the occupation of journalist for many practitioners.
Looking at contemporary technologies of media production, Neff (2015) argues,

New digital technologies change old organizational routines and workplace practices in ways
that can be surprising and unexpected, and in most workplaces, the transition to digital is far
from a straight-forward, one-to-one substitution of one set of tools for another. (p. 74)

The uptake of materialist perspectives in communication research has gone a long way
to show how ‘the social and material character of communication technology [exist as]
equally definitive and co-determining’ aspects of technologically oriented practices
(Lievrouw, 2013: 24). These projects contextualize changes in journalism’s technologi-
cal deployment as a shift in its broader cultural role via a reassertion of Latour’s (1991)
statement that ‘technology is society made durable’ (p. 103).
Much of the research, though, is grounded in contemporary trends, often overlooking
the ways that journalism has always incorporated new technologies. The 35mm camera
marks a transition from earlier medium- and large-format cameras to more portable and
digital modes of image production practiced today. Much of the scholarly literature sur-
rounding journalistic photography centers on images themselves, linking their content
and style to broader thematic, cultural, or aesthetic concerns. Paradigmatic studies on
news photos often privilege content over practices and processes (cf. Hariman and
Lucaites, 2007; Sontag, 1977; Zelizer, 2010). By attending to the ways the 35mm cam-
era’s capabilities and its place within journalistic practice have been conceptualized
across a disparate range of discourses, one can begin to see how various, value-laden
considerations of photography bridge technical and aesthetic concerns while offering
epistemological standard for what constitutes a ‘true’ image (Hirsch, 2000).

Theorizing technology and truth

Looking at the 35mm camera as a device implicated in the production of journalistic
truth means not just looking at the values and discourses that rendered photographs
6 Journalism

epistemologically valid, but also attending to the camera’s technological capabilities. As

Latour (1999) has argued, technologies are never stable things, but their presence amid
the cultural practices they are deployed within tends to remain tacit, despite the fact
technical operations facilitate a differing, and often more granular, understanding and
manipulation of reality. No matter how apparent technologies become in an analysis,
observers must account for more than the instrumentality of the device and the limits and
capabilities evident in the design (Latour, 2013). Particularly fascinated with the produc-
tion of knowledge, Latour (2004) argues that technological augmentations allow groups
to perceive, record, and represent phenomena in ways that alter the existing epistemo-
logical assumptions that underpin cultural, social, and political processes. News photog-
raphy is one such cultural process, as resonant photos have often been credited with
shifting public consciousness, thanks to a photographer or camera’s ability to reveal
something that may not have been readily apparent before (cf. Azoulay, 2008; Deluca,
2005; Hariman and Lucaites, 2007).
Considering photography as a technological process subservient to journalism’s
modes of truth production directly borrows Latour’s terms, but with some important
caveats. Primarily concerned with science, Latour’s works assume knowledge pro-
duction occurs within easy to delineate systems where technologies form part of a
stable structure. As Anderson (2013) shows, deploying Latour in order to study jour-
nalism means making assumptions about news production as a networked field, where
individual actors (sources, editors, reporters, photographers, and designers) deploy
communication technologies from within a process shaped by persistent external
demands (production deadlines, revenue pressures, audience expectations, and met-
rics). Some have argued that, via Latour, a focus on the technologies of journalism
misses the very real impact that culture, as a shared system of norms, has on news
production and the ways in which devices are deployed (Kreiss, 2012; Anderson and
Kreiss, 2013).
I would contend that such arguments short-change the real impact that a device might
have, particularly if the analytic lens turns from the organizational relationships involved
in the production of news to the ways journalism also functions as a public epistemology
reliant upon a true and verifiable documentary record. As Gitelman (2014) has argued,
documentation and the production of documents allowed for the emergence of a publicly
available record that coheres into a form of verification at the core of modern truth pro-
duction. Tagg (1988) has shown that throughout the 19th century, various regimes of
knowledge production posited photography as a documentary – and thus evidentiary –
practice reliant upon a technology capable of producing a visual record that coheres to an
assumed reality. News photography continues to exist as part of a specific epistemology
of the document, where the individual photo, just like a written record, ‘inheres symboli-
cally, materially, and graphically, according to the contexts in which documents make
sense’ (Gitelman, 2014: 12). Thinking of journalism as a discipline indebted to acts of
documentation allows one to consider how the profession creates a context for deploying
a camera as a ‘technology of journalism’ (Dooley, 2007). Yet, processes of documenta-
tion are not stable; they change as technological improvements in perception increase the
purview of what can be recorded and represented, as do the epistemological rules that
rely upon these acts of documentation (Frohman, 2012).
Creech 7

In the case of news photography, attention to the relationship between device and
practice reveals how photojournalism’s epistemological authority is reliant upon the
highly contextual interplay between technical capability, individual ability, and the pro-
fessional systems that offer an intuitive standard for creating and evaluating what consti-
tutes a valid journalistic photo. The 35mm camera sits at the nexus of these relations,
which, as Tagg (2009) states, allows an individual, equipped with a camera to evoke the
‘institutions, discourses, and systems of power’ that invest journalistic photos with their
power of representation (p. xxxii).
A photograph may exist as a referent to an event, yet I would argue that news photog-
raphy’s epistemological authority is predicated upon the specific affordances that allow
an event to be legibly observed and recorded, thus rendering an event newsworthy
because it was observed and a record exists (Gitelman, 2006). This is the notion of rep-
resentation at the heart of journalistic practice: a textual account, an artist’s rendering, a
Speed Graphic photographic, a series of 35mm shots arranged as a photo essay, and a
gallery of images recorded on camera phones and collected from social media all possess
varying modes of truth production that grant them power. Each mode requires attention
to the material conditions and discursive regimes that make its technologies of represen-
tation legible within the practice of journalism.

Sketching the relations that constitute the 35mm camera

The following sections deconstruct the interplay between material conditions and discur-
sive practices that constitute the truth-producing practices the camera embodies, treating
the device as a site that brings ‘together action and symbolic form in a way that reflect[s]
the often conflicting tensions at the core of journalistic practice’ (Zelizer 2004: 195). A
turn to the 35mm camera relies upon the assumption that it is an object whose cultural
significance and material operations can be discerned from a legitimate, though eclectic,
historical record and idiosyncratic archive (Douglas, 2010). To elucidate the relationship
between technology, epistemology, and cultural practice outlined above, the following
analysis consults philosophical musings on the camera, patents, technical documents,
educational materials, and professional commentary about the 35mm camera as evidence
that reveals the structure of epistemological claims surrounding the camera and the dis-
cursive strategies that construct the camera’s technical aspects as subject to a journalistic
epistemology. Many of the materials gathered cross disciplinary boundaries – camera
production and marketing, journalism education, documentary photography, and daily
journalism – but they reveal an idealized camera and the various strains of discourse that
make it understandable as a journalistic technology.
Using a genealogical method focused on uncovering the rules by which the camera
gained epistemological legitimacy, the analysis interprets the confluence of material and
discursive practices that surround the camera as ‘historical evidence to form an interpre-
tation about the broader relations of … public knowledge production’ that implicate the
camera (Roessner et al., 2013: 272). To untangle the relationship between technology
and epistemology the camera embodies, the following analysis is driven by the following
questions: How were the technical capabilities of the camera constructed as particularly
journalistic? What is the role of human perception in individuating the camera? How did
8 Journalism

discourses about news, documentary, and journalistic education construct the relation-
ship between the camera, the photographer, and the demands of journalism?

Technology, technique, and truth

In the terms of Latour, individual camera operations bear specific affordances that in
turn augment the practices they are immersed within. By turning to particular aspects of
the camera, we can see how, even in their conceptualization and design, these aspects
brought the camera closer to a human-centered perception of truth. Considering the
camera as a unified object is inadequate because, as Kittler (2002) has observed, pho-
tography is not a simple technological process. Instead, the camera collects the chemis-
try of film process, the physics of light manipulation, as well as other practices, uniting
these operations as singular only within the confines of the photograph – an object
granted further epistemological significance through specific, culturally inscribed
meaning-making processes.
By refining individual processes, Leica, Nikon, Kodak, and Canon could compete
with one another to offer a product that brought the production of images closer to the
natural operation of the eye. Patent documents reveal incremental improvements in shut-
ter speed, lens shaping, and rangefinder shape. The rangefinder was of particular con-
cern, as it directly interfaced with the eye and gave photographers instructions on how to
focus the camera so that the image most accurately reflected what they saw (US Patent
Number 2,391,152, 1945; US Patent Number 2,401,708, 1946; US Patent Number
2,425,400, 1947). By ‘correlating the rangefinder with the focusing part of the camera’
via a SLR system, designers attempted to connect the operations of lenses with what
could be made visible to the individual photographer (US Patent Number 2,464,166,
1949). Later, iterations of the SLR would attempt to link its operations to that of a view-
finder that allowed the photographer to see the image, its composition, and its shifting
granularity as the photographer turned the lens (US Patent Number, 2,481,656, 1949). In
each of these cases, new designs served to resolve a parallax or the difference between
the way the image appeared in the viewfinder and the way it would be imprinted on film
through the camera’s lens.
As worded in the patents, such designs attempted to overcome the difference between
the images a photographer conceptualized and the ones the camera was capable of pro-
ducing. Despite designs and production techniques that attempted to push beyond the
limits of light manipulation, the physics of light movement, focal length, and exposure
remained a firm reality (US Patent number 2,338,614, 1944; US Patent number 2,380,210,
1945; US Patent number 2,384,638, 1945). Mastery of these limits still proved fruitful,
as advances in focal systems, shutter speed, and exposure reduced the amount of time
required in producing an image (US Patent number 2,353,257, 1944; US Patent number
2,384,639, 1945; US Patent number 2,253,055, 1941). The range-finding apparatus
stands as an example of a particular kind of affordance that, in the terms of Latour, set
the terms for understanding the camera as a more technically facile mediator between
reality and the representation of reality.
Other aspects of the camera’s technical operations also granted practitioners new
affordances that allowed them to produce images with more granularity and context.
Creech 9

For instance, the camera’s smaller size and portability allowed individual journalists
to get closer to the action. In its own corporate history, the Leica (n.d.) company cele-
brates the invention and sale of its earliest models by drawing attention to the way its
cameras condensed the photography process into a more compact space, creating a ‘new,
portable, simple, and quick method of photography’ that ‘helped to produce a lot of the
images that expand our knowledge and influence our perception of the world’. Roll film
allowed for more photos to be taken of a subject in sequence, leading to the expectation
that by shooting more, a photographer may come back from an assignment with an image
that records a human or emotional truth their eye missed in the moment (Matheson,
1972). Adjustable shutter speeds granted photographers more control over the light
exposure process, allowing another iterative mechanism for bringing the exposed image
closer to what the eye could see (US Patent number US 4137539 A, 1979).
As advances in camera technology brought the device closer to the individual’s
perception, a key rationality governing the use and mass production of these cameras
emerged – by refining the photographic processes contained within the device, camera
manufacturers could bridge the gap between what the photographer saw and the image
produced (Gustavson, 2009). Embedded in design choices and technical development
is an apparent tension between reality, as it appears, human perception, and the ability
to capture that reality and make sense of it. As the next section will show, the develop-
ment of individual perception became an important concept that unified the camera’s
operations toward a singular purpose and created a discursive condition that could be
used to bring the camera and the photographer in line with journalism’s epistemologi-
cal demands.

Individual perception as a unifying concept

Within and across the documents collected for this analysis, perception emerged as a
useful, individually focused concept for bridging the technical aspects of the camera and
the epistemological demands of journalism. The notion of perception, though, is a highly
aestheticized ideal more readily discussed in art and documentary photography than in
newsrooms. However, Cookman (2009) argues that photojournalism has long built its
cultural meanings upon a conflation of concepts from various realms of practice. The
photos, words, recollections, and memoirs of celebrated documentarians, such as
Dorothea Lange, Alfred Eisenstaedt, Walker Evans, and Robert Capa, among others, do
important discursive work connecting the technical operations of the camera to an ideal-
ized notion of the photographer’s work.
The works and words of celebrated photographers and documentarians help overcome
a divide between the device and the individual. In many specific cases, they construe the
act of seeing as a practice that is equally informed by what the eye is capable of taking in
and what the camera captures (Evans, 1978). The device became an object for photogra-
phers to orient their practices around, because, as photographer Alfred Eisenstaedt (1985)
stated in his memoir, ‘It is always a challenge to take pictures unobtrusively. You have to
study the environment to get the right angle. Practice is very important’ (p. 101).
Photojournalists’ technical felicity could not be limited to a single type of camera. The
focus, ruggedness, and fidelity of individual lenses as well as the mobility different
10 Journalism

camera bodies afforded can be deduced from photographers’ technical notes, especially
those charged with photographing war (Douglas, 1951). Robert Capa’s photos from World
War II were all shot on a Contax 35mm camera, and he stated that the smaller cameras
gave him more mobility among infantrymen and produced images where the subjects
appear less aware of the camera (Whelan, 2007). Although Life editor John G. Morris
(1998) recalled that Capa’s images bore the blurs and marks of development problems
that left many of his film rolls unprintable, the existence of these images is due in part to
a mobility and portability the smaller camera afforded Capa, allowing him move among
the D-Day soldiers and shoot from a perspective that put the viewer in the action.
Perspective offers an individualized notion that allows neither the camera’s technical
capabilities nor the photographer’s intentionality to overdetermine the other. Lange and
Dixon’s (1952) invective for photographers to overcome the manipulation of technology
and to instead further sublimate the technical aspects of the camera into the way they ‘see’
the world further substantiates the existence of a professional and aesthetic rationality that
idealizes photography as a process that bridges the workings of camera and the eye. As
such, photojournalism becomes what Cartier-Bresson (1952) called ‘a joint operation of
the brain, the eye and the heart’ (p. 3). This ideal can be understood as the development of
a sensibility, where the disciplined synthesis of the camera into the individual’s perspec-
tive allowed for a photographic aesthetic that transcended mere representation to emerge.
The development of a photojournalistic perspective hinged around the training of the
eye, a training that was more of a social process than an individual one. Take, for instance,
Miller’s (1997) statement on the Magnum Photo Agency from his unauthorized biogra-
phy of the iconic photography group:

Magnum provides photographers with a rare opportunity to give and receive frank criticism of
their work and sharpen each other’s eyes by the constant interchange of superlative images.
The result is an incomparable standard of photography which captures life’s beauty and
tranquility as well as laying bare the face of inhumanity and suffering. (p. xii; emphasis added)

To bring the discussion back to the terms of Latour, the training of the perspective this
quotation describes brought the camera and photographer into a representational assem-
blage that ‘transform[ed] bearing witness into an artistic tour de force that transcends
journalism’ (Miller, 1997: xii).
When considering the power of photography’s truth claims, Walker Evans and Dorothea
Lange, who used a mix of medium-, large-, and small-format cameras, are important touch-
stones. The following quotation from Lange (1978) reveals an understanding of the cam-
era’s materiality as an extension of the body, and thus an individual’s intentionality:

You put your camera around your neck in the morning, along with putting on your shoes, and
there it is, an appendage of the body that shares your life with you. The camera is an instrument
that teaches people how to see without a camera. (p. vii)

Although it should be stated that Lange’s most famous Farm Services Administration
photographs were shot on a larger format speed graphic and not the kind of smaller cam-
era implied by her statement, embedded in her description of photography is the notion
Creech 11

of the photographer as an individuated subject, capable of distilling the importance of

captured moments, and through the right coherence of light, perspective, and emotion,
compose a photograph capable of imparting significant meaning to a broad audience. As
another example, Kirstein’s (1938) essay celebrating Evans’ work in American
Photographs further exemplifies this notion of the photograph and photographer as tran-
scending the strict technical confines of photography, offering Evans’ work as an exam-
ple of how the exceptionally perceptive and talented individual may record photos whose
communicated truths eclipse processes of production.
Idealized notions of individual perspective reorient the camera’s technological aug-
mentations of the human eye as ultimately subject to the will and intentionality of an
individual whose mastery over the device may reveal previously unperceivable truths.
Gernsheim and Gernsheim (1965) made this ideal relevant for journalism by foreground-
ing photography’s technical operations as the basis from which image production prac-
tices interested in the representation of truth extended. In doing so, they theorized that
the cultural power of photography could be found in the skillful and patient working of
a camera’s lens. Discourses situating the camera as an augmentation of human perspec-
tive provide a focal point for construing technological practice as amenable to profes-
sional demands that could adjust as economic, cultural, and technical conditions inside
the journalism industry changed.

Disciplining the camera and photographer

If the notion of individual perspective discursively collapses the camera’s technical oper-
ations and makes them subservient to the individual holding the camera, then perspective
becomes the aspect of an individual that can be disciplined in the expectations and phi-
losophies that govern journalistic truth production. While various overlapping and inter-
connected discourses worked to construct the series of concepts that rendered the 35mm
camera legible as a journalistic device, education and professional training practices
show how a fitful epistemology emerges around the camera.
The camera is an interesting device because it reveals fractures within journalism’s
own professional epistemologies. In the early 1920s, Walter Lippmann (1920, 1925)
articulated a cohesive vision of journalism as a method of knowledge production that
mapped closely to scientific rationalism, bringing the methods of journalism in line with
an overarching impetus to bring news reports closer to a shared, objective reality.
However, many journalism historians and sociologists have found that as Lippmann’s
objective methods became a professional ideology, notions of objectivity served as a
concept that brought individuals into the profession while obscuring persistent short-
comings in journalistic practice (Schudson, 1978, Tuchman 1972). In the split between
ideal and practicality, objectivity operates as a kind of organizing discursive condition,
and its disparate deployment across the profession and over time offers an example of
how journalism’s epistemic rules are open to technological, cultural, and social revision
(Maras, 2014; Mindich 2000). For the purposes of this article, objectivity is just an
example of how the values that underpin journalism’s mode of truth production are often
purposefully vague, but create the means by which new technologies and practices are
brought into the discipline.
12 Journalism

Educational materials offer a useful set of examples because they articulate a schema
that bridged technical expertise and professional values and offered a conceptual index
for the aspiring photojournalist. Lessons that connect ‘understanding, imagination, and
perceptiveness’ with ‘knowledge of tools and technique’ synthesize the materiality of the
camera with journalism’s demands of truth (Rhode and McCall, 1961: 31). Earlier mate-
rials posit photography as a highly technical and mysterious process, but smaller format
cameras were ‘instrumental in eliminating much of the mysticism in which photography
was shrouded’ (Price, 1937: 114). Extending the link between photography as techno-
logical and biological process, student photographers were encouraged to develop greater
control over their muscles so as to better serve the operations of the camera:

While its mechanism eliminates such difficulties as focusing, sighting and timing, there are a
few problems which the operator must solve for himself … An important thing to remember is
to hold it firmly and still when making an exposure. The camera is held close to the eye for
focusing and sighting. A picture made by an excitable person is apt to show movement in the
film. A little practice is required to establish a routine for manipulating it to eliminate this
difficulty. (p. 117)

Once individuals developed technical mastery and could comport their bodies to the
camera’s affordances, the words and works of professionals became important touchstones,
offering a role model for a type of news photography that rendered the camera’s technical
workings as subservient to the journalist’s ability to perceive an image that revealed the
truth of a story before snapping it (Hoy, 1986). Over time, technical mastery over the cam-
era became a foregone conclusion, and educational materials could spend more pages
focused on the relationship between style, image aesthetics, and the way technical augmen-
tations led to more complex representations of journalistic truth (Kobre, 1991).
As news photography became more industrialized and photojournalism more profes-
sionalized, educational materials came to reflect a normative standard of truth that indi-
vidual photographers would be expected to adopt (Coopersmith, 2000). Many of these
materials reflect text-centric routines and reveal how the values that dictate the profes-
sional uptake of devices might not readily accommodate shifting affordances. For exam-
ple, Fox and Kerns (1961) tell students that news pictures must conform to the same
values as written news stories: ‘they need to be rich in such qualities as recency, near-
ness, importance, human interest. In addition, they must bring added understanding to
the story by visualizing information which can not be adequately described by words
alone’ (p. 30). Doing so, though, required students to overcome any initial awe they may
have had with the technology, as explained by Byrne (1952):

There is a magical quality about photography and a certain sense of elation about having
released that miracle, which I don’t think we ever completely lose – at least I hope not. But in
time, detachment comes and before long it is no longer the process that thrills us, but the fact
that we have captured the picture we wanted. (p. 20)

Once the photographic process was demystified, the individual could develop techni-
cal expertise and comport the device to an intuited understanding of journalism’s norms.
As Pouncey (1952) argues, ‘What is the difference between just plain photography and
Creech 13

newspaper photography? The answer is “ideas.” Our profession is built on transmitting

ideas – or thoughts – or news’ (p. iii). Therefore, the individual educated in both the
technical aspects of the camera and the epistemological demands of journalism could
produce the kinds of photographs that communicate newsworthy information. The
almost tautological nature of this formulation is no accident, instead revealing a discur-
sive regime that further elides technology and practice into an understanding of news
photographs as being true and cohesive representations of reality as it happened.
The individual photojournalist remains an important locus of these discourses, as
individual mastery of the rules of journalism was the ideological means for bringing
changing camera technologies into professional practice. As an example, the notion of
individual ‘perspective’ provided a useful concept for centering educational interven-
tions, and students were encouraged to develop their perspective by developing their
personalities: ‘In gaining this experience, [the photographer] develops a way of seeing,
which is a reflection of his personality’ (Bennett, 1962: 85). Bennett also quotes famed
portrait photographer Phillipe Halsman to add further emphasis: ‘More important than
the development of technique is the development of yourself. How can a shallow and
superficial person capture the innermost essence of his sitter?’ (p. 126). In short, once the
individual’s eye was trained to see and compose images that could communicate news-
worthy ideas, the technology would follow.
Education was an also important method for bringing changing technologies into the
profession via already established professionals. The National Press Photographers
Association’s (NPPA) short courses were instrumental in making technical, aesthetic,
and conceptual advances in photography sensible to newspaper journalists (Cookman,
2009). As part of the broader professionalization of journalism in the mid-20th century,
the NPPA could articulate a professional ethic of how a camera should be used in the
service of journalism and the individual’s responsibilities in making sure journalism’s
truth demands were evident in every photographic act. There is an important discursive
flattening that occurs here. Take, for instance, Life’s Wilson Hicks’ invective to use the
35mm camera ‘to picture life as it is – not as a photographer may revise it’ (as quoted in
Cookman, 1985: 99).
As evidenced by educational and technical texts, the stability of the camera as a tool
deployed in service of journalism relied upon an individuating discourse that construed
technical mastery as the individual’s responsibility and made it subservient to their per-
spective. Once technical mastery was settled and the camera became the extension of the
photographer’s perceptual capabilities, the aesthetic, technical, and professional aspects
collapsed into a discursive regime that set the standard for understanding 35mm images
as newsworthy and true.

Conclusion
While it is tempting to think of singular acts of journalism and photojournalism, or the
careers of individual journalists and photographers, as gaining their power through the
truth they reveal, it is perhaps more useful to think of a journalistic truth as a mode of
representation whose epistemological rules emerge in an interplay between technology
and practice. Interrogating the devices enmeshed in journalism’s truth production
14 Journalism

practices means adopting a perspective that assumes technology is best understood ‘in
relation to the interminglings they make possible or that make them possible’ (Deleuze
and Guattarri, 1987: 90). In terms of Latour, a series of relationships geared toward pro-
ducing journalistic truth are put into effect whenever a news photographer begins to
compose and snap a photo. For scholars interested in the structure and social character of
journalism’s broader authority over the truth, it is not enough to say that technology or
practice constitutes the other. Instead, it is perhaps more accurate to say that they are
made inextricable from one another via a series of overlapping practices, devices, and
epistemological rules, forming a representational assemblage that is flexible enough to
accommodate change and preserve journalism’s authority over the truth.
For the study of technology in journalism and media, Latour offers an approach
that allows observers to analyze how technologies come to embody the rules of their
profession. In the case of the 35mm camera, we can see how journalism’s relationship
to the truth incorporates the device in ways that make it and its images culturally leg-
ible and legitimate as acts of journalism, but does not dictate the camera’s capabilities
or development over time. Camera technology is just one example of journalism’s
changing regimes of truth becoming a material epistemology that bears all the contra-
dictions, possibilities, and conflicted meanings of the profession itself. Given the
current moment where technological change portends dramatic shifts in the business
and practice of news, the story of the 35mm shows how journalism possesses an often
unacknowledged epistemological fluidity that brings new devices into its modes of
truth production.

Acknowledgements
An earlier version of this research was presented at the 2014 ‘Getting the Picture’ symposium
sponsored by the Visual Studies Research Institute at the University of Southern California. The
author would like to thank the other members of that symposium, as well as Andrew Mendelson at
City University of New York (CUNY), Amber Roessner at the University of Tennessee in
Knoxville, and Anthony Nadler at Ursinus College for their notes on previous drafts.

Declaration of Conflicting Interests

The author(s) declared no potential conflicts of interest with respect to the research, authorship,
and/or publication of this article.

Funding
The author(s) disclosed receipt of the following financial support for the research, authorship, and/
or publication of this article: A 2014 research award from Temple University supported this work.

References
Aklin GH (1944) US Patent No. 2,338,614i. Washington, DC: US Patent and Trademark Office.
Anderson CW (2008) Journalism: Expertise, authority, and power in democratic life. In:
Hesmondhalgh D and Toynbee J (eds) The Media and Social Theory. New York: Routledge,
pp. 248–264.
Anderson CW (2013) Rebuilding the News: Metropolitan Journalism in the Digital Age.
Philadelphia, PA: Temple University Press.
Creech 15

Anderson CW and Kreiss D (2013) Black boxes as capacities of and constraints on action: Electoral
politics, journalism and devices of representation. Qualitative Sociology 36(4): 365–382.
Azoulay A (2008) The Civil Contract of Photography. Boston, MA: Zone Books.
Barnhurst KG and Nerone J (2001) The Form of News: A History. New York: The Guilford Press.
Bennett E (1962) Careers in Photography. New York: Universal Photo Books.
Bennett HF (1945) US Patent No. 2,380,210. Washington, DC: US Patent and Trademark Office.
Borchard GA, Mullen LJ and Bates S (2013) From realism to reality: The advent of war photogra-
phy. Journalism & Communication Monographs 15(2): 66–107.
Byrne H (1952) Without Assignment: How to Freelance in Photography. New York: Pellegrini &
Cudahy.
Cartier-Bresson H (1952) The Decisive Moment. New York: Simon & Schuster.
Cookman C (1985) A Voice is Born. Durham: National Press Photographers Association.
Cookman C (2009) American Photojournalism: Motivations and Meanings. Evanston, IL:
Northwestern University Press.
Coopersmith J (2000) From lemons to lemonade: The development of AP Wirephoto. American
Journalism 17(4): 55–72.
Deleuze G and Guattarri F (1987) A Thousand Plateaus. Minneapolis, MN: University of
Minnesota Press.
Deluca K (2005) Image Politics: The New Rhetoric of Environmental Activism. New York:
Routledge.
Dooley PL (2007) The Technology of Journalism: Cultural Agents, Cultural Icons. Evanston, IL:
Northwestern University Press.
Douglas DD (1951) This is War! A Photo-Narrative of the Korean War. Boston: Little, Brown
and Company.
Douglas S (2010) Writing from the archive: Creating your own. The Communication Review
13(1): 5–14.
Eisenstaedt A (1985) Eisenstaedt on Eisenstaedt. New York: Abbeville Press.
Ekstrand V (2013) The presentist media landscape and the practice of doing history. American
Journalism 30(4): 441–449.
Evans H (1978) Pictures on a Page: Photojournalism, Graphics, and Picture Editing. New York:
Pimlico Publishing.
Fox R and Kerns R (1961) Creative News Photography. Ames, IA: Iowa State University Press.
Friedman B (2014) Editor’s note: Is that a thing? The twitching document and the talking object.
American Journalism 31(3): 307–311.
Frohman B (2012) The documentality of Mme. Briet’s antelope. In: Packer J and Crofts Wiley SB
(eds) Communication Matters: Materialist approaches to Media, Mobility, and Networks.
New York: Routledge, pp. 173–182.
Fulton M (1988) Eyes of Time: Photojournalism in America. Boston, MA: Little, Brown, and
Company.
Gernsheim H and Gernsheim A (1965) A Concise History of Photography. New York: Grosset &
Dunlap.
Gillon GW (1945) US Patent No. 2,391,152. Washington, DC: US Patent and Trademark Office.
Gitelman L (2006) Always Already New: Media, History, and the Data of Culture. Cambridge,
MA: The MIT Press.
Gitelman L (2014) Paper Knowledge: Toward a Media History of Documents. Durham, NC: Duke
University Press.
Goldsmith A (1979) The Camera and Its Images. New York: Ridge Press Books.
Gustavson T (2009) Camera: A History of Photography from Daguerreotype to Digital. New
York: George Eastman House.
16 Journalism

Hannigan W (2004) Picture Machine: The Rise of American News Pictures. New York: Henry N
Abrams.
Haraden GA and Gillon JW (1949) US Patent No. 2,481,656. Washington, DC: US Patent and
Trademark Office.
Hariman R and Lucaites JL (2007) No Caption Needed: Iconic Photographs, Public Culture, and
Liberal Democracy. Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press.
Harvey LP (1945) US Patent No. 2,384,638. Washington, DC: US Patent and Trademark Office.
Henning M (2007) New lamps for old: Photography, obsolescence, and social change. In: Acland
C (ed.) Residual Media. Minneapolis, MN: University of Minnesota Press, pp. 48–67.
Hirsch R (2000) Seizing the Light: A History of Photography. New York: McGraw Hill.
Hoy F (1986) Photojournalism: The Visual Approach. Englewood Cliffs, NJ: Prentice Hall.
Ilan J (2013) The best of both worlds: The story of Reuters picture service. Media History 19(1):
74–92.
Kirstein L (1938) Photographs of America: Walker Evans. In: Evans W (ed.) American
Photographs. New York: The Museum of Modern Art, pp. 191–200.
Kittler F (2002) Optical Media. Malden, MA: Polity Press.
Kobre K (1991) Photojournalism: The Professional’s Approach, 2nd edn. New York: Focal Press.
Koerner AM and Tuttle CM (1941) US Patent No. 2,253,055. Washington, DC: US Patent and
Trademark Office.
Kreiss D (2012) Taking Our Country Back: The Crafting of Networked Politics from Howard
Dean to Barack Obama. New York: Oxford University Press.
Lange D (1978) Dorothea Lange: A Photographer’s Life. Syracuse, NY: Syracuse University
Press.
Lange D and Dixon D (1952) Photographing the familiar. Aperture 1(2): 9–15.
Latour B (1991) Technology is society made durable. In: Law J (ed.) A Sociology of Monsters:
Technology and Domination. New York: Routledge, pp. 103–131.
Latour B (1999) Pandora’s Hope: Essays on the Reality of Science Studies. Cambridge, MA:
Harvard University Press.
Latour B (2004) Politics of Nature. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press.
Latour B (2013) An Inquiry in Modes of Existence: An Anthropology of the Moderns. Cambridge,
MA: Harvard University Press.
Leica (n.d.) ‘Legendary Leicas’, corporate website. Available at: http://us.leica-camera.com/
World-of-Leica/100-years-of-Leica-photography/Leica-100-years/Legendary-Leicas
Lievrouw L (2013) Materiality and media in communication and technology studies: An unfin-
ished project. In: Gillespie T, Boczkowski P and Foot K (eds) Media Technologies: Essays on
Communication, Materiality, and Society. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, pp. 21–52.
Lippmann W (1920) Liberty and the News. New York: Harcourt, Brace & Howe.
Lippmann W (1925) Phantom Public. New Brunswick, NJ: Transaction Publishers.
Lowrey W (2002) Word people vs. picture people: Normative differences and strategies for control
over work among newsroom subgroups. Mass Communication and Society 5(4): 411–432.
Matheson A (1972) The Leica and Leicaflex Way. New York: Focal Press.
McKeown J (2000) McKeown’s Price Guide to Antique and Classic Cameras. Grantsburg, WI:
Centennial Photo Service.
Maitani Y (1979) US Patent No. US 4137539 A. Washington, DC: US Patent and Trademark
Office.
Maras S (2014) Objectivity in Journalism. Malden, MA: Polity Press.
Mihalyi J (1944) US Patent No. 2,353,257. Washington, DC: US Patent and Trademark Office.
Mihalyi J and Macneille SM (1946) US Patent No. 2,401,708. Washington, DC: US Patent and
Trademark Office.
Creech 17

Miller R (1997) Magnum: Fifty Years at the Front Line of History. New York: Grove Press.
Mindich D (2000) Just the Facts: How ‘Objectivity’ Came to Define American Journalism. New
York: New York University Press.
Morris JG (1998) Get the Picture. New York: Random House.
Neff G (2015) Learning from documents: Applying new theories of materiality to journalism.
Journalism: Theory, Practice and Criticism 16(1): 74–78.
North M (2005) Camera Works: Photography and the Twentieth Century Word. New York:
Oxford University Press.
Pouncey T (1952) Photographic Journalism: A Guide for Learning with the Graphic. Dubuque,
IA: William C. & Brown Co.
Price J (1937) News Pictures. New York: Round Table Press.
Rhode R and McCall F (1961) Press Photography. New York: Macmillan Publisher.
Riddell WA (1945) US Patent No. 2,384,639. Washington, DC: US Patent and Trademark Office.
Roessner A, Popp R, Creech B, et al. (2013) ‘A measure of theory?’ Considering the role of theory
in media history. American Journalism 30(2): 260–278.
Schade W (1947) US Patent No. 2,425,400. Washington, DC: US Patent and Trademark Office.
Schudson M (1978) Discovering the News. New York: Basic Books.
Siles I and Boczkowski P (2012) At the intersection of content and materiality: A texto-materialist
perspective on the use of media technologies. Communication Theory 22(3): 227–249.
Sontag S (1977) On Photography. New York: Picador.
Tagg J (1988) The Burden of Representation: Essays on Photographies and Histories. Minneapolis,
MN: University of Minnesota Press.
Tagg J (2009) The Disciplinary Frame: Photographic Truths and the Capture of Meaning.
Minneapolis, MN: University of Minnesota Press.
Tuchman G (1972) Objectivity as strategic ritual: An examination of Newsmen’s notions of objec-
tivity. American Journal of Sociology 77(4): 660–679.
Weegee (1987) ‘Weegee on Weegee’, Bomb, 20. Available at: http://bombmagazine.org/article/941/
Whelan R (2007) This Is War: Robert Capa at Work. New York: International Center of
Photography.
Williams R (1961) The Long Revolution. New York: Columbia University Press.
Wood DL (1949) US Patent No. 2,464,166. Washington, DC: US Patent and Trademark Office.
Zelizer B (1995a) Journalism’s ‘last’ stand: Wirephoto and the discourse of resistance. Journal of
Communication 45(2): 78–92.
Zelizer B (1995b) Words against images: Positioning newswork in the age of photography.
In: Hardt H and Brennen B (eds) Newsworkers: Toward a History of the Rank and File.
Minneapolis, MN: University of Minnesota Press, pp. 135–159.
Zelizer B (2004) Taking Journalism Seriously: News and The Academy. Thousand Oaks, CA:
SAGE.
Zelizer B (2010) About to Die: How News Images Move the Public. New York: Oxford University
Press.

Author biography
Brian Creech is an Assistant Professor in Temple University’s Department of Journalism. His
research focuses broadly on the public epistemologies and discourses of journalism, technology, and
popular culture from a post-structuralist perspective. His work has recently appeared in American
Journalism, The Communication Review, Communication, Culture & Critique, Communication and
Critical/Cultural Studies, Convergence, Journalism Studies, and Digital Journalism.