What photojournalism is and where it came from

Photojournalism is journalism told mainly through photographs. A photojournalist goes to where events happen, records what is in front of the camera honestly, and gives the audience enough accurate information, in a caption and in context, to understand what they are seeing. The photograph is evidence as well as expression. That double role, part witness and part storyteller, is what separates photojournalism from advertising, portraiture or fine art photography, even when the technical skills overlap.

This course builds on PHOT-230, which covered the basics of photographing people in public and the law of the street. Here the focus is on news work: how stories are chosen, how breaking news and features are covered, how images are edited, captioned and transmitted to deadline, the ethical codes that govern the craft, the law that protects and limits journalists, and the personal safety and trauma issues that come with witnessing other people's worst days. This first lesson defines the field and traces the history that shaped its values.

A working definition

Photojournalism has four defining features. First, it is about real events and real people, not staged or invented scenes. Second, it is timely or newsworthy: the pictures matter because of what they show about the world now, or about a past that still matters. Third, it is accurate: the image and its caption together must not mislead. Fourth, it is published to inform the public, usually through a news organization that takes responsibility for it.

Within the field there are several genres. Spot news or breaking news covers unplanned events such as fires, crashes, storms and protests. General news covers planned events such as elections, court cases and press conferences. Features cover human-interest stories that are less tied to the day's headlines. Sports photography covers games and athletes. Portraiture for news shows the people in a story. The picture story and the photo essay use several images to tell a longer narrative. Documentary photography overlaps with photojournalism but usually works over months or years on a single subject, often for books and exhibitions as well as publications.

Why the photograph carries weight

A news photograph persuades in a way that text often does not. Viewers tend to believe that a camera records what was there, and research on how people read news consistently finds that images draw attention first and are remembered longer than words. That trust is the asset photojournalists protect. Every staged scene, misleading crop or invented caption that comes to light spends some of it, not just for the photographer involved but for the whole profession. The ethical rules covered later in this course exist because the medium's power depends on the audience's belief that the picture is honest.

A photograph also has limits. It shows a slice of time, usually a fraction of a second, from one position, with a frame that excludes most of the scene. It cannot explain causes on its own. The photographer's choices about where to stand, when to press the shutter and what to leave out shape the meaning. Good photojournalists are aware of this and work to make the selection fair, then rely on captions and accompanying reporting to supply what the picture cannot.

Beginnings: from engravings to halftones

Photographs of news events existed almost as soon as photography itself. In the 1840s and 1850s photographers recorded fires, wars and public gatherings, but the slow processes of the time made action impossible and the images could not be printed directly in newspapers. Publications instead hired engravers to copy photographs by hand onto wood blocks. Roger Fenton's pictures of the Crimean War in 1855 and the photographs of the American Civil War made by teams working for Mathew Brady and Alexander Gardner reached most people this way, filtered through an engraver's hand.

The halftone process, which breaks an image into dots of varying size that a printing press can reproduce, changed that. Newspapers began printing halftone photographs in the 1880s, and by the early twentieth century they were common. Social documentary photographers such as Jacob Riis, who photographed New York tenements in the 1880s and 1890s, and Lewis Hine, who documented child labour for the National Child Labor Committee in the 1900s and 1910s, showed that photographs could drive public debate and reform.

Small cameras and the picture magazines

In the 1920s, small cameras using 35 mm film, led by the Leica introduced in 1925, and fast lenses allowed photographers to work quickly and unobtrusively in available light. Photographers could now capture candid moments rather than posed groups. In Germany, illustrated magazines developed the idea of the picture story, in which several photographs, laid out together with short text, tell a narrative.

Life magazine, launched in the United States in 1936, brought the picture story to a mass audience. At its peak it sold millions of copies a week. Its photographers, including Margaret Bourke-White, whose image of the Fort Peck Dam was on the first cover, and W. Eugene Smith, whose 1948 essay Country Doctor followed a rural physician in Colorado, set the standard for the photo essay. Look, Picture Post in Britain, Paris Match in France and Weekend Magazine in Canada followed similar models. The cooperative agency Magnum Photos, founded in 1947 by Robert Capa, Henri Cartier-Bresson, George Rodger and David Seymour, gave photographers more control over their work and copyright.

In the same period, government projects also produced lasting documentary work. In the United States, the Farm Security Administration hired photographers including Dorothea Lange and Walker Evans to document rural poverty during the Depression; Lange's 1936 portrait of a mother in a pea pickers' camp in California became one of the most reproduced photographs of the century. In Canada, the National Film Board's Still Photography Division, created in 1941, documented the war effort and Canadian life for decades and became an important home for documentary photographers.

The wire services

While magazines told longer stories, wire services moved news pictures fast. The Associated Press, founded in 1846 as a cooperative of US newspapers, launched AP Wirephoto in 1935, sending photographs over telephone lines to member papers across the country on the same day. Other services, including United Press, later United Press International, and Reuters, which added pictures to its news service in the 1980s, built similar networks. Agence France-Presse covers the world from Paris.

In Canada, The Canadian Press was founded in 1917 as a cooperative news agency owned by Canadian newspapers. It distributed news across a vast country with a small population, and its photo service became the backbone of Canadian news photography, supplying pictures to papers that could not afford to send a photographer everywhere. Canadian Press photographs of national events, from royal tours to the 1990 standoff at Kanehsatà:ke and Oka in Quebec, where Shaney Komulainen photographed a soldier and a Mohawk warrior face to face, became part of the country's visual memory.

Wire services shaped the craft in particular ways. They needed photographs that could be understood quickly by editors far away, pictures that would work across many publications, and captions that were accurate, complete and neutral. Their style manuals, including The Canadian Press Stylebook and the AP Stylebook, still influence how captions are written today.

Canadian and American traditions

Canada's photojournalism grew up with a smaller market and a strong role for public institutions and cooperatives. Ted Grant, often called the father of Canadian photojournalism, photographed politics, sport and medicine for decades, and Boris Spremo of the Toronto Star was known for news pictures that combined speed with strong composition. The News Photographers Association of Canada and the National Newspaper Awards recognize Canadian news photography, and Canadian photographers have worked for international agencies in conflicts around the world.

In the United States, a larger market supported many daily papers with staff photographers, the picture magazines, and competition for prizes. The Pulitzer Prize added a photography category in 1942. Joe Rosenthal's photograph of Marines raising the flag on Iwo Jima in 1945, made for the Associated Press, won the prize that same year. The National Press Photographers Association, founded in 1946, created a code of ethics that is still widely used. In 1968 the Pulitzer board split the award into spot news and feature photography; spot news was renamed breaking news photography in 2000.

Iconic images and contested history

Some news photographs become icons that stand for a whole event. The 1972 photograph of children fleeing a napalm attack in Vietnam, known as The Terror of War, is one example. Icons are powerful but also simplified, and their history can be contested. In 2025, after a documentary raised questions about who made The Terror of War, World Press Photo suspended its attribution of the image while the Associated Press, which distributed it, said its own review supported the original credit. The episode shows that photojournalism's history is not fixed: archives, credits and context continue to be examined, and accuracy about the past matters as much as accuracy about the present.

Icons also raise questions about who is seen and who is doing the seeing. For much of the twentieth century, most staff photojournalists at major North American publications were white men, and coverage of Indigenous, Black and other communities often came from outsiders. Organizations on both sides of the border now work to diversify the profession and to involve communities in how they are represented, a theme that returns in the lessons on ethics and on trauma and consent.

The digital transformation

From the 1990s, digital cameras, laptops and satellite phones allowed photographers to transmit images from the field within minutes. Newspapers adopted colour printing in the 1980s and 1990s, and websites from the late 1990s. Smartphones and social media, from about 2010, made almost everyone a potential photographer of news and created new channels for distribution and verification. At the same time, falling advertising revenue led many newspapers in both countries to cut staff photographers, and many professionals now work as freelancers or for wire services and agencies. Lesson 2 examines this ecosystem in detail.

The newest change is the rise of generative AI tools that can create realistic images of events that never happened. That makes provenance, the documented history of an image from capture to publication, more important than ever. Camera makers, news organizations and technology companies have developed standards such as the Coalition for Content Provenance and Authenticity (C2PA) specification, often shown to users as content credentials, so that a viewer can check where an image came from and how it was edited. Lessons 7 and 9 cover these tools and the ethical rules around them.

What makes a photojournalist

The qualities that made great photojournalists in the past still apply. They are curious about people and events. They are prepared, with equipment that works and knowledge of the subject. They can anticipate moments rather than react to them. They are persistent, returning to stories and waiting for pictures. They respect the people they photograph, and they hold themselves to standards of accuracy and honesty even when no one would notice a shortcut. They can also work under pressure, to deadline, often in difficult or dangerous conditions.

Technical skill matters, but it serves these qualities. A sharp, well-exposed photograph that misrepresents an event is a failure; a slightly soft picture that shows something true and important can be a success. The rest of this course develops both the craft and the judgement that photojournalism requires.