Austrian Press Photography 1890-1938

This is the first media- and culture-historical research project to investigate the early days of Austrian press photography using a wide range of research material. Positioned at the interface between the histories of media, culture, photography and art, the project examines the genesis of popular pictures as printed in mass newspapers between 1890 and 1938. While Austria`s cultural history has thus far relied mainly on written source materials and documents of high culture, the present project aims to reinforce visual history, conceding popular culture a central role in research. The findings show that, by 1900, the illustrated press had already created a new type of photographic public sphere that varied significantly from the public sphere of high-culture daily press. Research has so far mainly seen the interwar period as the heyday of press photography, while press photography had in fact already undergone a process of professionalisation in the first decade after the fin de siècle. Within a few years, the photograph had replaced the hand-drawn illustration as a news medium. By the First World War, photographic coverage had widely come out on top, with the photo-illustrated newspaper remaining the undisputed illustrated mass medium throughout the Interbellum. It was only after the Second World War that it gradually found a rival in television. Surprisingly, press photography research has long used the base product (i.e. paper prints or negatives) as its primary source material, rather than the end product (i.e. photographs actually printed in newspapers and magazines). The present study examined press photography as part of a complex media fabric, analysing the photographers` methods, the way the press used and arranged the pictures, but also the economic, political and ideological environments of the newspapers and the changing technical and commercial conditions for photographic printing. Future analyses of Austria`s photographic history will need to take into account the present findings: many images analysed in the project were taken by press photographers previously unknown to photo-historical research. Their biographic data were collected in a databank and will form part of a monograph on the results of the research project.