Photojournalism in Austria. A Cultural History

This publication with its focus on media- and cultural history investigates the early days of Austrian press photography. Positioned at the interface between the histories of media, culture, photography and art, the book examines the genesis of popular pictures as printed in mass newspapers between 1890 and 1945. While Austria`s cultural history has thus far relied mainly on written source materials and documents of high culture, the present publication aims to reinforce visual history, conceding popular culture a central role. 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 examines 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 form part of the present monograph, which is the result of a FWF Austrian Science Fund research project.