These developments expanded the resources available to newspapers located outside of metropolitan centres, by giving them quick and easy access to photographs of high-profile events transpiring elsewhere.The first of these front pages is that of a conventional metropolitan broadsheet newspaper the Montreal Daily Star for March 3, 1932 (Fig.
The image at greatest distance from the headline is a picture of the Lindberg baby, Charles Augustus Lindbergh, Jr., who had been kidnapped two days earlier. The infant is sitting in a chair, kicking a ball, in an image of childhood innocence. The second cover is that of the May 22, 1932 issue of the French weekly crime periodical Police Magazine (Fig. Here, we see the same picture of the Lindberg baby. Part ii on the run mp3 download freeIn this case, however, the image is enlarged, made to occupy the entirety of the space normally reserved by this magazine for photographs on its covers. Indeed, this same photograph, distributed by press photo agencies, had circulated through the international press throughout the period between the kidnapping and murder, accruing to itself, in consecutive moments, the sentiments of hope, fear and grief that marked the journalistic coverage of what had come to be known as laffaire Lindbergh. I will concentrate here on the front pages or covers of a variety of periodicals. Most of these are daily newspapers, but the corpus examined here includes examples of the weekly crime periodical published in France ( Dtective and Police Magazine ) and the covers adorning two issues of a monthly American true crime magazine ( Startling Detective ) which reported on the Lindbergh case. Rather than studying a delimited corpus of periodicals of a unitary type, then, I seek to follow a set of images (and image-types) as they circulate across a variety of print culture forms. If the print culture of the early 1930s had solidified as a set of national traditions, periodical formats and journalistic practices, it may also be seen as a loosely interconnected, international machinery for the repetition of photographs and their juxtaposition within fluctuating relations of word and image. One effect of this machinery was that the appearance (and re-appearance) of photographs was not synchronized in any tightly calibrated fashion with the flow of events offered elsewhere in our chronology of the events surrounding the Lindbergh kidnapping 2 My interest, here, is in three aspects of the selection and arrangement of photographs in coverage of the Lindbergh baby story. The first of these is the status of the periodical front page or cover during the years in which the Lindbergh affair unfolded, and the role of images in the layout of these pages. My concern here is with the logics of juxtaposition typical of the newly popular tabloid newspaper relative to other periodical formats. I will then discuss a key challenge faced by news periodicals in their coverage of crime: the unavailability of images of criminal acts themselves in the moments in which they are committed. As I shall argue, this absence of visual images of the crime itself shapes the conventions of crime-oriented photojournalism in important ways. Finally, I will explore one of the most striking features of visual coverage of the Lindbergh affair, the large number of images of the Lindbergh baby himself. While the wide-spread reproduction of images of the baby in press coverage of the affair is hardly surprising, given his high-profile status as victim, its effect is to produce unusual juxtapositions of photographs, in which images of innocent childhood are made to dominate, through their scale and affective force, others intended to highlight the criminal dimensions of the Lindbergh affair. Historians of the American newspaper will often speak of the late 1920s as constituting a third revolution in the history of the sensationalist press. This followed the emergence of the Penny Press in the 1830s and the so-called Yellow Press of the 1890s 3. In these histories, a third period, extending from the latter half of the 1920s into the early 1930s, has come to be called the period of Jazz Journalism, largely because it unfolded during a period in American social history known as the Jazz Age. While, in fact, the tabloid newspaper, the journalistic form regarded as most emblematic of American Jazz Journalism, had its roots in the United Kingdom, with the launch of the British Daily Mail in 1896 4, it would come to be seen as quintessentially American in style and tone. The word tabloid refers to the physical dimensions of newspapers the tabloid was half the size of the previously dominant broadsheet form but it quickly acquired other connotations. One of these, as John Osborn has shown, refers to a general process of condensation. In tabloid journalism, journalistic reports became shorter in length, reduced to their barest informational content, while headlines were redesigned to create punctual, sensational effects rather than offering elaborate summaries of the articles which followed them 5. The second half of the 1920s saw several developments which intensified the international circulation of photographs between newspapers: the perfection of systems (and reduction of costs) for the transmission of photographs over telephone lines, and the birth or consolidation of some of the major international news photography agencies, such as the Associated Press AP Photo service, established in 1927 6.
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