Civic Picturing vs. Realist Photojournalism. The Regime of Illustrated News, 1856-1901.

[from the Author's Introduction: ]
"It often is assumed that photojournalism came out of the camera, fully-armored, like Athena out of the head of Zeus. This
certainly is not the case. Contrary to the received history in which all techniques and styles of news illustration lead toward the photograph at the summit of journalistic representation, our previous research underscores the contingency of photographic styles and usages.2 That photography might wed permanently with news was not obvious in the Victorian era. Its adoption or rejection depended not on technical barriers but on its usefulness to the existing regime of news illustration, dominated by typography, and its capacity otherwise to express the routines of news work. Available technology sometimes limited the styles and usages of photography, but this limiting was just that: a limitation. It did not amount to a phototechnological determination of the project of journalism. Within the larger regime of news illustration, moreover, photojournalism appeared tardily. Beginning in the 1830s, in England and the United States, newspaper and magazine publishers began to experiment with the use of various kinds of illustrations. This experimentation preceded the successful introduction of photography in the form of the daguerreotype in 1839.3 The technologies available to illustrators
were numerous and included woodcuts and wood engravings, various forms of metal engravings, and lithography. Eventually, these were combined with photography. But photography—much as it was talked about as supremely realistic and unauthored, as an epochal invention, a radically different and discontinuous tool of illustration—was used simply as one tool among many.
[and ..] In this paper, we look specifically at two illustrated periodicals, Leslie's and Harper's These are easily the most important of the genre. They are similar in many ways: both were printed in New York, both were weeklies, both were national in circulation, both were established in the mid- to late-1850s, and both came of age during the Civil War. Also, as we shall see, both used similar techniques of illustration for similar content. But they were also different in important ways. Leslie's insisted that it was a newspaper, and maintained an emphasis on breaking news. It was the mainstay of the company that produced it, and sought out a large, heterogeneous readership (its circulation varied from approximately 50,000 to 200,000, with higher peaks for dramatic issues, such as assassinations, because much of its circulation was in single-copy sales).8
Harper's was published by the nation's leading book publisher. It was aimed at a more genteel audience, was more concerned with literature and the arts, and recycled its illustrations in its other publications, notably novels and a monthly magazine. Where Leslie's was a newspaper, Harper's styled itself "A Journal of Civilization," a nomination that it took seriously. Our comments in this paper are based on a sample of representative issues from each taken at five-year intervals (1856,1861,1866, and so forth).