ABSTRACT
Over the past 130 years, literary and visual journalists have occupied the same contested fronts of journalism’s changing norms, interjecting convention-bending practices on the edges of the mainstream. Visual journalism and literary journalism have appeared on the same media platforms, sometimes in the same publications, and have been affected by the same business and social influences. Journalism’s visual and literary elements appeared side by side in the 1880s, when Jacob Riis’s photographs documented slum life in How the Other Half Lives. In the 1930s, photographer-journalist teams, such as Walker Evans and James Agee, produced books that documented the circumstances of little-seen American lives. The pioneering photo essays of W. Eugene Smith defied expectations to confirm dominant social ideologies in the 1940s and 1950s, while in the 1960s Diane Arbus used her camera to expand our understanding of the human condition. Over the decades, the visual and the literary have gotten closer, finally moving in together online in The New York Times’s “Snow Fall: The Avalanche at Tunnel Creek.” This chapter traces the ways in which visual journalism has evolved, from recording visual “facts” to incorporating the techniques of narrative film, multimedia, and virtual reality, often blending with American literary journalism.
