ABSTRACT
The early years of Ralph Ingersoll’s experimental New York newspaper PM, published six days per week from 1940 to 1948, mark an extraordinary moment in the history of American photography’s encounter with the culture of mass media and with mainstream daily print journalism in particular. A dissident former managing editor with Henry Luce’s portfolio of magazines, including Time, Fortune, and, in its early development, Life, Ingersoll was a key architect in the photographic success of the latter magazines in the 1930s and a vital innovator in American photographic journalism more generally. With PM, Ingersoll and his principal investor, Marshall Field III, bet heavily on the idea that pictorial and reprographic excellence was the best way forward in launching a new liberal daily newspaper committed to international antifascism and the progressive, New Deal values increasingly abandoned by his former employer.1
