ABSTRACT
The documentation of everyday life as a visual experience–beginning with painting and continuing through photography and film–fixes people, objects, and events in time and place and responds to expectations about the image in the discourse of society. Newspapers are portable objects; they penetrate private and public spaces, define real and imagined distances of time and place, and affect human relations with their appearance in people's daily lives. The visual narrative of the arts may contribute profoundly to the construction of a cultural history of the press. Artists, like journalists, transform experience into images of reality that help to explain society. An understanding of art and the role of artists is a key to the understanding of society. The chapter analyses the artist's gaze and explores its potential contribution to a cultural history of newspapers in 1930s urban America. The modern newspaper is an urban invention.
