ABSTRACT
J. de Hoij’s picture issued from his studio as history painting came to be challenged by the lowly-illustrated press as the privileged platform for pictorial reportage. News pictures are images crafted with a commitment to transmit timely and reliable information held by journalists to be of consequence to a viewing public. All news pictures begin with the interaction of an artist-reporter and an editorial team getting an ideally first-hand account in visual form to press. The power of the news image as news inheres in the assumption of the news artist’s presence on the scene. A particularly important category of image with an enormously complex and unmistakably modern supporting infrastructure, the news picture stands at the crossroads of two elements that form collective identity in modernity: information and mechanical reproduction. The modernity of the news derives in key respect from its dependence on novel mechanisms of information-gathering and dissemination that were deeply tied to general demands of the “modern mind.”.
