ABSTRACT
This chapter examines the emergence of a persistent visual trope in news photography: the photographing of inattentive subjects, who do not face the camera directly or pose for it, but are instead depicted engaged in activity and seemingly unaware of the camera's presence. It considers what perceived qualities and affinities motivated the once novel, now dominant idea that journalistic photographs should be unposed. Examining the photographic output of the Bain News Service, the first news photography agency in the United States, and reading it through the lens of discussions of the work of news photography in the photographic trade press, I argue that photographs of inattentive subjects were particularly compatible with textual journalism as it was coming to be practiced in the early twentieth-century United States. This compatibility can be ascribed to two qualities that commentators believed news photographs should possess, and regarded unposed images as possessing: impersonality and timeliness. Tracing the history of images of inattentive subjects sheds new light on how emergent professional norms and epistemic conventions helped to shape the formal qualities of early news photography.
