ABSTRACT
This chapter examines a particular time—photojournalism's infancy—in which journalism went through substantial changes in the way it presented events visually. The photographic revolution might not have happened without the innovations of Mathew Brady, who pioneered photojournalism beginning in the 1840s. Sensational reporting of local crime news had become a staple of nineteenth-century journalism with the advent of the penny press. The sensational images of the Civil War, Reconstruction, and the Gilded Age helped lay the groundwork for illustrated, photographic, and even the color visual materials during the era of yellow journalism, as well as the sensational tabloids of the 1920s. As Tebbel and Zuckerman have noted, "Frank Leslie's various illustrated papers had pictured society, scandal, civic problems, politics, and a variety of other matters in essentially the same way the tabloids and their supplements were doing half a century or more later. The difference, of course, was photography and the technology of reproducing pictures".
