lumogeny

Styles / Documentary & reportage

Picture-magazine photo essay

1936–1972. New York. Also called Life magazine photo essay or Picture story.

Where the lights stand
seen from above1 flash on the cameracameraSchematic, not to scale
  1. Key: a flash on the camera, from the camera, hard.

Schematic, not to scale: worked out from the style’s choices. No set-up of this style has been rendered yet.

Where you have seen it
[Dr. Connie M. Guion, a 79-year-old female physician, examining a patient], by Charlotte Brooks, 1961

[Dr. Connie M. Guion, a 79-year-old female physician, examining a patient]

Charlotte Brooks, photographer, LOOK Magazine Photograph Collection, Library of Congress, Prints & Photographs Division, LC-L9-61-9268-BB, no. 15 (LC-DIG-ppmsca-09460). Source: [Dr. Connie M. Guion, a 79-year-old female physician, examining a patient] at Library of Congress, Prints and Photographs Division, LOOK Magazine Photograph Collection

And here
[An African American woman and several children sitting on a bed in an apartment], by Stanley Kubrick, 1949

[An African American woman and several children sitting on a bed in an apartment]

Stanley Kubrick, photographer, LOOK Magazine Photograph Collection, Library of Congress, Prints & Photographs Division, LC-USZ6-2362 (LOOK - Job 49-O46, frame 22). Source: [An African American woman and several children sitting on a bed in an apartment] at Library of Congress, Prints and Photographs Division, LOOK Magazine Photograph Collection

Stories told in pictures across the pages of weekly picture magazines such as Life, Look and Picture Post. A photographer spends days or weeks with one doctor, midwife, family, village, battle or event and brings back dozens of rolls; editors pick a dozen or so frames and lay them out as a sequence of spreads, from an opening view through close faces and hands at work to a closing image, bound by captions. Mostly black and white, shot close on a small 35 mm camera rather than the press photographer's 4×5, in whatever light there is or by flashbulb, grainy and often printed dark.

Shoot sheet for your kit The photographs

How the look is made

  1. Stay with one person, family, place or event for days or weeks, until people stop noticing the camera, and photograph the whole of their day.
  2. Cover the story so it can be laid out: an opening view of the place, faces up close, hands at work, the turning point and a closing picture.
  3. Work close with a small 35 mm camera rather than the bulky 4×5 press camera most news photographers still carried, in the light that is there; use fast film at full aperture in dark rooms and a flashbulb only when nothing else will record.
  4. Shoot far more than will run, so the editors can choose a dozen frames and sequence them across the spreads.
  5. Write down names, places and what people say, so every picture can carry a caption that tells what it shows.
  6. Print dark and strong for the page: burn down distractions, and dodge or bleach back with potassium ferricyanide the faces and gestures that carry the story.

Shoot sheet for your kit

Fill in your camera, lenses and lights, and the sheet says which light plays each part, what to work around and where to start on your camera. Without a kit it starts on a full-frame camera.

Step 1

Light

1 flash on the cameracameraSchematic, not to scale

  1. Key: a flash on the camera, from the camera, hard.

Shadow edges
Shadows that fade gradually from light to dark, cast by a large or diffused light: a window, a softbox, a cloudy sky.
Shadow depth
Dark shadows that still hold some detail (a high lighting ratio, about 4:1 to 8:1: the shadow side two to three stops darker).

How the style is lit

  • Available light indoors (a kitchen bulb, a clinic window, a mill furnace), fast film, lens wide open.
  • A flashbulb at the camera in dark rooms: flat faces, a hard shadow behind.
  • Daylight as found outdoors, with no reflector or fill.

This plan is worked out from the style’s choices, so it is drawn as a schematic. One way to get the light, not a record of how any photograph was lit.

Step 2

Lens and settings

Start at

35 mmf/41/60 sISO 200

On a full-frame camera: the same depth of field and exposure as the style’s own numbers, in the same light. Then meter and adjust.

Then
28–50 mm · f/1.5–f/8 · 1/500–1/15 s · ISO 100–400 on full frame, documented. 35 mm Leicas and Contaxes: Smith did 90 per cent of his coverage with a 35 mm f/2.8 and carried 28–135 mm lenses; Hardy shot Inchon at 1/15 s and f/1.5. Daylight at f/5.6–f/8 and 1/250–1/500 s on Super-XX or, from 1954, Tri-X is inferred.
Focal length
Roughly the eye’s own perspective; no visible distortion. A wide view; near things loom and lines stretch towards the edges.
Angle
The camera at the height of a standing person or of the subject.
Distance
Within arm’s reach: faces, hands and details fill the frame. Whole figures and their immediate surroundings.
Crop & fill
The subject shown small within its setting, which explains it. The edges cut into the subject: heads, limbs or objects run out of frame.
Instant
A casual, unplanned instant, taken quickly.
Step 3

Direct

Unposed: people go on working, eating, nursing and talking to each other, eyes on the task or on one another rather than the lens, bodies loose because the photographer has stayed for days; children may stop and stare back. Close frames of working hands and of grief or exhaustion carry the story. A few scenes are set up or repeated for the camera.

Head & gaze
Attention on what the hands are doing or on a thing (working, reading, eating, playing), not on the camera.
Line & energy
Loose and unforced, as people stand and sit when they forget the camera, whether caught or coaxed by prompts.
Several people
People talking, playing, working or dancing together, absorbed in each other rather than the camera.
The moment
People photographed as they are, unaware or unconcerned.
Step 4

Style the set

Nothing is styled: people wear their own clothes or the uniform of their work (a nurse's dress, a doctor's white coat, a soldier's kit), without make-up, in their own kitchens, clinics, mines and village lanes, with the clutter of daily life left in.

Clothes
What people happened to be wearing; nothing chosen for the picture. The clothes of a trade, a rank, a team or an institution.
Set & props
A real home, workplace or street that belongs to the people in it, not a set, with their own things and traces of use.
How much is styled
Nothing dressed, made up, moved or added for the picture.
Step 5

Finish

Monochrome
Rich blacks, clean whites and every grey between.
Film
A small handheld camera: quick, mobile, grainy when pushed.
Texture
Film grain or noise you can see at normal size.
Post-production
Areas lightened and darkened by hand in printing.
Shown as
A sequence with text that tells a story.
Shown in
Pictures made for magazine pages and spreads.

Stay away from soft focus & diffusion, composite & montage, deadpan, typology, studio backdrop, coloured gels, fully art-directed and full glamour make-up.

Before you shoot it

These are photographs of real people, often poor, sick, grieving, dying or very young, made by outsiders who stayed with them and then handed the film to editors who chose, cropped, sequenced and captioned the pictures without the subjects' say: Life's art director cut Smith's 113 chosen frames of Deleitosa to 17, some scenes were posed, Smith himself printed one famous Schweitzer picture from two negatives in his own darkroom without Life's editors knowing, and in 1997 Aileen M. Life had no Black staff photographer until Gordon Parks in 1948, and most essays showed Black Americans, colonised Africans and the rural poor through outsiders' eyes: a Black family in a Look assignment titled 'Chicago city of contrasts', patients in French Equatorial Africa as the objects of a European doctor's care in 'A Man of Mercy'. Prefer essays made from inside a community, as Parks's Harlem essay was. The war essays show dead and dying soldiers, and even after 1943 the censors kept the faces of dead Americans out of print. For new essays, ask consent, record names and words, show people the pictures and the layout before publication, and let them withdraw. Most of the photographs are in copyright. Cowles transferred its copyrights in the Look photograph collection to the United States, asking that the pictures not be used for advertising or trade, and the privacy and publicity rights of the people shown still apply.

Photographs that define it

From open collections, shown whole with their credits. Later photographs are linked, not shown, while they are in copyright.

[African American children seated around a table in an apartment, eating], by Stanley Kubrick, 1949

[African American children seated around a table in an apartment, eating]

Stanley Kubrick, photographer, LOOK Magazine Photograph Collection, Library of Congress, Prints & Photographs Division (digital ID cph.3d02356). Source: [African American children seated around a table in an apartment, eating] at Library of Congress, Prints and Photographs Division, LOOK Magazine Photograph Collection

In copyright, so linked

With other styles

The opposite: FSA/OWI documentary photography. FSA work files single captioned prints, often from large cameras, as evidence for a government case; choose the picture essay when the story must unfold across spreads around one person, shot close on 35 mm.

The opposite: French humanist photography. The two overlap at Picture Post, whose Bert Hardy, Thurston Hopkins and Grace Robertson belong to both. Still, a humanist picture can stand alone as a lyrical or witty instant, while every essay frame serves a sequence and a caption: decide whether one picture or a story has to carry the brief.

The opposite: New York street photography. The New York school kept the magazine's 35 mm camera and flash but dropped the story, the caption and the sympathy; use it as the foil when the brief wants ambiguity rather than a narrative.

Pairs with Diaristic snapshot photography. Borrow the diarist's years of insider closeness to make an essay from inside a life rather than from a few weeks on assignment.

Pairs with Drum magazine photography. Drum carried the picture story to Johannesburg under Picture Post's former editor Tom Hopkinson; borrow its flash, its subjects' performance for the camera and its insiders' exposés when the essay must come from inside a community.

Sources

  1. Life (magazine), Wikipedia: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Life_(magazine) (launched as a picture weekly 23 November 1936; Bourke-White's Fort Peck Dam cover; five pages by Eisenstaedt; text condensed into captions for 50 pages of photographs; last weekly issue 29 December 1972; The Family of Man took 111 of 503 pictures from Life)
  2. Life, vol. 1 no. 1, Grolier Club exhibition item: https://grolierclub.omeka.net/items/show/1167 (23 November 1936; Bourke-White's Fort Peck Dam; text condensed into captions for fifty pages of photographs; first printing of 360,000)
  3. Picture Post, Wikipedia: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Picture_Post (1938 to July 1957; Lorant founding editor, Hopkinson from 1940 until his dismissal in 1950 after Cameron and Hardy's Korea story; Hulton; photographers Hardy, Hutton, Man, Reiss, Hopkins, Chillingworth, Robertson, McCombe; Lorant's picture-story from Germany; Robertson's 'Mother's Day Off')
  4. Picture Post Library 1938–1957, Science Museum Group Collection: https://collection.sciencemuseumgroup.org.uk/people/cp169630 (editors Lorant and Hopkinson; regular photographers; Britain's counterpart to Life; closed 1957)
  5. Tom Hopkinson, Wikipedia: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tom_Hopkinson (edited Picture Post 1940–1950; fired by Hulton in October 1950 over Hardy and Cameron's Korea story; editor of Drum from 1958)
  6. Drum (South African magazine), Wikipedia: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Drum_(South_African_magazine) (based in Johannesburg; editor Sir Tom Hopkinson, 1958–1962)
  7. Stefan Lorant, Wikipedia: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Stefan_Lorant (editor of the Münchner Illustrierte Presse; Weekly Illustrated and Lilliput in Britain; co-founded Picture Post with Hulton; advised Luce on Life)
  8. Felix H. Man, Wikipedia: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Felix_H._Man (110 photo reports 1929–1932, including 'A day in the life of Mussolini', 1931; reportages in the Münchner Illustrierte Presse and reports delivered to the Berliner Illustrirte Zeitung; moved away from juxtaposed single images; chief photographer at Picture Post; Picture Post began printing colour pages in 1948)
  9. Alfred Eisenstaedt, Wikipedia: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Alfred_Eisenstaedt (Berliner Illustrirte Zeitung; 'Unlike most news photographers at the time who relied on much larger and less portable 4"×5" press cameras with flash attachments, Eisenstaedt preferred the smaller hand-held Leica'; natural light rather than flash; Life staff 1936–1972)
  10. Margaret Bourke-White, Wikipedia: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Margaret_Bourke-White (Fort Peck photographs and cover of the first Life, 23 November 1936, in fact the spillway three miles east of the dam according to the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers; Otis Steel flares; five cameras, 22 lenses and 3,000 flashbulbs for the 1941 Soviet trip)
  11. W. Eugene Smith, Wikipedia: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/W._Eugene_Smith (Country Doctor 20 September 1948; Spanish Village 9 April 1951; Nurse Midwife 3 December 1951; A Man of Mercy 15 November 1954 and its manipulated image; dispute over layout; a Welsh miner instructed how to pose; Newsweek wanted larger format negatives but he would not abandon the 35 mm Contax; Tomoko photograph withdrawn in 1997)
  12. 'Extreme armchair photography: W. Eugene Smith', Japan Camera Hunter (March 2016): https://www.japancamerahunter.com/2016/03/extreme-armchair-photography-w-eugene-smith/ (in 1952 Smith listed six Leicas with 28, 35, 50, 85 and 135 mm lenses, a 4×5 view camera and a Rolleiflex, but '90 percent of my visual coverage is done with the Leica with the 35mm f2.8')
  13. W. Eugene Smith, International Center of Photography: https://www.icp.org/browse/archive/constituents/w-eugene-smith ('credited with developing the photo essay to its ultimate form'; an exacting printer; tempestuous relationship with Life)
  14. Ben Cosgrove, 'Albert Schweitzer in Africa: Behind the Picture', LIFE.com: https://www.life.com/people/albert-schweitzer-in-africa-behind-the-picture/ (the famous portrait 'drastically manipulated', combining elements from two separate negatives; Smith developed and printed his own work; against Life's own guidelines)
  15. 'Dr. Schweitzer in the Congo', Museum of Hoaxes: https://hoaxes.org/photo_database/image/dr._schweitzer_in_the_congo/ (Glenn Willumson found the composite in Smith's negatives: the hand and saw from a second negative, added to hide fogging; made in Smith's own lab, so Life's editors never knew)
  16. Albert Schweitzer Hospital, Wikipedia: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Albert_Schweitzer_Hospital (in Lambaréné, established in 1913 'in what was then French Equatorial Africa that became Gabon')
  17. Spanish Wake, Museo Nacional Centro de Arte Reina Sofía: https://www.museoreinasofia.es/en/collection/artwork/spanish-wake (Spanish Village series; 1950 in Deleitosa; 113 shots from 45 rolls reduced to 17 by art director Bernard Quint; published in Life 1951)
  18. Maude Callen, Wikipedia: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Maude_Callen (twelve-page essay, Life, 3 December 1951; Pineville, Berkeley County; donations of over $20,000; clinic opened 1953)
  19. Harold Feinstein, 'Reminiscences of W. Eugene Smith' (Harold Feinstein's official site, 2012): https://haroldfeinstein.com/reminiscences-of-w-eugene-smith/ (all-night printing with Smith in the mid-1950s; potassium ferricyanide as an interpretive printing tool)
  20. Gordon Parks biography, The Gordon Parks Foundation: https://www.gordonparksfoundation.org/gordon-parks/biography (1948 photo essay on a Harlem gang leader; first African American staff photographer at Life, two decades there; FSA and OWI before)
  21. Gordon Parks, Wikipedia: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gordon_Parks (moved to Harlem after leaving the Office of War Information; the 1948 essay on a young Harlem gang leader won him a staff job at Life, where he stayed until 1972)
  22. Robert Capa, Wikipedia: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Robert_Capa (the 11 surviving D-Day prints in Life's issue of 19 June 1944; captions written by staffers)
  23. George Strock, Wikipedia: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/George_Strock ('Three dead Americans lie on the beach at Buna', published in Life on 20 September 1943 after Roosevelt allowed it, the first photograph published in the United States of American soldiers dead on the battlefield; the faces of the dead and unit insignia still barred)
  24. Larry Burrows, Wikipedia: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Larry_Burrows ('One Ride with Yankee Papa 13', Life, 16 April 1965, on a mission of 31 March 1965; covered Vietnam from 1962 until his death in 1971)
  25. Ben Cosgrove, 'One Ride With Yankee Papa 13', LIFE.com: https://www.life.com/history/vietnam-photo-essay-larry-burrows-one-ride-with-yankee-papa-13 (a cover story in the 16 April 1965 issue on a 31 March 1965 helicopter mission)
  26. 'The Human Record of War', Flight Journal: https://next.flightjournal.com/articles/human-record-war-life-magazine-1965 (Burrows's '21 black-and-white shots of a Marine helicopter crew', 14 pages)
  27. Look (American magazine), Wikipedia: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Look_(American_magazine) (1937 to 19 October 1971; Cowles; 'Monthly Picture Magazine'; Kubrick's more than 300 assignments; James Karales on the civil rights movement; archive at the Library of Congress)
  28. LOOK Magazine Photograph Collection, Rights and Restrictions Information, Library of Congress (archived copy): https://web.archive.org/web/20231128001056/https://www.loc.gov/rr/print/res/074_look.html (Cowles 'transferred all of its copyrights in the LOOK Magazine Photograph Collection to the United States' with the wish that the photographs are 'Not to be used for advertising or trade purposes'; non-staff photographers may keep their copyright; subjects' privacy and publicity rights may apply)
  29. Stanley Kubrick for LOOK Magazine, rights and restrictions, Library of Congress (archived copy): https://web.archive.org/web/20240418222831/https://www.loc.gov/rr/print/res/378_kubr.html (Cowles transferred its copyrights in the Look collection to the United States; Kubrick a staff photographer 7 January 1947 to 12 September 1950; subjects' privacy and publicity rights)
  30. Charlotte Brooks, Wikipedia: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Charlotte_Brooks (Look staff photographer 1951–1971, the only woman staff photographer in its history; medical stories among her more than 450 features)
  31. Arthur Rothstein, Wikipedia: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Arthur_Rothstein (Look staff photographer in 1940; director of photography 1947–1971)
  32. Carl Mydans, Wikipedia: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Carl_Mydans (FSA photographer from 1935; joined Life in 1936 as one of its earliest staff photographers)
  33. Bert Hardy, Wikipedia: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bert_Hardy (Picture Post 1941–1957; 'Scenes From The Elephant', 8 January 1949; the Leica 'unconventional gear for press photographers of the era'; Leica at 1/15 s and f/1.5 in Korea; Contax II)
  34. Thurston Hopkins, Wikipedia: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Thurston_Hopkins (a 35 mm Leica 'which apart from occasional use of a Rolleiflex' he preferred for the rest of his career; Picture Post freelance, then staff from the mid-1950s until its closure in 1957)
  35. Humanist photography, Wikipedia: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Humanist_photography (Picture Post 'did much to promote the humanist imagery of Bert Hardy, Kurt Hutton, Felix H. Man …, Thurston Hopkins, John Chillingworth, Grace Robertson, and Leonard McCombe')
  36. Le Baiser de l'hôtel de ville, Wikipédia: https://fr.wikipedia.org/wiki/Le_Baiser_de_l%27h%C3%B4tel_de_ville (made for Life, published 12 June 1950; played by two theatre students of the Cours Simon, Françoise Delbart and Jacques Carteaud, for 500 francs)
  37. 'Extreme armchair photography: W. Eugene Smith', Japan Camera Hunter, March 2016: https://www.japancamerahunter.com/2016/03/extreme-armchair-photography-w-eugene-smith/ (on the set of Limelight in 1952 Smith listed six Leicas 'mounted with one 28mm, two 35mm, one 50mm f1.5, an 85mm f2 and a 135mm f3.5', a 4×5 view camera and a Rolleiflex; '90 percent of my visual coverage is done with the Leica with the 35mm f2.8')
  38. Bert Hardy (1913–1995), British Council Visual Arts collection: https://visualarts.britishcouncil.org/collection/artists/hardy-bert-1913 (at the Inchon landing, 'unlike other members of the press, Hardy could shoot 1/15 sec at f1.5 with his Leica miniature'); the same passage in Bert Hardy, Wikipedia: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bert_Hardy
  39. Alfred Eisenstaedt, Wikipedia: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Alfred_Eisenstaedt (preferred the small hand-held Leica to the 4"×5" press cameras with flash attachments that most news photographers used)
  40. 'Verichrome and Super-XX films', Photographic Historical Society of Canada: https://phsc.ca/camera/verichrome-and-super-xx-films/ (Verichrome about 125 ASA at most, Super-XX slightly faster at about 200 ASA)
  41. Kodak Tri-X, Wikipedia: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kodak_Tri-X (introduced around 1940 in sheets rated ASA 200 daylight; released in 35 mm and 120 in 1954; usually rated ISO 400; pushing to EI 800 gives very good results, EI 1600 needs more sophisticated processing, stand development reaches EI 3200)

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