HOW DO YOU choose ninety-five images from millions of photographs? How do you write a history of Australian press photography that captures the many brilliant images and wonderful, talented characters, but also charts the historical trends—including changes in technology, media and social mores—that have shaped press photography? The authors faced that enormous task in writing this book.
Our project began in 2012 with a grant from the Australian Research Council, financial support from the National Library and research support from the Walkley Foundation. While we studied many photographs, newspaper articles, publications and collections of archival material, one of the cornerstones of our approach was to conduct oral history interviews with photographers to give voice to their insights and experiences. We began interviewing in 2014 and interviewed sixty photographers, ranging in age from thirty-two to ninety-four years. They worked across a range of newspapers and geographic locations. Over half were retired. The rest were still working, either as staff photographers at newspapers or as freelancers. Sadly, there were several news photographers who passed away before we could interview them, and some who were too frail to interview. Many were from an era when the photographers were often more colourful than their subjects.
This book begins with the first known photographs published in Australian newspapers and ends by discussing the many dramatic shifts in press photography occurring today. It is published at a time of momentous change in the industry. The book is the beginning of a conversation about the history of press photography and the role of photographers and their pictures. It is not the end of the story. A photograph can only show what is in frame, and a book faces similar constraints. A photographer can zoom out to try to show the viewer as much as possible, but there will still be many things that are not visible in the final photograph, including what was happening off to the side, behind the photographer, and even in his or her head as they took the photograph. This book is similarly unable to show or tell everything. Choices had to be made about what to include and exclude.
One of those choices was to focus upon national news rather than local news. In terms of newspaper companies and papers, there is a greater focus on those that survived the twentieth century. The book also naturally reflects the stories of those photographers we were able to locate and who agreed to be interviewed about their careers and experiences. One of the most difficult choices we faced was about which photographs to include. Our selections and omissions should not be read as a judgement about quality. Rather than trying to choose the ‘best’ photographs of all time, we tried to select photographs that illustrate shifts and traditions in photography practice, technology, newspaper values, photographers’ working conditions and rituals, collective memory, and social changes affecting audience reception of photographs.
We would have loved to be able to include many more photographs but were restricted by availability and the desire to have some balance geographically and between outlets, but also by copyright permissions and fees, which were a significant cost for this book. We found that publisher archives were sometimes missing material or details about photographs. By-lines were not common until the 1980s, so in some cases, it has been difficult to correctly identify the photographer. We have therefore made every effort to provide accurate details for photographs but would be pleased to hear of any further details or corrections.
Fay Anderson and Sally Young