Give people a picture or two with the news, and they'll come crying for more. When Joseph Pulitzer bought the faltering New York World in 1882, he planned to increase circulation by inserting sensational woodcuts, then gradually decreasing their number to restore the paper to dignity. A trade journal condemned the new images as pandering to low interests and predicted they would persuade people that ''a newspaperman has no conscience, and that when he enters the house it is a good time to lock up the spoons.'' But readers would not give them up. When Pulitzer began to weed out the woodcuts, circulation plummeted until he gave the public what it wanted once again.
It wasn't only sensation people wanted, though that helped. It was sensation with pictures, news with pictures, stories with pictures. By the turn of the century, when newspapers began to print photographs in some numbers, readers had their own cameras, courtesy of Kodak, and had decided that the medium had advantages. In 1900, The Daily Mail in London, which dished out news and gossip in small servings generously garnished with photographs, was the first British paper to achieve a circulation of one million. Press photography had become a profession.
The profession was difficult, poorly paid and cordially despised, but that never stopped a photographer. A few women, a very few, even got into the act. One of them, Jessie Tarbox Beals (1870-1942), is currently being celebrated in a show called ''Jessie Tarbox Beals: On Assignment,'' at the New-York Historical Society. Beals, hired by The Buffalo Inquirer in 1902, was the first woman hired as a newspaper staff photographer. She never sat still long; in 1904 she parted company with the paper and headed west to St. Louis in pursuit of big news: the World's Fair.
One of the reasons so few women entered the profession was that equipment was so heavy. Small cameras like Kodaks were not reliable in adverse conditions. Beals carried an 8-by-10 view camera, glass plates and a tripod, close to 50 pounds of equipment. (She was further encumbered by a whalebone corset and a hat the size of a flying saucer.) Still, when a judge in a murder trial locked the photographers out, she climbed a tall bookcase up to a transom window, snapped a picture before she was detected and had a five-column front-page photograph.
Beals's pictures of the World's Fair Air Show contest are remarkable technically and historically: technically because she managed, with slow and cumbersome equipment, to record moving airships and people rushing to see them; historically because they provide an extended glimpse into early attempts to fly. The Wright brothers had achieved 59 seconds of powered flight in 1903, but not many people knew about it or believed it, and the Wrights could not yet sustain and control heavier-than-air flight. On both sides of the Atlantic, men feverishly strove to overcome gravity.Continue reading the main story
In St. Louis, the air was full of gliders and propeller-driven dirigibles. Beals, who had difficulty getting access to the fair but finally became the only woman officially recognized as a photographer there, had herself photographed in the gondola of one of the airships: she had a knack for self-promotion.
Her pictures of the exhilarating attempt to conquer the skies are the most compelling in the show. Beals was a good journalist but was more exceptional for who she was and what she did than for brilliant images. Early in the century, when news photographers were almost entirely anonymous and did not expect to be otherwise, she was famous because she got the pictures, had what she called the ''hustle'' that photojournalists require -- she once insisted that a colonel on dress parade make his troops halt so she could get a photograph -- and had honed her talent for publicity.
In 1905 she moved to New York, but even her St. Louis fame could not get her a newspaper job, so she freelanced and ran her own studio. Her portraits of celebrities, many of them writers and artists, were praised at the time as equal to those of Gertrude Kasebier and Alvin Langdon Coburn, both important portraitists, because she used sharp focus, as news photographers did, rather than soft, artistically inclined pictorialism.
Today the comparison seems wrongheaded. She did make a contribution to history, taking numerous pictures of professional women (including Emily Post, the social arbiter of manners, luxuriously dressed and curled up on a sofa with her typewriter in her lap) when women in professions were still a phenomenon.
Beals left the studio behind to photograph her subjects in their own surroundings, with available light, but sometimes the surroundings reduced the sitter to the dominant piece of furniture. Her close-up of the Japanese-born Sadakichi Hartmann, a major photography critic, achieves real force through the ravaged face and emotional openness of the man, a telling example of the subject's power to take over a portrait sitting.
Beals took some strong pictures of immigrant and tenement life, but these are not on display. Then, in 1917, she separated from her husband, Alfred Tennyson Beals, moved to Greenwich Village and opened an art gallery. She photographed bohemian society and the tea rooms and clubs that catered to it, often selling the images as postcards. These unprepossessing pictures have the easy naturalness and the sense of casual, momentary observation that painters like George Luks, John Sloan and Everett Shinn had been putting on canvas for a decade or more. These painters, who had all been newspaper men and trained as quick and sharp observers, believed that urban life deserved its chroniclers. The camera was a natural for this kind of focus on modern life, and it seems fitting that a newspaper photographer would follow the same path.
Pioneering woman that she was, Beals faced some of the problems that confront all working women, problems that photojournalism compounds. She trained her husband in photography and he became her assistant, particularly in the darkroom, but the marriage was troubled, and who knows if Mr. Beals was willing to take a back seat to her hustle and her fame?
''Thank God I had abnormal strength,'' she wrote in her diary. ''Mere feminine, delicate, Dresden china type of women get nowhere in business or professional life. They marry millionaires, if they are lucky. But if a woman is to make headway with men, she must be truly masculine.'' She told an interviewer, regretfully, that because she had to work and be away, she had no time to cuddle her daughter or sing her lullabies.
In the end, her very success worked against her. Her publicity and frequent lectures encouraged other women to follow in her footsteps, and by the mid-1920's there were said to be 150 female professional photographers in New York. Jessie Tarbox Beals, by then in her 50's, found the competition too stiff and went to California for a while to take pictures of Hollywood estates.
Constrained to earn a living for herself and her daughter, she took every kind of photograph rather than concentrating on one area or style. ''I had too many keys that opened too many doors, in too many places,'' she said. This left her without a distinctive signature, but she could have signed her name ''Pioneer.''Continue reading the main story