Folia Historica 31. (Budapest, 2016)

II. TANULMÁNYOK - Tomsics Emőke: Az eseményképtől a riportfotóig. A fotográfia a képes sajtóban az 1880-as és 1900-as évek között

of preparing photographs for printing by merely accentuating the contours also became widespread. The revision of photographs for printing gradually lost its artistic aspect. The professionals who prepared the images, including the pioneers of photographic reportage, were all referred to as illustrators. Professional and amateur photographers, artists, sketch artist, using the pencil and the camera alike all worked together in the field of illustration, which was increasingly determined by photography. The increasing prestige of photography is demonstrated by the fact that in the last decade of the nineteenth century the papers regarded it as a factor enhancing the value of the illustration (because it called attention to its uniqueness) if the image was made "on order", or, from the 1900s, by their "own photographer". The photograph rose to the status of a source of information possessing news value.

Although the changes in press illustration were owing to the new technologies of photography and halftone printing, they had an influence on the very character of illustrated news, including the development of visual thematics, the shifting proportion of genres, the relationship between text and image, and on the longer run and in a wider perspective, on the perception of events and the formation of concepts and mental experiences. Although the shaping of images was aesthetically dominated by precepts derived from traditional modes of visual representation, the transformation of the photograph into press image brought about a dissolution of this system of values, and the commercialization of events and historical situations. By simultaneously publishing photographs and drawings (often prepared by relying on photographs), the papers attenuated the contrast between artistic and photographic representation, and the dichotomy between the traditional-artistic and the modern-mechanical. As a result, however, visual representation lost much of its loftiness, and pathos began to dwindle among the images disseminated by the press. Momentariness, and the possibility of its direct communication via press images, changed not only the tone of the visual presentation of events, but also facilitated their conceptualization as occurrences. Sequences began to proliferate from the second half of the 1890s, and from the mid-1900s the photograph occasionally appears without any further explanation, as the independent narrator of a story.

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