Photography History in the News Essay

Over two centuries, civilizations have used print media to spread news and information to the masses. During a period of time around 59 B.C the Roman Acta Diurna, is the earliest recorded â€Å"newspaper†. Julius Caesar, wanting to inform the public about important social and political happenings, ordered upcoming events posted in major cities. Written on large white boards and displayed in popular places like the Baths, the Acta kept citizens informed about government scandals, military campaigns, trials and executions. In 8th century China, the first newspapers appeared as hand-written newssheets in Beijing. In the year 1969 extraordinary activity in the exhibition field vied with the introduction of new products and it called as photographic year. The year’s largest display both of products and pictures was held at the nine-day Photo Expo 69, which filled all four exhibition floors of the New York Coliseum and drew a total of nearly 100,000 visitors. More than 3,000 black-and-white and color photographs by amateurs and professionals were displayed, and individual exhibits covered space photography and other specialized fields. Supplementing the print shows were a number of temporary theaters for slides and movies which reflected the newest ideas in the presentation of these media. Among other shows that attracted attention and drew visitors was ‘600 Faces by Beaton, 1928-1969,’ originally exhibited at the National Portrait Gallery in London and shown in the United States at the Museum of the City of New York. It was the largest one-man show (and the only one-man show of British photographer and designer Cecil Beaton) ever held in New York, and it contained portraits of many of the outstanding personalities of the past four decades. Later on, photojournalism was introduced to accompany the written information, because photojournalism has unique power to fix events, places and human in our collective history. But before we move on further, let us try to determine first what is photograph? A photograph is a picture produce through the chemical action of light on sensitive film. It is a medium of recording reality that is iconic as well as indexical. Although a photograph resembles or imitates something, making it iconic, it achieves this through the use of light from the subject, therefore making it less arbitrary. However, a photograph is a representation of a particular moment and situation in time. Barthes expressed his view that a newspaper photograph is, ‘an object that has been worked on, chosen, composed, constructed, treated according to professional, aesthetic or ideological norms which are so many factors of connotation.’(cited in Bagnell, 1977: p.98). Traveling photographic exhibits visited many cities in the United States, Canada, and Latin America during the year. Among the exhibits sponsored by the George Eastman House, the museum of photography at Rochester, N.Y., were ‘Contemporary Photographers,’ a multipart exhibition; a retrospective of the work of Eugà ¨ne Atget, a French photographer active in the early part of the century; and ‘Photography in the Twentieth Century.’ The Smithsonian Institution, in Washington, D.C., sent out several traveling shows, which included ‘Australia—The Sunburnt Country,’ ‘The Color of Man,’ ‘The Concerned Photographer,’ and ‘Laos.’ The technological revolution of today is creating new challenges and opportunities for traditional media. Today books, newspapers, magazines and any other forms of media is really using photograph to illustrate or to picture out the of   they mean in their written information. Literature Cited Newspaper the History. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Newspaper#History