Picture Magazines of the 1930sPhotography records the gamut of feelings written on the human face,
the beauty of the earth and skies that man has inherited, and the
wealth and confusion man has created.
—Edward Steichen,Timemagazine ( 1961 )Photography changed how the world was recorded.
Likewise the “picture magazine” changed how the world
was seen. The photojournalist Edward Steichen referred
to this genre as a “major force in explaining man to man.”
But just as the invention of the photograph in the early
nineteenth century made representational painting
obsolete, during the past thirty years the spontaneity
and immediacy of that other revolutionary medium,
television, has made the picture magazine an
anachronism.
Yet before television, picture magazines with
rotogravure pages awash with halftones, printed with
luminescent inks on velvety paper, were veritable eyes on
the world. Photography may have been static, but, when
edited like a motion picture and narratively paced to tell a
story, the images of never-before-recorded sights offered
audiences the same drama—and more detail—than any
newsreel. Innovative editors at the leading magazines
advanced revolutionary storytelling ideas that altered the
way photography was used and perceived. With the
advent of faster films and lightweight cameras,
photography was freed from the confines of the studio;
photographers were encouraged to capture realities that
had been previously hidden in the shadows.
As photography evolved from single
documentary images into visual essays, the forms and
formats of presentation changed as well. From the mid-
nineteenth to the early twentieth century, the picture
magazine evolved from a repository of drawn and
engraved facsimiles of daguerreotypes into albums of real58