An Early ‘Denial of Ekphrasis’: Controversy over the Breakout of the Visual in the Jazz Age Tabloids and the New York Times

Abstract

This case study focuses on the use of visual elements - and the criticism over such use - in 1920s newspapers in New York, applying Jay David Bolter’s concept of ‘denial of ekphrasis’. The pioneering Jazz Age papers, acting as early ‘multimedia screens’, used photographic elements to communicate information in novel ways, contributing to the undermining of the analytical power of the written word. Elite criticism of these papers evinces nothing more than a class-based contempt for popular cultural forms, while examination of the contemporary New York Times shows that, by the mid-1920s, that paper was already paralleling many of the visual and content-based choices selected by its jazz journalism counterparts. Even so, this study finds that, in line with Bolter’s theories, the underlying traditions of the press were not fundamentally altered by technological developments and the spread of the visual form.

Online news galleries, photojournalism and the photo essay

“…In addition, news images (e.g. Bicket and Packer, 2004; Caple, 2010; Zelizer, 2005) and online newspapers (e.g. Boczkowski, 2004; Knox, 2007; Paterson and Domingo, 2006) have been widely studied from a range of theoretical perspectives.…”

Punctuating the home page: image as language in an online newspaper

“…Caple, 2007a), and historical perspectives on the evolution of the social practices of photojournalism and newspapers (e.g. Bicket and Packer, 2004; Caple, forthcoming a; Hartley and Rennie, 2004;Huxford, 2001;Sontag, 1979Sontag, , 2003.…”

Media Education: Rethinking the Role of Photographic Representation in Public Education

“…By the turn of the twentieth century, the Kodak Brownie had been introduced, putting the motto into practice for countless consumers in American and around the world. Reproductions of photographs that were being massreproduced through the halftone printing process developed in the 1880s had become so popular that by the early 1920s major daily papers around the world followed the lead of tabloid journals and began printing images in their pages as well (Bicket and Packer 2004). Photographs seemed to be appearing more and more frequently without the efforts of the people who would most often look at them.…”