The Wind that Swept Mexico by Anita Brenner

UP TO THE OUTBREAK of the Mexican Revolution in 1910, news photography was a simple and untroubled business. The regular assignments of news photographers could be accommodated in six neat compartments: sports, stage people, politicians, society, American businessmen, and European crowned heads and nobilities. The demand for the last named was endless; the American public had an apparently inexhaustible appetite for pictures of Manuel of Portugal, the Duchess of Manchester (neé Zimmerman of Cincinnati), and the daughters of Nicholas of Montenegro. Occasionally a news story would get a thorough going over with a camera-the anthracite strike of 1902, a wreck on the New York Elevated, the San Francisco earthquake, Mrs. Pankhurst in Holloway Gaol-but not often.

The business of the news photographer was to show, anonymously and as expertly as possible, a world in place. The few news photographers who traveled far and wide-men like Jack Hamment, Jimmy Hare, and Herbert Ponting-were almost celebrities themselves, ranked with correspondents like Richard Harding Davis. Even they were a comparatively recent phenomenon. The common use of halftone reproduction of photographs was unknown until the 90's-the first halftone used by the New York Tribune was a picture of Tom Platt published January 21, 1897-and the notion of news photography was so startling that Hare had difficulty in persuading Collier's to send him to Cuba in 1898. Hearst was more alert and Hare's great rival through the Spanish War was Jack Hamment of the New York Evening Journal.