The public eye: celebrity and photojournalism in the making of the British tabloids, 1904-1938

2011-08-05My dissertation locates the origins of photojournalism in the tabloid newspapers that proliferated in early twentieth-century London, and interrogates the role of tabloid photography in the transformation of ideas of celebrity, publicity, and publicness. The tabloids were the world’s first newspapers to make extensive use of the snapshot photograph as a vehicle of mass communication. The snapshot image documented a fleeting moment in time, and could be taken with or without the consent of the subject, which intensified the pressures of life in the public eye. The tabloids made the photographic exposure of unguarded moments part of their mass appeal. In this way, the proprietors, editors and photographers of the first tabloids helped produce a new way of consuming images of famous people that significantly altered the nature of celebrity culture and stoked debate about photographic intrusion into private life. In its focus on celebrity, my research contributes to debates regarding what historians have identified as Britain’s unique tensions between the rise of mass democracy and the endurance of traditional social and cultural hierarchies. As a mass cultural medium focusing on aristocratic and royal figures, the British tabloids express some of the paradoxes of British democratic culture. The tabloids simultaneously underscored the cultural centrality of traditional elites, as well as representing a challenge to their social dominance by seizing control over what kinds of information could be made public through the mediation of the camera. My project illustrates the global significance of British visual culture. Because of Britain’s international influence – both in and beyond the Empire – the tabloid format pioneered in London penetrated the journalistic culture of most of the globe