Daily encounters: Photography from Fleet Street

Daily newspapes became one of the defining media forms of the twentieth century. Public figures were central to the appeal of newspapers, and the lives of royalty, politicians and performers were all scrutinised. Yet the history of the photographers who captured these figures in print has been largely overlooked.

The exhibition'Daily Encounters' set out to redress the balance with a celebration of press portraits from the ‘Golden Age of Fleet Street’. It traces a new breed of press photographers, often from working-class backgrounds, who produced the most memorable images in the history of the medium.

Emerging within the context of the National Portrait Gallery, initial research focused on examining the function of newspaper imagery as a unique form of popular iconography and collecting of the new photographs in the National Portrait Gallery’s holdings. Research was also undertaken in the Hulton Getty archive, Daily Mirror Archive, Press Association Archive and Daily Herald Archive. Original press prints and contact sheets from the period 1904 – 1985 were consulted and compared with the usage and reproduction in newspapers of the day. Daybooks, biographies and histories of individual photographers, agencies and newspapers were reviewed and interviews conducted with surviving photographers, picture editors and agency managers.

The exhibition was constructed as a narrative that interweaves an exploration of four central themes: the construction of public iconography, the shifting technology of image production and its cultural application within photojournalism, the tension between truth and fiction, and the wilfully constructed mythology of Fleet Street and professional journalism.

Roger Hargreaves curated this exhibition and authored the accompanying publication Daily Encounters: Photographs from Fleet Street (July 2007, ISBN 1855143771).

• http://www.photobox.co.uk/content/news/f...
• http://www.lcc.arts.ac.uk/38535.htm