Picturing Privacy: Journalism’s Strategic Legal Discourse about Photography, 1890–1920

How were the privacy problems of photography discussed in journalists' legal discourse between 1890 and 1920, and how did that discourse influence the emerging law of privacy within their professional field, and the role of photography in journalism? New technologies and practices were incorporated into a drastically changing journalism field at the turn of the twentieth century, sparking debate about the boundaries between new forms of reporting and personal rights to privacy and publicity. This article adds nuance to that history by using the conceptual framework of institutionalism to analyze trade press discourse along the new frontier of photographic illustration in the news. It argues that an institutional lens can help us understand how a discourse full of contradictions shored up the emerging model of commercial news media along with a sexist conception of the law of privacy. Seeing how the press balanced professional and economic demands for depictions of everyday life against these social concerns can clarify our picture of how the law of privacy and publicity has developed amid the media marketplace of the twentieth and early twenty-first centuries.