The Making of Visual News sets out to show how photography has changed the way we read, report and sell the news. It investigates how photographs first became news images at the end of the nineteenth century and how magazines in the USA, the UK, France and Germany have put them to use ever since.

Thierry Gervais is Assistant Professor at Ryerson University and Head of Research at the Ryerson Image Centre (RIC), Toronto, Canada. He is the co-author of La photographie. Histoire, technique, presse, art and Photographies et magazines d'actualite (both with Gaelle Morel), and fomer editor in chief of Etudes photographiques. Gaelle Morel is an art historian and the Exhibitions Curator at the Ryerson Image Centre, Toronto, Canada. She has edited Les Derniers Tableaux. Photojournalisme et art contemporain and co-authored several books with Thierry Gervais. She is a former member of the board of the Societe francaise de photographie, and a member of the editorial committee of the bilingual journal Etudes photographiques.

Introduction The invention of the magazine (1843-1918)From a photographThe halftone agePress photographersThe role of the art directorReflections of the warGeneral news magazines: European know-how (1919-1936)Berliner Illustrirte Zeitung before the warThe postwar German press: a competitive marketPropagandist visual strategies A style for news magazinesAn aesthetics of transparencyVU: a photographic workshopNarrating the newsThe Life model and the standardization of news magazines (1936-1976)From idea to actuality: the beginnings of LifeDramatizing the newsFrom the photographic essay to the pictorial essayChallenges to authorityTowards diversificationConclusion