Themes > Arts > Photography and Photographs > Fields and kinds of Photography > Photo Reportage

Children playing on the beach near Tower Bridge c.1934 Cyril Arapoff The early 1930s saw the emergence in Britain of a new kind of photography, which its practitioners called 'photo-reportage'. These photographers were mostly well-educated émigrés from Germany who left after Adolf Hitler was elected Chancellor in 1933. They brought with them the experience of producing photographic stories for popular German illustrated magazines which they had themselves researched, photographed and written. Britain's first magazine based on this continental model was Weekly Illustrated which was established in London in 1934 under the editorship of Stefan Lorant, a Hungarian who had edited illustrated magazines in Germany before being arrested and deported by the Nazis in 1933. The technique of most photo-reporters involved the use of the recently introduced 'miniature' hand-held rollfilm cameras, such as the Rollieflex, Leica, and Contax. These were unobtrusive, speedy in operation and enabled sequences of closely-timed photographs to be taken without having to reload with film. One of the most prominent of the German émigré photo-reporters was Felix H. Man who photographed a number of stories about London for Weekly Illustrated . He was subsequently involved with Lorant in setting up a new magazine, Picture Post, which first appeared in 1938. This highly-regarded magazine was one of the best of its kind anywhere in the world and did more than any other publication to develop British photojournalism. It pioneered the 'day in the life' approach and published many photographic stories concerned with London.

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