Transmit images remotely. Cultural chronology of telephotography in the French press.

In the history of photography and the media, telephotography, or transmission of images from a distance, has essentially been approached from the technical point of view and for the first years of its existence.

 

It highlights a chronology different from that previously proposed, with a long limited development of this technique, throughout the 1920s, followed by a visible progression phase in the last years of the inter-war period. .

 

This analysis makes possible to leave the technical perspective alone and reveals that this slow appropriation is explained, beyond the improvements of the process, by the evolution of the professional practices of the world of the press, the role attributed to photography in the construction information and the excitement of the news snapshot.

The transmission of distant images, called telephotography, has been the subject of scientific research since the first half of the nineteenth century.

However, despite the certain stake that these techniques represent for the world of the press, they are little approached in the French historical field.

The first elements mentioned in already old studies have been regularly included in many books on the press or press photography, for lack of specific study on the subject. 

In this work, the point of view retained is that of technical innovation, with a presupposition: that of the necessary association between photography and the press, which would be an inevitable phenomenon of contemporary journalism. 

In this perspective, the transmission of images at a distance is first and foremost considered as a set of technical difficulties that press professionals would look forward to seeing, so the focus is on the progress made by Arthur Korn's experiments and, Édouard Belin, in the first ten years of the twentieth century, an experimental phase that followed, as early as the 1920s, a deployment on the ground supposed to mechanically follow these advances.

In addition to chronological questions, which deserve to be clarified, this prism of analysis includes the risk of teleology and does away with the analysis of the uses of telephotography in the press which will, on the contrary, be at the heart of our study. 

Through this examination of the uses of a new technique, it is necessary to highlight, no longer the innovation itself, but a cultural chronology of this innovation, embodied in the needs to which it responds or not in the newsroom and in its influence on the visual culture of the time.

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