Photos Distill the Truth

The recent fury over of the public use of aborted baby photos is part of an ongoing debate on the use of graphic photographic imagery that has raged ever since Matthew Brady first published pictures of Civil War battlefields laden with the grotesque images of dead and dying soldiers.

In the late 1800s, Joseph Pulitzer’s pioneering work in the New York World and St. Louis Post-Dispatch helped forge modern newspaper journalism, including the emerging field of photojournalism. Pulitzer is said to have demanded that photographs be used to support the journalists’ text.