The first photograph in a newspaper appeared July 1848 in French weekly L’Illustration, depicting Paris barricades from the June Days Uprising, likely as an inked engraving.
Key Takeaways
L’Illustration published the image on July 1st, delayed by slow news gathering and weekly scheduling; the June Days Uprising ran June 22-26, 1848.
The published image was probably an inked engraving derived from the original photograph, not a direct photographic reproduction.
War drove photojournalism’s growth: Roger Fenton’s 360 Crimean wet-plate images (1855) and Civil War coverage normalized photo illustration.
By 1900, newspaper images shifted from novelty to expectation; the same L’Illustration claimed first color photo publication in 1891 and 1907.
First illustration (non-photo) in a newspaper dates to around 1806, predating photography by decades.
Hacker News Comment Review
One commenter notes the WSJ famously ran text-only well into the color photo era, finally adding photos in the late 1990s or 2000s, suggesting financial news has always been a structural outlier for photojournalism.
