If you were to look at a quality newspaper prior to 1900 you would see columns of close type reporting the words and actions of important public figures. But there would be no pictures. The Daily Graphic did concede to having drawings, but it was not until Lord Northcliffe relaunched the Daily Mirror in 1904 that photographs began to appear regularly in the press.

Immediately the job of press photographer began to take on a distinct and attractive character. With modest wages but generous expense accounts, with the possibilities of travel and with unprecedented access to public figures and decisive moments in history, press photographers began to style themselves as glamorous adventurers driven by competition and fuelled by intrigue.

Photographic agencies, such as Topical Press Agency and Fox Photos, began to appear and the photographers jumped from one agency to another, improving their terms on the back of good pictures.

The press quickly settled on the photographic subjects guaranteed to be of public interest: politics, entertainment, sport, crime and, of course, royalty. When historic events were anticipated, photographers rushed to the scene to hunt in packs. Sometimes they worked alone, but they were always in search of the elusive scoop.

Photographs in newspapers invested modern life with visual information to an unprecedented degree. Political figures were regularly photographed, and the pictures rushed to press by land or sea. Unlike text, they could not yet be cheaply wired to newspapers over a telephone line.

Specific dates were seldom added to many news photographs because of the time lag between taking a shot and publishing it. Photographs from the First World War Battle of the Somme in France, fought between July and November 1916, were not printed until January 1917. The popularity of the photographically illustrated newspaper, spawned new daily and weekly newspapers and magazines, all of which engaged in intense rivalry for the best original pictures. Some public figures courted the publicity they gained from having their picture in the papers.

Theodore Roosevelt, for example, orchestrated events for the cameras that followed him and welcomed the packs of press photographers on his election campaigns. But the intense competition encouraged photographers to invade the privacy of public figures. Edward VII complained that he could scarcely venture out of doors without being “snapshotted” by a battery of cameras. Photographers encroached on the Sandringham estate while the royals hunted, smuggling themselves into bread delivery trucks to photograph the children and stalking them at the racecourse.

The elbowing for best position often turned the atmosphere ugly and, eventually, a press rota system was introduced for royal events.

Within its first three decades photo-journalism had established itself. It offered a blend of the candid snap-shot with moments of negotiated photo opportunity and the stage-managed photograph, which was choreographed to give the illusion of spontaneity.

The photographer (they were mostly men) was consigned to the lower ranks of journalism but, in time, rose in the newspaper hierarchy. Some of the best images, such as the portrait published in The Times of Edmund Hillary and Tenzing Norgay having just conquered Everest in 1953, began to linger in the memories of readers and to define the public’s relationship with the previously remote world of the famous and powerful.

Transmission speeds were also increasing. In 1935 the Associated Press wirephoto division marked the start of cheaper and faster transmitting systems and networks, which remained in place until superseded by electronic systems in the 1980s. Today photojournalists in the field can transmit pictures instantaneously. Digital pictures are downloaded on to a small laptop and sent via the internet on a mobile phone. In an area without internet connections, such as a war zone, photographers might download pictures from the laptop using a satellite phone.

Increasingly, however, photojournalists are being asked to shoot video instead of still photographs because the video can be used on newspapers’ websites. The quality of video is so high that a still image can be frozen and isolated for use in print if necessary. In a hundred years, press photography has come a long way.