Introduction

Images are published due to editorial decisions and commercial opportunities. Almost all the developments that supported increasing visual content in the twentieth century used some application of photomechanical imaging technologies, even though these techniques were initially an awkward fit with standard letterpress methods; in short, increased visual content was a troublesome addition to established practices. This chapter opens with these constraints by considering the functions and cultural meanings carried by different visual expressions such as line drawings or photographs and the technical developments and costs associated with different print media, acknowledging recent scholarship in visual studies, material culture and cultural history. However, the specific geographical and political focus of this volume offers the opportunity to then consider these image types in relation to case studies and examples of diverging local practices developing in Ireland (South and North) and Great Britain, and the role of those images within the ‘imagined community’ sketched by particular publications (Anderson 2006).

By 1900 photomechanical print genres sat amongst other new visual media such as film (Ardis and Collier 2008: 30), enabling overall an increased visual content in proportion to text in publications throughout the twentieth century (Barnhurst and Nerone 2001; 194–8; 232–50). Such intermediality has continued throughout the century, with new print formats and reporting styles expressed through colour offset litho or print/digital interactions, always with one eye on competing platforms such as television or social media. Technically and logistically, press images moved from the cast metal letterpress world of relief printing to the lightbox world of rotogravure, offset lithography, then digital printing and online dissemination. Broad differentiations of print mediums divide into finer shades– a literal phrase here, as coarse images on cheap, rough paper signify immediacy, while finely grained and expensive images posit refined or considered positions. Photographs, illustrations and information graphics serve many diverse ends of photojournalism, consumerism or spectacle. Despite the cost of images, they are normalised within ‘the form of news’ (Barnhurst and Nerone 2001; Hill and Schwartz 2015); indeed they now drive editorial design in a multimedia environment (Berry 2004; Franchi 2013).