The AP had long been providing stories to newspapers, but it was not until 1927 that the company started a fledgling news picture service. A small band of photographers was assigned to key cities and pictures were sent from bureau to bureau primarily by train, sometimes by air, from abroad by ocean liner. On rare occasions, the AP would use the AT&T; picture transmission system to send a picture of special urgency from its origin to a distribution point.
In virtually every instance, however, delivery could take up to 85 hours. An example: When the ocean liner Moro Castle caught fire off the New Jersey coast in 1934, an AP photographer flew over the vessel and made shot after shot of the flaming scene. The negatives were then processed in New York and original negatives sent via air mail to key distribution centers in Chicago and Los Angeles. The pictures were printed and redistributed by train and mail.
The AP often paid train conductors two dollars for delivering packages to messengers. The system in the early 1930s became increasingly adept at handling pictures in this combined air-sea-and-rail network. But the thought of seeing today's picture in today's -- or even tomorrow's newspaper -- was little more than a fantasy.
AP General Manager Kent Cooper changed that in 1935.
Despite opposition and serious technical barriers, Cooper adopted the AT&T; system to the particular needs of the newspaper industry. The system transmitted pictures from one city to another. But Cooper wanted many cities to receive photos in one transmission, so AP engineers and telephone company operatives went to work. On Jan. 1, 1935, the AP WirePhoto network was born; its first photo was a view of an airplane crash in upstate New York.
The AP network grew rapidly from its start of 47 papers in 25 states, and regional networks were developed. During World War II, less than ten years after the birth of AP WirePhoto, AP staff photographers covered the battle fields of the world and their pictures, handled through pool operations in London and Guam, brought photos home in record time.
When Marines landed on Iwo Jima to fight Japanese forces in February 1945, the AP's Wirephoto service transmitted photographs to newspapers less than a day after AP photographer Joe Rosenthal made them. Rosenthal's now-historic photograph of victorious Marines raising the American flag on Mt. Surabachi was one of a group of pictures he took of the landing, battle and aftermath. The photos were flown to Guam and sent by Navy radio to San Francisco where they were transmitted over AP's Wirephoto service 17 1/2 hours after the Marines landed on Iwo Jima.
"It seems almost incredible that newspapers reporting the first landing on Iwo Jima could simultaneously publish pictures of the landing itself," The New York Times said.
Rosenthal's Mt. Suribachi photograph won a Pulitzer Prize two months later.
As the network expanded during the postwar years, it became more and more sophisticated with growing flexibility built in to allow regional distribution of photos. Systems that received photos without the need for human attention gradually replaced the manual reception of pictures.
As the network grew, the cooperative spirit of the AP was put into action, bringing more and more member-originated photos onto the wire. One series of successful photos came from the Wichita Falls (Texas) Tribune. In 1958, the paper's photographers stood on the roof of their office building and bravely photographed a tornado bearing down on their town just a block away. The pictures played in newspapers across the country.
The AP Wirephoto success prompted the start of two other wirephoto picture networks -- Acme (later known as United Press Newspictures) and International News Photos (later to merge with UP and become United Press International).
In Europe, independent networks began providing photos to European newspapers that received AP news. By the 1950s, these networks traded pictures via radio circuits across the Atlantic. In the 1960s, the networks were linked by an undersea cable. AP made agreements in some areas with national picture agencies; in some areas AP setup its own picture network built on the U. S. model. By the end of the 1960s, AP sat astride a picture network that was linked solidly from Tokyo, through the U.S., into Europe and on as far as Moscow. Color began appearing in the world's newspapers, and AP photographers and darkroom technicians transmitted full color via wire.
New technologies appeared to enhance the quality of the AP Wirephoto network -- the most revolutionary was Laserphoto. Using a photo paper processed with heat instead of chemistry and a laser light source instead of the decades-old lamps system, Laserphoto brought a new, higher-quality picture to American newspapers.
A few years later, AP introduced a second network, LaserPhoto II, that used satellite technology to transmit primarily color news pictures.
But it was clear that the days of analog transmission -- the telephone wire transmission of pictures that had existed since the turn of the century and had served Wirephoto since its inception -- were limited. New news technologies had speeded up word transmission, increasing the number of available stories. Analog telephone lines became more and more limiting because of the demand for quicker delivery of more pictures including color. It took 40 minutes to transmit one color photo on the analog system.
The answer was digital photo transmission.
The process toward better transmission began in the 1970s, and by 1978, AP had introduced a new photo tool, a technical marvel that used digital technology to handle pictures, the AP Electronic Darkroom. The system was used primarily to receive pictures, store them digitally and then retransmit them without loss of quality. Picture enhancement by computer was possible in the darkroom and substantial improvements in photo quality were achieved, especially in the handling of foreign photos. By the late 1980s, electronic darkrooms were at work in New York, Chicago, Washington and Los Angeles. Electronic darkrooms were built and assigned to London, Frankfurt and Tokyo, the major international control points for pictures. And soon after, electronic darkrooms were utilized at major stories, such as political conventions and Olympic games.
By the time AP photographers were shooting all pictures in color, the Leafax scanner was created. A picture transmitting device that also scanned photographic negatives and created digital pictures, the Leafax took the time-consuming and messy chemical printing out of the news picture distribution workplace.
The final step in a new picture system was yet to come -- the design and implementation of a full digital system.
In 1989, AP announced that it would install at member newspaper sites the AP Leaf Picture Desk to receive photos. The old Wirephoto network would be abandoned; the Laserphoto II network would come down. Full color pictures were transmitted on a large satellite circuit at speeds of about 15 seconds per photo, as compared to 40 minutes on the analog lines. And because AP was shooting all color, all photos would be in color, high-quality color preserved by the digital system in a way analog could not match.
The new system required significant changes in the way pictures were handled by newspapers' operations departments. Pictures were viewed on a computer screen; there were no more prints. Digitized pictures could be enhanced by newspaper editors to meet the exacting requirements of their individual publishing systems, and passed digitally into the prepress and press room.
A team of AP technicians was dispatched to help newspapers wire their newsrooms, and a team of AP trainers showed editors how to operate the equipment. Because color quality from the wire was now easily controlled, the use of color increased and papers printed color as never before. Their own local pictures, likewise, were handled through the system.
Two final steps completed the digital evolution.
On Jan. 28, 1996, AP photographers used a new electronic camera, the NC 2000, to shoot the Tempe, Ariz., Super Bowl XXX entirely without film. The camera, a joint development of AP and the Eastman-Kodak company, made digital pictures on electronic chips built into the camera. Today, photographers at the AP and many of its member newspapers routinely use the next generation of digital cameras, the Nikon-based Kodak DCS 620 and the Canon-based Kodak DCS 520, to shoot high-quality pictures that can be transmitted in seconds.
The development of a digital photo archive in New York was the next step in AP's digital evolution. Today, the AP Photo Archive holds some 700,000 photos. Any user anywhere in the worId can enter the archive via the Internet, browse the picture file by utilizing search criteria and download selected pictures in a matter of minutes.
The Associated Press operates the most sophisticated picture collection distribution system of any news organization — the black magic of the classic film and chemical photo process has been replaced by the equally magical process of digital picture handling. There is no place on earth too remote for same-day news picture transmission.
