Artist as reporter: the PM news picture, 1940-1948

The present dissertation concerns the visual program of the 1940s New York tabloid PM, employer between 1940 and 1947 of both the sensational street photographer Weegee and the abstract painter Ad Reinhardt, and its systematic assertion of its own formal artifice and artistry to its hundreds of thousands of daily New York and national readers. In the wake of the First World War, John Dewey demanded a journalism, as a key instrument in the formation of public knowledge, that refused as politically calamitous a “spectator theory of knowledge,” positing a world “out there” objectively knowable, as through a lens, to a distinct awareness within, otherwise pervasive in American journalism. He argued instead for a journalism motivated by an actor theory of knowledge assuming that knowing can only be transactional, that the knowable world consists as such through the very processes of its representation and cognition. The conduit of that transaction, the newspaper, must then be transparent about its own formal operations, about the conditions of its own representations. PM emerged as the platform for a necessary traffic between the domains of print journalism and the fine arts during the 1940s, at the very juncture of economic depression and global war, which satisfied Dewey’s demand. ❧ The project considers five moments in PM’s journalism that exemplify its assertion of the transactional nature of visual journalism’s role as a conduit for public knowledge. The first chapter assesses the logic of the tabloid's 1940 exhibition of sketch reporting hosted by the Museum of Modern Art, arguing that the show was a both a declaration of PM’s unlikely artistic agenda and a trenchant challenge to the primacy of the discursively disembodied documentary photographic news picture. The second chapter considers the role of the handmade sketch report beyond the gallery and within the pages of PM’s daily reporting. For PM the sketch report was a productively ambivalent document, conveying information both about the world’s affairs and about the character of the agent responsible for that information’s transmission. Chapter three focuses in on PM’s strategy, through heavily retouched “radiophotos” sent from Moscow to New York in February 1941, for deploying news pictures in order to imbue the photographic image with something of the same authorially contingent rhetorical structure as the handmade sketch report. Chapter Four chronicles PM’s mobilization of the press photographer Weegee in the years prior to the publication of Naked City as the very embodiment of the invested, partial, and intervening photographic reporter, whose news pictures were marked as much by the indexical record of “the news” as by their maker’s own idiosyncratic sensibility, where his antecedents had always been discursively constructed as anonymous, disembodied machines for the production of objective visual truths. The final chapter, on the abstract painter Ad Reinhardt’s pedagogical cartooning for PM, considers this artist’s activation of the newspaper comic as a platform for the dialectical critique of pictorial journalism’s, and even PM’s, own representational procedures.

本论文聚焦1940年代纽约小报《PM》的视觉策划策略。该报在1940至1947年间雇佣了轰动性街头摄影师威基（Weegee）与抽象画家阿道夫·莱因哈特（Ad Reinhardt），并面向数十万纽约本地及全美每日读者，系统性地彰显自身的形式建构手法与艺术匠心。
第一次世界大战结束后，约翰·杜威（John Dewey）提出，新闻业作为塑造公共知识的核心工具，应坚决摒弃当时美国新闻业中盛行的旁观者知识论（spectator theory of knowledge）——该理论假定存在一个可通过镜头等媒介客观认知的“外在世界”，并将认知主体视为独立于该世界的存在，而杜威认为这一立场在政治上极具危害性。他转而倡导以行动者知识论（actor theory of knowledge）为内核的新闻业，该理论主张认知仅能通过交互过程产生，可知世界正是通过表征与认知的具体实践得以建构。作为这种认知交互的载体，报纸必须清晰阐明其自身的形式运作逻辑与表征生成的前提条件。
1940年代，正值经济大萧条与全球战争的历史交汇节点，《PM》应运而生，成为印刷新闻业与纯艺术领域之间必要沟通的桥梁，恰好契合了杜威的上述理论诉求。
本研究梳理了《PM》新闻实践中的五个关键节点，用以例证其对视觉新闻作为公共知识传播载体的交互本质的主张。第一章剖析该报1940年于现代艺术博物馆（Museum of Modern Art）举办的速写报道展的内在逻辑，指出该展览既是《PM》独特艺术议程的公开宣言，也是对脱离话语语境的纪实摄影新闻图片之主导地位的尖锐挑战。第二章探讨画廊之外、《PM》日常版面中手工速写报道的角色定位。对《PM》而言，速写报道是一种兼具生产性的矛盾创作产物：它既传递了关于世界时事的信息，也揭示了负责传递该信息的媒介主体的创作特质。第三章聚焦《PM》在1941年2月从莫斯科发往纽约的经过大量后期修图的广播照片（radiophotos）所采用的传播策略，该策略旨在借助新闻图片，为摄影图像赋予与手工速写报道相仿的、由创作者赋予的偶然性修辞结构。第四章记述了《PM》在《裸城》（Naked City）出版前数年对摄影记者威基的启用，将其塑造为具有介入性、带主观视角的摄影记者的典范。威基的新闻图片既带有“新闻事件”的索引性记录痕迹，也彰显了创作者自身独特的创作风格；而此前的摄影记者常被构建为匿名、脱离主体的客观视觉真理生产机器。最后一章以抽象画家阿道夫·莱因哈特为《PM》创作的教学性漫画为研究对象，探讨该艺术家如何将报纸漫画作为平台，对图像新闻乃至《PM》自身的表征流程展开辩证批判。