Bain News Service

George Grantham Bain founded what is generally considered the first American news picture agency, and the reason his work survives in the quantity it does is a fire.

Bain started in the 1890s as a reporter who realized that newspapers wanted photographs and had no reliable way to get them. He built an agency that supplied pictures to papers across the country, keeping the negatives and licensing the same image many times over — a business model that had not existed before and that every wire service since has copied.

By 1907 he had one of the largest photographic files in the world. In 1908 his building on Park Row burned, and he lost a great deal of it. What he rebuilt afterward, and shot for the following twenty-odd years, is what came to the Library of Congress: roughly forty thousand glass negatives.

The subject is New York, relentlessly. Politicians on courthouse steps. Suffragists marching on Fifth Avenue. Strikers outside factory gates. Immigrants at Ellis Island. Baseball at the Polo Grounds. Fires, wrecks, parades, arrests, and the ordinary business of a city that was becoming the largest in the world while somebody stood in the street with a camera.

The photographers worked close. There were no long lenses and no press pens, so a Bain picture of a public figure was taken from a few feet away by a man who was standing there — which is why the subjects look back at you rather than past you. That directness is the signature of the collection and it is nearly impossible to reproduce now.

The captions are their own problem and their own pleasure. They were written fast, on envelopes, by clerks working against deadlines, and they are wrong often enough that the Library flags them. Names are misspelled, dates are approximate, and the same man appears under three versions of his own surname. Where a caption and the picture disagree, trust the picture.

Two subjects run through the file more than any others. Baseball, because Bain covered the New York clubs obsessively during the deadball era, and the result is the best photographic record of the sport before 1920 that exists anywhere. And the suffrage movement, which he documented from the early marches through the 1917 New York referendum, at a time when most papers treated it as a curiosity.

Bain himself is a minor figure in the story of American journalism who ought to be a larger one. He came out of the Washington press corps, understood before nearly anyone that a photograph was a commodity that could be sold repeatedly rather than once, and built the infrastructure — couriers, darkrooms, a filing system — that made syndication possible. Every wire photo service is a descendant.

For dating, the material itself helps. Bain shot on glass into the 1920s well after film was available, so a plate negative is likely earlier rather than later, and the scratch patterns on the surviving glass are part of why these images look the way they do.

The Company That Photographed Washington for the Newspapers