1935 - Photography

Photography

Photograph: Migrant Mother by Dorothea Lange appears in the San Francisco News March 10, showing a gaunt woman from Oklahoma with her seven starving children (see 1931). Lange has stopped off at a migrant-labor camp, taken just six pictures, and failed to get the name of the woman (she will turn out to be Florence Thompson, 32), but the portrait is so moving that 25,000 pounds of food pour into the paper's offices to help relieve hunger among migrant workers.

The Associated Press (AP) begins sending news photographs over wires, using an analog process that converts different shades of black and grey into electronic signals that can be reconverted at the receiving end. Publisher Roy Howard has persuaded other publishers to join him in financing the new service, and the first AP wirephoto goes out to newspapers April 1.

The Bettmann Archive opens at New York with pictures by Leipzig-born refugee Otto L. (Ludwig) Bettmann, 32, who will fill up two basement rooms at 215 East 57th Street before moving in 1961 to 215 East 57th. Formerly curator of rare books in the Prussian State Art Library at Berlin, Bettmann received a doctorate of philosophy from the University of Leipzig in 1927 but has fled Nazi persecution with little except two steamer trunks containing some 25,000 images, many on film negatives. He catalogues his collection, cross-indexing it for easy retrieval, and begins to expand it, obtaining many of his images for less than $1 each from the Library of Congress and receiving rental fees—initially $25 but later much more—for allowing publications, book publishers, and advertisers to use them. The archive will grow to have more than 5 million images, making it the world's largest collection of historical photographs and other illustrations (see 1981).

Eastman Kodak introduces Kodachrome for 16-millimeter movie cameras. Eastman has acquired production rights from New York concert violinist Leopold Godowsky Jr., 35, and his pianist co-inventor Leopold Damrosch Mannes, 35, who have devised a three-color dye-coupling process with help from a team of Eastman scientists. Godowsky and Mannes met as students in 1916 and have studied physics and chemistry at university while continuing their music careers; Godovsky married George Gershwin's sister Frances in 1931 and has been working with Mannes at Rochester since July 1931 (see 1936).