This week the graphic and candid photographs of the 1920s and 30s.
It was the French photographer Henri Cartier-Bresson who defined the decisive moment.
That instant when a picture forms in the camera's lens and the shutter clicks.
In the history of photography there have been many such moments. Moments of drama, of conflict, of happiness and sorrow.
This is the story behind some of those moments when the picture formed, the shutter clicked and the photographer captured a little piece of history.
This is a picture that no one was supposed to see. It shows a woman strapped to an electric chair at the moment when the switch was pulled.
It appeared on the front page of New York tabloid in 1928 and marked the beginning of an era when photographers would do anything to get the pictures that made the news.
Steal a picture, con a picture, do anything you have to do to get the picture. The more sensational the better.
The viewing public had raised its expectations so that when we gave them great things in pictures they wanted better things, more things.
Pictures, pictures, pictures were on everybody's mind.
On the morning of the 13th of January 1928 readers of the top-selling tabloid The New York Daily News woke up to something that few had seen before. A woman dying in the electric chair.
According to its own publicity The Daily News existed to astonish, bemuse and horrify the reader. This picture did it all.
The Ruth Snyder picture ushered in a new kind of photography, brash, bold and crude.
Tabloid pictures had arrived.
The story behind the picture is one of the most notorious episodes in photojournalism. It began in 1927 with the trial of Ruth Snyder for the murder of her husband.
Even though this was a decade full of sensational murder trials, this was probably the most sensational and outstanding trial of the era. It was covered by hundreds of newspapers and it was on the front page from coast to coast for eight months.
The trial sparked a circulation war with the tabloids competing for every new angle, every snatched image. Each aspect of the story was raked over and reconstructed in minute detail.
Ruth and her husband Albert lived in a sleepy New York suburb. They were not well matched. He was quiet and conventional. She was not.
Ruth Snyder was what the public called the flapper mom. She drank a lot, she gambled and she seemed to embody everything that was wrong with flapperism to the newspaper reading public.
In 1927, Ruth Snyder met a corset salesman called Judd Gray. They embarked on a passionate affair. Gray was completely under her spell.
She was rather pretty, I think, and blonde. That's what they said. I really got the impression that she was the aggressive person in that romance. That's the way I got it.
It wasn't long before the lovers were planning to remove the husband from the scene.
Eventually they evolved this plot whereby they would get him drunk, stun him with a lead sash weight, and then strangle him to death with picture wire.
And this indeed is what happened in 1927. A very messy, very inept murder. She supplied all of the planning. He actually supplied the muscle power.
The murder took place on the night of March 20, 1927.
When the police came, she said she had been robbed and her jewelry was gone and the house was trashed, but she didn't convince the cops.
And later it turned out that they both confessed.
Ruth Snyder and Judd Gray went to trial on April 18, 1927.
During the trial, it emerged that Snyder had taken out a double indemnity insurance policy on her husband.
Among the journalists covering the trial was James M. Cain. Cain went on to use Snyder as the model for the fam fatales in noir classics like Double Indemnity and The Postman Always Rings Twice.
Snyder and Gray was sentenced to death by electric chair at New York's Sing Sing Prison. For the tabloids, it was the perfect end to a perfect story.
All they needed was a picture.
Most of them were resigned to using artists' impressions, but one newspaper was determined to scoop the competition.
It was Harvey Duell's editor of the New York Daily News who decided to snatch a photograph of Snyder in the electric chair.
The rules were explicit. Reporters could attend executions but not photographers.
So the news sent in a photographer posing as a reporter and armed with a hidden camera.
Well, it was a terrific mission and possible story. They had signed people weeks in advance who got blueprints of the death chamber.
They found out where the photographer would be sitting and decided to sneak in someone who was unknown to the people. So it was an outside photographer.
The man assigned to the task was Tom Howard, the top photographer on the Chicago Tribune.
Howard and a team from the Daily News set about creating a special camera.
They made this one-shot camera, had a glass negative. They only had one opportunity to make a picture.
They had it be small so it could be concealed.
And it was strapped to Howard's left ankle and right down here. And they ran a rubber tube from the shutter release up into his left pocket.
And he was able to squeeze off a shot.
This is the camera that Tom Howard used to photograph the Bruce Snyder execution.
It's a modified miniature camera that was strapped around his leg and the shutter release ran from the front of the camera.
This is where the glass plate would be at the back of the camera in the plate holder.
And here's the strap that was used to connect the camera to Howard's leg.
In the days leading up to the execution, Howard familiarized himself with his new equipment, endlessly rehearsing how he would get the shot.
He came in a hotel room where they simulated the distance, every day a different distance, of how they figured the chair would be and where he would have to sit, what he would have to do.
With the camera carefully concealed beneath his trouser leg, he entered the prison with the other reporters.
He was just a photographer as we know and I guess he had to behave like a reporter so his cover wouldn't be blown, which could have just sat there doing a crossword puzzle up until the execution because he knew what he was there for.
But instead he went up and he interviewed prison officials and he was quite a con man.
In the execution chamber, Howard got an aisle seat about 10 feet from the electric chair. Ruth Snyder was led in, strapped to the chair and blindfolded.
For Howard, the rehearsals were over.
Oh, he closed his eyes when this picture was taken, put his foot in the aisle, had the cord going up his leg, squeezed the cord and then he had to walk out of there and a long walk back to the car.
I had the cars waiting, one car that he rode in and then they had a car in case they broke down, got a flat tire or something like that. This was Harvey Dool's, he was a thorough guy.
He walked in the city room and everybody cheered him for making it at all and then he gave him the film and as I understood it, they said you got the picture done.
What they want up getting is an image of Ruth about a third of the whole image, the rest of the people standing around. It's not clear to me or anyone else what happened here, the negative must have gotten broken or perhaps his pants leg had gotten away.
What they want up doing is going in here, cropping it so that they want up with a picture something like that, which as you can see is pretty fuzzy, then they start working on it, retouching, adding in a little more detail so that it gives you a sense of sharpness and you wind up with a picture that's like that.
It's the kind of picture that I think if you look at it, it's much stronger on the page than it is by itself.
The Daily News presses around all night. On the following day, the paper sold an extra million copies. Editor Harvey Dool's, I pulled off the scoop of the decade.
There was no newspaper or magazine. Nobody in this country had ever shown a picture of somebody being executed and when the Daily News ran this, it was an absolute sensation.
A lot of people thought it was a tasteless thing to do, tasteless. But because I personally am against capital punishment, I think it was a good picture. I think that it startled people.
I think there was an immense feeling that tabloids were vulgar and showing a picture of somebody being executed was just what it was unheard of and vulgar and sensational and immensely popular.
Well, I think if we had an opportunity to run this picture today, we'd certainly do it. There's no question in my mind.
I think it's much more difficult today because people are more aware of cameras and search people. So I don't think there's any chance of doing this today.
But I think the anti-death penalty people would be thrilled. It's a frightening, powerful photograph.
Did this frighten you at all when you were a little girl?
No, I just did.
Because it was hanging in the house. And it frightened me.
And your friends that would come over, they'd think, why is that dead woman hanging on the wall? And I've thought, as I've been looking at it, I never had any fear about it at all. To me it was the picture that made them famous.
On Valentine's Day in 1929, I was assigned by Harry Reid, who was a city editor of the Chicago Evening American,
to report that the Hudson Avenue police station, and he told me to stay there until he calls me.
So about 10 o'clock, I did get the call, and he told me that there was a shooting at 21-22 North Clark Street.
Photographer Tony Berardi was about to photograph one of the 1920s' most infamous gangland slayings, the St. Valentine's Day Massacre.
Photographs of violent death on this scale were without precedent. But with the Chicago gang wars getting ever more bloody, the newspapers had acquired an appetite for carnage.
And on the 14th of February, 1929, Al Capone provided them with the perfect picture.
It was about 9 o'clock in the morning, and the gunners arrived in police uniforms, and they drove into the garage on North Clark Street,
and they drew out from under their coats the machine guns, and began shooting.
Well, I didn't know how many bodies were there, but I saw a bunch of bodies.
And the first thing that came into my mind is where's the best angle to photograph this thing, and this happened to be on top of this truck.
And I took my camera, which I had it open before I even got there, and I pointed down there and made the shot of the seven bodies.
From the truck I took two or three, then I got on the ground and I started shooting pictures at different angles.
The other two, a gangster would have been singled out and killed, and his body left in the trunk of his car, or it would have been killed on the street.
That was the first time that seven of them had been killed when stroke.
Well, this is the picture I took from the top of this truck, which I think is the best of all, and I think it really tells a story.
It shows these bodies where you can see the faces, you can see the blood, you can see the man leaning on that chair.
It's a very dramatic picture.
As the bodies were removed, Berardi finished photographing the scene and handed his film plates to a messenger boy who raced them back to the paper.
Then he phoned his boss, Harry Reid, with the story.
Reid cut him in on a phone line with a rewrite man who could take his story as he told it, and the rewrite wrote the story, which was written by the time the pictures got there.
I made a print of the pictures, and we had a scoop on the town, the story and pictures of the St. Valentine's Day Massacre.
The photograph went round the world, dramatic testimony to the violence of Gangland Chicago.
But many wondered how Harry Reid had managed to get a photographer on the scene so quickly.
It turned out later that Reid had a personal friendship with Al Capone, and had talked to Capone early that morning, and Capone had said, do you have anybody at police stations in the neighborhood?
And Reid said yes he had, and he said tell them to stay alert.
That was Capone's tip-off to Reid and a repayment for their personal friendship.
Well, even today, it's according to who you know.
And Harry knew a lot of people, including Al Capone.
After St. Valentine's Day, the American tabloids recognized few taboos. Crime, preferably bloody, was good for business, provided there were photographs attached.
What you see largely is a lot of crime, a lot of murder, a lot of disaster, because those sold newspapers, and it was understood instantly.
As soon as you had photographs available, it was understood that that was the way you made a large circulation.
A new generation of photo hacks emerged. Their beat was the crime ridden streets of America, and they would go anywhere and do almost anything to get the picture.
They were aided in their search for the sleazy, the secret, and the forbidden, by a technological breakthrough, the Flash bulb.
Flash was kind of new then, you know, because I came in the days when there was power, so they were lucky they got one shot, you know, and then Flash, they could make two or three, you know, so it changed it a bit.
Flash also gave these pictures their raw, hard-edge quality.
The light would bounce the peripheral light and give you highlights all over. You know, there wasn't a subject on your lip.
It seemed to come off the wall or the party wagon, so it gave the picture quality.
The acknowledged master of this nighttime world was New York freelancer, Arthur Felig, better known as Ouija.
Ganglang murder or society suicide, Ouija was always the first on the scene.
Fiji had this element of immediacy. He had a police radio in his car. In fact, he often got there before the police got there.
So again, you had an inside view of what was going on. You are there at a thing you're not supposed to be at. Maybe the cops haven't got there yet.
I always said 90% of people thought it was a joke, you know, the way he dressed, the way he smelled, the way he looked, always be draggled, have his breakfast or something.
There's shouting, tie, beer, cigar, juice all over the place, or a half rotten tea, you know, but Ouija's mind was very elated.
He was so far ahead of his time, you could hear the talk around the city. You see Ouija, you see Ouija.
Ouija claimed to have photographed 5,000 murders in 10 years. Not surprisingly, perhaps, by the end of the 30s, even the insatiable American tabloids had had enough.
Ouija saturated the market to such an extent that there was a moment at which it looked like he couldn't sell very much because they'd had too many corpses in the papers and the tabloids were worried about it.
4,000 miles away from the crime-ridden world of the American tabloids, a quieter but no less profound photographic revolution was taking place.
In the formal elegance of palaces and chancelries, international statesmen wrangled over the future of Europe in the aftermath of World War I.
Outside, the press waited patiently for the chance to take four more portraits. Inside, however, some very different pictures were being taken.
The photographer was Eric Salomon, a cultivated upper-class Berliner. He specialized in unposed portraits of politicians, celebrities and statesmen.
Never before had the high and the mighty been caught in such off-guard moments.
Salomon's pictures soon earned him the label The Man with the Candid Camera.
It was such a new view to people about their leaders, about their politicians, because instead of the formal portrait, somehow he was able with his eye to make perfectly beautiful and fascinating pictures with available light that look as though you're there and they don't know it.
All of these people who appeared to the public here before this as stuff shirts, all of a sudden there they are smoking cigars and relaxing and their legs are all over the place and their arms and everything.
This tells you about these people and it's illuminating and it's terribly important.
Salomon's pictures were made possible by new camera technology. In place of the bulky, speed graphic favored by most press photographers, he used smaller, more discreet cameras.
The lenses were so fine they could dispense with flash and work with available light.
The Leica had a rule of film rather than photographic plates and was compact enough to be carried in a jacket pocket. In Salomon's hands, it was the perfect precision tool.
What it meant was instead of going into an event where you have this big camera and you'd have a flash on it and you'd say, smile and you'd shoot the shutter, all of a sudden you had a small instrument that you could hold close to you and hold it up and very quietly take images and therefore you could take pictures more discreetly.
He came to photography at the age of 40 or 41 and then never having handled a camera before. So he was a complete amateur. He was not a professional photographer.
He had been working in the promotion department of publisher and there for the first time he came into contact with photography.
Salomon began by snatching forbidden pictures from Berlin courtrooms using a camera concealed in his hat.
He then started gate crashing society dinners and high level diplomatic conferences. Only occasionally was he spotted.
Salomon made this whole business of stolen pictures respectable because Salomon went to the diplomatic dinners and the diplomatic doos.
One of the talents he had was wearing tails very well. He was not a lower class man and he could easily get himself into the soiree where the important individuals were.
He found a ready outlet for his photographs in the new picture magazines that had been started in Berlin and Munich. Soon other photographers were following his lead.
We broke down the boundaries and we started realizing that not always did the subject realize that a photographer was present.
I think actually that is the beginning of the kind of debunking that we've all become to expect. It was the first time that you really attempted to undermine the anticipated nobility of our major public figures.
Usually the candid camera worked to the benefit of public figures by humanizing them. Sometimes however politicians were made to appear all too human.
Mussolini started switching his nose and I took the picture. Now I was not aware of the fact what I had. It was a fraction of a second but I knew it was unusual.
Mussolini was looking such a fool he banned the magazine from all of Italy. So you could get out there and you could catch people looking foolish or sad or off balance or awkward or whatever.
And photographers were very eager to do that. Editors were very eager to publish it. And I think that in that period there was a sense that it was the off guard moment that was the truthful insight into someone.
After Salomon pioneered a whole new style of political photography his own career came to a halt with the rise of the Nazi party. After 1933 the picture magazines that had showcased his work would no longer use pictures taken by a Jewish photographer.
The war broke out in 1939. My parents came to Holland which they thought would be a neutral country. And that of course was a miscalculation of some magnitude.
And by about 1943 they were in a camp named Westerbork and from there they were shipped to Auschwitz which meant gas chambers.
But Salomon's influence lived on. Some of the people who had worked with him fled Nazi Germany taking the candid techniques with them.
Stephen Laurent founded a magazine which offered a unique mixture of picture based reportage and light hearted entertainment. It was called Picture Post.
Picture Post did produce this absolutely winning combination of titillation and serious research and serious comment. I think the weight was on serious comment.
People bought for both reasons. People in a way liked to have their eyes opened and Picture Post did it far more successfully than any of the daily press did I think.
In America another group of emigres including photographers like Alfred Eisenstadt and Robert Kappa found work on a new publication that was to prove one of the most successful and influential picture magazines of all time.
Life magazine came into being at a time in both American and world history because the time just came about that it should be created.
We had reached the point of storytelling in words and now the whole world was turning slowly towards seeing what was happening in images, seeing what was happening rather than reading what was happening.
And when Life magazine was born in 1936 the hour had just come.
That's a good face. That's pretty swell. It is the moment when people begin to get their news in pictures.
It's not that we haven't had pictures before we certainly have but people begin to depend on pictures primarily. They look to the pictures before they look to the text.
Life was founded by publishing entrepreneur Henry Luce. His philosophy was grand but simple. To see life, to see the world, to eye witness great events, to see strange things, to see and be amazed.
The editors of Life magazine were astonished. That's the word.
We're astonished that the first issues of life were so successful that the newsstands were on Monday morning when the first weeks issues came out people would stand in line to be sure that they were able to buy one before the magazine was sold out.
By the mid-30s the public on both sides of the Atlantic expected more from its newspapers. A story without a picture was only half a story.
And in December 1936 a Fleet Street photographer provided a glimpse of the true drama that lay behind a major political crisis.
This is on its own. This is absolutely on its own. Cannot be compared with any other pictures.
This picture you see was taken just after it announced to the whole of the nation and the empire that it had abdicated. That's the king there leaving England for the last time as king.
But you must believe me when I tell you that I have found it impossible to carry the heavy burden of responsibility and to discharge my duties as king as I would wish to do without the help and support of the woman I love.
When Edward VIII made his dramatic abdication broadcast from Windsor Castle an official photographer was on hand to record the scene.
But outside Chris Ware and his assistant Jack Richards were working out how to get the picture that people really wanted to see.
We lined up on the other side of the road and that's when we saw the headlights of a car coming.
And as it was getting nearer Chris said to me, cross the road Jack, don't run and don't walk too slow because I don't want you to get run over but just walk across the road.
And as the car slowed down he's up and ready and he's looking like that and he can see the headlights of the car and it's turning and just saying he gets it.
He's been dodging camera men for days and it's been spending weeks dodging them and then his car slows down from nowhere, from nowhere.
Chris folded up his camera, I picked up the case, he puts it in, he said I think he might be lucky.
That night Fleet Street editors had two pictures to choose from, the official and the unofficial.
There was no competition.
How long do you reckon you had to take that picture? To actually take the picture. 75th of a second.
How long do you reckon you had to take that picture? He's probably in there half an hour.
All he's got to do is sit down and say oh, would you mind putting your arm on the table? So you know, which is done there.
And that's it. To take that, you've got to have the luck and hope that everything's working and that's why I prefer that picture to that one.
By the end of the 30s, photographs were not just supplements to the news, they had become the news.
This was never more true than with the photograph that remains one of the most memorable ever taken.
In May 1937, the Hindenburg Airship left its hangar in Germany to embark on its 37th transatlantic flight.
All went smoothly until the airship approached the New Jersey coastline.
Well, the weather wasn't very good. It was kind of cloudy, dark. There was a little bit of thunder. The clouds were black and all that, but the ship was supposed to land at 6 o'clock that morning and it was 12 hours late.
And the weather was getting bad.
We were watching the weather and at about 4 o'clock in the afternoon the weather was clearing and we thought it would be good so the airship captain was advised to come on in as quickly as he could and be ready to land.
Well, here it comes, ladies and gentlemen, and what a great sight it is. A thrilling one. It's a marvelous sight. It's coming down out of the sky, pointed directly towards us and toward the mooring man.
Although this was a routine flight, giant airships were still something of a novelty and a handful of photographers and journalists were there to record the arrival of celebrity passengers.
There wasn't too many people from the press, there wasn't too many cameramen here, so they didn't expect anything that was going to happen and we didn't either. I mean, we came out here and to us it was a routine.
Among the photographers who were there that evening was Murray Becker from the Associated Press.
I don't know at the time who was aboard that they might want to photograph an interview and he went out to the scene and I think it was close to about 7 o'clock in May. It was still quite light.
It's practically standing still, now they've dropped ropes out of the nose of the ship. It's been taken to hold up down on the field by a number of men. At starting the rain again, the rain had stacked up a little bit. They backed motors of the ship, just holding it.
About this time, we all heard this explosion. It wasn't a loud explosion, it was a very distinct one and we all felt the shock. Since we were looking up, we saw this puff of smoke come up out of the top of the airship all the way aft,
just ahead of the big upper fiend up there.
It's a terrific race, ladies and gentlemen, the smoke and the slaves now and the framers rising to the ground over humanity and all the furthest it's been.
Most of us stood where we were, sort of frozen in place. I wasn't trying to tell you we were thinking about anything particularly, I think we were just here, here, what is this happening in front of us.
As the disaster unfolded, Murray Becker's photographer's instincts took over. Armed with a standard-issue press camera, he began taking pictures.
Murray Becker took the camera and he followed the thing a bit like this all around and suddenly it blew and he just clicked the camera.
What he had to do is to make the second picture, take the plate out, put it back in the camera, in the meantime everything is burning and screaming and then pull a slide out, re-cock the shutter, then take his second picture.
The first half a minute or a minute or so he must have made about a dozen pictures and the remarkable thing about it, sometimes in a situation like that, you're all fingers, you forget to do something with this type of camera, you just don't press a button like you do with a modern camera.
So he made at least a dozen good pictures and I guess the ones that were famous were about half a dozen, really top pictures.
I can't even talk to people, there's pressure on there. I can't talk, ladies and gentlemen. Honestly, it's just like there are masses smoking, and everybody can't hardly breathe and talk and screaming.
Honestly, I can hardly breathe, this is the worst thing I've ever witnessed.
When the story broke, they immediately sent a motorcycle rider or two out to get the plates. They returned with the plates and they were brought into the dark room where I was working and all the papers were calling, what do we have coming on the explosion?
And we said, well, we're getting stuff out now and how's we going to get it over here?
If the crash occurred a mile away, it would have been a news item, it would not have been this mammoth news event, but as it happened, everyone was there and saw an explosion. Rarely does the news sit for its portrait like this, but in this case it did.
And something like this that we just may have in the dark room, everybody rushing around getting pictures out as fast as they could, and of course eventually that great picture winds up in the front page of the New York Times.
This picture certainly is one of the most spectacular, hundreds of spectacular pictures.
And I think the fact that you can see the burning of the airship and the hydrogen back on the after part of the ship, and you can also see that the fire by this time, it spread the whole length of the ship and come out of the nose up here.
It also shows in comparison to the size of the Hennenberg against the members of the ground crew who look like little tiny ants down here.
But it wasn't just readers of the New York Times that saw Becker's remarkable picture. Within 24 hours, using courier systems as well as the latest wire and radio technology, the picture made it onto front pages the world over.
We used to send the print down to RCA and they would transmit it by radio photo to London, and London would distribute it throughout the continent, and then it went by radio photo the other way toward Tokyo, and Tokyo would distribute it to the far east.
Well, the Hennenberg is an extraordinary event. Within the space of far less than 24 hours, people in France and in Belgium and in Iowa and Missouri are seeing the same picture at virtually the same time.
It's a near simultaneous event. That was an unprecedented immediacy. The expectation that you could be in on the news as it happened is really established with the Hennenberg.
Now, it is only a matter of minutes after a news event has occurred before newspapers all over the country are carrying pictures that tell the story more graphically and completely than the printed word.
Pictures sent from any location.
By the end of the 30s, photography had established itself as the central medium of news.
In the words of the New York Daily News, it had proved its ability to astonish, bemuse and horrify.
But the power of photography had not been lost on the politicians of the era, and in the ideological battles that dominated the 30s, the camera would become an essential weapon, and photographers would play the role of persuaders.
And that role of the photographer is explored when decisive moments continues next Saturday at 10 past eight here on BBC Two.
Now, it is only a matter of minutes after a news event has occurred before newspapers all over the country are carrying pictures that tell the story more graphically.
