UPI vs. AP
Excerpted with permission from Picture This! The Inside Story and Classic Photos of UPI Newspictures
(c) 2006, Gary Haynes
Serious photojournalists work to seize the moment, not win awards. UPI photographers regularly did both. In addition to seven Pulitzer Prizes they repeatedly won every other award known to news, feature, and sports photography: World Press Photo, the National Press Photographers Association’s Pictures of the Year, White House News Photographers Association, George Polk Memorial Awards, and regional and statewide photo competitions.
UPI and AP never published anything. They reported and photographed the news and distributed stories and pictures to customers who did publish. To a far greater degree than competition between their newspaper counterparts, AP and UPI photographers fought the clock and each other to get a picture first “to the wire” knowing that somewhere in the world, almost every minute, a customer was on deadline.
News service photography provided instant gratification. Today you shoot and transmit your best pictures and tomorrow morning you knew how well you did after a “jury” of editors with access to both UPI and AP services “voted” by publishing your photo or the other guy’s. These contests were closely monitored by both UPI and AP headquarters in New York.
A press pass was your all-access ticket – a ticket to experience without experience’s costs, an opportunity to meet people you’d otherwise never meet, and to learn that even the most famous and powerful try to put on their “best face” or at least pretend to be ordinary mortals whenever a news photographer’s camera is aimed at them.
For more than 30 years news service photographers worked anonymously. UPI routinely put bylines --reporters’ names -- on stories, but not on pictures until the 1970s, and then only after the New York Times and other large newspapers began requesting names so they could credit photographers along with the agencies they worked for.
Perhaps there was no rush to name the photographer, and the photographer wasn’t eager to be named, because for years even the finest photographs given the most prominent newspaper display didn’t exactly take a reader’s breath away. Until the 1980s, most large newspapers were printed using turn-of-the-century “letterpress” printing technology using easily smudged oil-based ink, off-white, low-quality “newsprint” paper, and coarse engraving screens.
The words stayed legible on the page, but the photoengraving dots that formed the pictures almost always smeared and became fuzzy and indistinct, so that even when newspapers used photographs well -- a good crop, a respectable size -- murky reproduction often left readers re-reading the caption to see what the photo was all about. Not until the 1980s had a majority of newspapers switched to “offset” presses that reproduce photos with fidelity on better, whiter paper.
By contrast LIFE, one of America’s most popular weekly magazines from 1936 through the early 1970s, was filled with photographs reproduced beautifully on oversize 11x14-inch pages, using fine engraving screens, high-quality inks, and glossy paper. Life often published a UPI or AP photo that had been widely reproduced in newspapers, but the quality magazine version appeared to be a different photo altogether.
In large part because their pictures were reproduced clearly enough to be appreciated, and because their name always appeared with their work, magazine photographers achieved near-celebrity status. Life became a standard by which the public judged photography, and many of today’s photo books celebrate “photojournalism” as if it had been the exclusive province of near-celebrity magazine photographers.
The Best of Life (1973), for example, opens with a two-page (1960) group shot of 39 justly famous Life photographers. But 300 pages later, photo credits reveal that scores of the photos among Life’s “best” were taken by UPI and AP photographers.
During the civil rights struggles in the South in the ‘60s, magazines would assign their own staff or pay freelance photographers more for a day’s work than UPI photographers made in a week. But those magazines regularly featured photos shot by UPI and AP staff photographers.
Newspaper photographers always enjoyed the luxury of working toward just one or two deadlines a day. And, most times, they could return with their pictures to their office, familiar surroundings, and a support staff to process the film and make prints.
But when UPI and AP photographers went toe-to-toe, getting a good picture was often the easy part. Today’s digital photo technology makes it a breeze for photographers to stay on the job while they send their pictures and captions to their office, but it wasn’t always so simple.
The news service skirmish used to involve lone photographers from each service who had to cover an event, leave the scene at the risk of missing something better, and get somewhere as fast as possible to process edit, print, caption, and transmit the pictures. The mad dash from an event to darkroom and back might be repeated two or three times on an onerous news day.
More often than not, there was no bureau nearby, so a “darkroom” involved a temporary operation that the photographer cobbled together in advance: a room that could be made dark, that had running water, electricity, and a phone. UPI worked out of hotel rooms, friendly local newspapers, public restrooms, and mobile homes parked near pay phones. Even a major Hollywood film studio, Paramount Pictures, once played host to UPI photographers trying to beat AP.
Converting a hotel room into a photo operation had its amusing moments. An upscale New Orleans Hyatt hotel room was transformed into a lab/darkroom with heavy black plastic gaffer-taped floor-to-ceiling over all the windows and door openings, and extension cords draped everywhere – to safelights, a film dryer, and a transmitter. The maid let herself in the first night to turn down the bed and leave chocolates on the pillows. No doubt wondering if Dr. Frankenstein had moved in, for the duration of the stay she stayed in the hall and pushed UPI’s chocolates under the door.
Even with multiple UPI photographers on a story, there was always a race to speed film from the photographer to the lab. By motorcycle from the first Super Bowl to the Los Angeles bureau. By ski couriers during the 1960 winter Olympics in Squaw Valley, Calif. And even by United Air Lines flight attendants at the 1968 Democratic National Convention in Chicago. UPI’s attractive young women film runners in eye-catching outfits were greeted by name and waved through security checkpoints by guards who hassled everybody else.
Foreign assignments often meant that in addition to a bagful of cameras and lenses, the photographer hauled a “portable” darkroom and transmitter. President Lyndon B. Johnson was en route to Australia in 1968 when he stopped in Pago Pago, American Samoa, for a few hours to give a speech while his plane refueled. UPI’s Los Angeles staffer transmitted five pictures, the first radiophotos ever transmitted from Pago Pago, using 700 pounds of extra gear lugged from Los Angeles and rigged up inside a U. S. Navy facility.
News service competition sometimes got so intense that one would steal the other’s story and rewrite it. AP once caught a thief with a story from India that quoted a Mr. Siht El Otspueht. UP’s version appeared in The New York Sun with the same quote. Siht El Otspueht spelled backwards, is “The UP stole this.” AP had caught a thief.
Annual national and international photo awards affirmed AP and UPI photographers in the top echelons of world news photography – kept on their toes by the presence of the “other guy” that kept them both working harder and shoot ing smarter. In 1967, AP’S Jack Thornell shot a Pulitzer winner right under the nose of one of UPI’s best. In 1978 John Blair’s shot won UPI a Pulitzer even though AP had two photographers practically rubbing shoulders with him.
But UPI was unique in the newsgathering business because its photo and word operations were separate but equal. Not only did UPI photo bureaus operate independently of their “newsside” but in many cities, and for years that included the New York headquarters, “photo” was in another building entirely. The unorthodox management structure was a secret weapon, since almost every UPI photo coverage decision, from plan to execution, and especially the film editing , was done by photographers or photo editors who had never been reporters.
AP functioned more in the manner most newspapers do, with the photo operation an ancillary extension of the newsroom, and until the 1970s AP’s regional newsphoto editors in Boston, Washington, Atlanta, Chicago, Dallas and Los Angeles were all former “word men” with little photo experience or expertise.
AP’s photographers were easily as capable and skilled as UPI’s, but the minute they surrendered their film to an AP “photo editor” they often ceded advantage to UPI, because the best pictures didn’t always get picked. AP would win year-end contests with excellent pictures that a “photo editor” had failed to select back when the story was news.
Lou Garcia, a UPI photographer, began his news service career with AP, where his duties included , producing a picture page a week using pictures from AP photographers around the world.. Garcia and his boss Max Desfor were regularly “amused and amazed,” Garcia says, to find that some of the AP’s “best” pictures hadn’t been selected by AP’s photo editor who supposedly “edited” the film.
“Picture-taking [AP] photographers were often dismissed early to avoid overtime” Garcia recalls, “leaving an editor who was considered management to pick the frame, a picture [chosen not on its own merits but] because it matched the AP wire story,”
Every UPI photo bureau had fewer photographers than the AP photo bureau in the same city. In Philadelphia in 1960, AP had seven photo staffers to UPI’s one. UPI photographers often made up the staff disparity by being more nimble, able to assign themselves and scramble to a story - something as simple as catching the last commercial flight of the day – while an AP decision percolated though its cumbersome, word-oriented process.
UPI photographers, while anonymous, were not leaderless. Frank Tremaine, vice president for Newspictures, had distinguished himself as Honolulu bureau manager when the Japanese bombed Pearl Harbor. He filed the first news reports on the attack and his wife, Kay, dictated the first eyewitness accounts of the bombing. He was aboard the U.S.S. Missouri when Japan surrendered in 1945. Tremaine adapted well to the rowdy “picture side” full of colorful characters and great photo editors.
UPI’s executive picture editor Harold Blumenfeld believed that UPI photographers on assignment should carry a camera wherever they went. He met several shooters arriving for the 1960 World Series at the Pittsburgh airport and noticed that John Quinn, of the Chicago bureau, carried no camera. It was, Quinn explained, in his luggage. Blumenfeld turned away and loaded everybody else into UPI’s car, leaving Quinn to contemplate his future while catching a cab to the hotel.
Thanks to Blumenfeld, UPI embraced 35mm cameras in the late1950s, when most newspaper and AP photographers were still in their “Mexican Justice” mode: stand-‘em-up-and-shoot-‘em. Though a few AP photographers regularly used 35mm cameras, AP did not begin a systemwide 35mm conversion until after AP member papers began complaining that AP photos events, shot with a flash on the camera, lacked the “liveliness” of UPI’s pictures of the same situation.
At the 1960 political conventions Blumenfeld decreed that UPI would shoot only 35mm, allowing photographers to use far smaller cameras using “available light” and a streamlining the lab operation. He hand-picked photographers from around the system who were already comfortable with the small format.
In the field, UPI photographers were their own editors. On major national and international stories – Super Bowls, Inaugurals, Political Conventions, World Series – involving a large staff, New York headquarters worked out the plans and logistics involving multiple photographers, and sent excellent film editors who could find that needle in a haystack. New York’s top editors, Ted Majeski and Larry DeSantis, were a breed apart, able to “rephotograph the photographs” as the film blurred past their editing loupes. The 35mm format guaranteed that photographers would shoot a lot of film. Young staffers tended to use more film than the “old timers,” like Washington’s Frank Cancellare, who learned careful shooting durng his years with 4x5 cameras. “Cancy” could shoot five or six excellent pictures on a single 35mm roll. UPI photographers at the 1964 Democratic National Convention shot ten cases, 3000 rolls of 36-exposure 35mm film, a potential of 108,000 individual pictures.
Newcomers to these events were always startled to see just one editor, Schneider 4x magnifying loupe in hand, zipping past every frame like a human motor drive, pausing only to notch the numbered edge of an occasional frame to be printed. Fearing that the speed of the edit meant good pictures were being missed, at the end of the day newcomers would examine their own film. They were invariably amazed to see that UPI’s photo editor hadn’t missed a frame.
And UPI had attitude. For most young UPI photographers, UPI was their home, their family, their political base, and their distraction. Everything else could wait, including their families and friends who were expected to understand, as they rushed to catch the next plane to another big story. Photographers willing to do that were rewarded with more and more big stories, and a far-above -average divorce rate.
Photographers from the two agencies shared a mutual respect. Trying to beat the other guys by day didn’t mean that UPI and AP photographers didn’t schmooze together at night after the work was done. Eddie Adams of AP and Gary Haynes of UPI could be found prowling Shinjuku nightspots together during the Tokyo Olympics in 1964, signing autographs for eager young Japanese who refused to believe that the (then) athletic 6-foot Americans weren’t Olympians.
Still, the relationships weren’t always cordial. UPI’s Bill Lyon, Southern Division photo manager, once dangled AP’s photo editor, Bob Otey, off a third-floor balcony at Orlando’s Cape Colony Inn, forcing the terrified Otey to admit he had held back a roll of NASA pool film he was supposed to have given to UPI – a violation of the pool agreement.
Morty Dagawitz, facing a wave of UPI layoffs, got a job at AP as a photo editor in 1971, and experienced culture shock. “AP staffers acted more like civil servants, going by the book and watching the clock,” he says. “I never met an AP photographer who had the love of photography that my New York UPI colleagues did.”
Accustomed to the UPI culture in which editors grabbed cameras, Dagawitz spent one lunch hour photographing a horse-jumping contest right outside AP’s office in Rockefeller Center. His photos of horses amid the skyscrapers got AP lots of play, but threats of a union grievance instead of praise from fellow staffers. AP editors don’t take pictures, his boss explained. “Once you’ve become an editor for the AP there is no going backward.’”
However comprehensive a news service photo report might be at day’s end, its value to clients was to have a variety of photos at deadline time. Newspapers large or small use news service pictures in the same way – a mix of national and regional news, sports, and features.
Only one picture could be transmitted every eight minutes on either agency’s national picture network. UPI’s editors always tried to pace UPI’s pictures from major stories so as not to bury editors in more photos of a single event than any publication could possibly use, to the exclusion of all else that happened that day.
The AP, until the mid 1970s, didn’t so much edit its picture report as dump a hundred-plus photos a day on members with no apparent pacing, or grasp of member’s needs or deadlines. A single major story would often dominate AP’s picture wire to the virtual exclusion of all else, dozens of photos on a single subject that left editors on deadline desperate for pictures of other events – foreign, national, sports.
In the 1970s large newspapers began to hire photo editors to direct photo staffs who also monitored news service pictures, and they began to critique the AP picture report. At first, AP claimed to serve so many masters that it couldn’t be all things to everybody. But the criticism continued, and Editor and Publisher magazine invited photo editors from a dozen papers large and small to comment. David Yarnold, assistant photo director of the San Jose (Calif.) Mercury, said that he was “as touched as anyone by the royal wedding, but 41 transmissions from London (noon to noon) the day BEFORE was a bit bloody much. ” (E&P)
The article led to several New York sessions with AP exectives and member photo editors who wanted to see AP picture service improve, and to better serve their needs. AP President Louis Boccardi sat in on one marathon session, and not long after , AP’s picture report became more user-friendly.
UPI pictures gave AP a run for the money right up until UPI ran out of money. UPI didn’t wither away because AP provided superior pictures of the world news. UPI’s “enemy” was within - its owners operating well beyond their competence, fumbling and frittering away a great enterprise, despite the heroics of loyal UPI staffers who made concession after concession after personal sacrifice as they kept competing with AP while trying to keep the ship afloat as the captains were scuttling it.
“The strongest bonds that hold UP together,” observed author Stephen Vincent Benet, “and what it boils down to, when the sentiment and wisecracks are skimmed off, is an actual and genuine love of the game. Other factors may well be that UP is an organization of young men, average age about twenty-eight, from small towns and midwest colleges of journalism, plain fellows of Nordic stock with scarcely a Harvard B.A. among them, and every executive has come from the ranks.”
UPI Newspictures, RIP.
(c) 2006, Gary Haynes
Serious photojournalists work to seize the moment, not win awards. UPI photographers regularly did both. In addition to seven Pulitzer Prizes they repeatedly won every other award known to news, feature, and sports photography: World Press Photo, the National Press Photographers Association’s Pictures of the Year, White House News Photographers Association, George Polk Memorial Awards, and regional and statewide photo competitions.
UPI and AP never published anything. They reported and photographed the news and distributed stories and pictures to customers who did publish. To a far greater degree than competition between their newspaper counterparts, AP and UPI photographers fought the clock and each other to get a picture first “to the wire” knowing that somewhere in the world, almost every minute, a customer was on deadline.
News service photography provided instant gratification. Today you shoot and transmit your best pictures and tomorrow morning you knew how well you did after a “jury” of editors with access to both UPI and AP services “voted” by publishing your photo or the other guy’s. These contests were closely monitored by both UPI and AP headquarters in New York.
A press pass was your all-access ticket – a ticket to experience without experience’s costs, an opportunity to meet people you’d otherwise never meet, and to learn that even the most famous and powerful try to put on their “best face” or at least pretend to be ordinary mortals whenever a news photographer’s camera is aimed at them.
For more than 30 years news service photographers worked anonymously. UPI routinely put bylines --reporters’ names -- on stories, but not on pictures until the 1970s, and then only after the New York Times and other large newspapers began requesting names so they could credit photographers along with the agencies they worked for.
Perhaps there was no rush to name the photographer, and the photographer wasn’t eager to be named, because for years even the finest photographs given the most prominent newspaper display didn’t exactly take a reader’s breath away. Until the 1980s, most large newspapers were printed using turn-of-the-century “letterpress” printing technology using easily smudged oil-based ink, off-white, low-quality “newsprint” paper, and coarse engraving screens.
The words stayed legible on the page, but the photoengraving dots that formed the pictures almost always smeared and became fuzzy and indistinct, so that even when newspapers used photographs well -- a good crop, a respectable size -- murky reproduction often left readers re-reading the caption to see what the photo was all about. Not until the 1980s had a majority of newspapers switched to “offset” presses that reproduce photos with fidelity on better, whiter paper.
By contrast LIFE, one of America’s most popular weekly magazines from 1936 through the early 1970s, was filled with photographs reproduced beautifully on oversize 11x14-inch pages, using fine engraving screens, high-quality inks, and glossy paper. Life often published a UPI or AP photo that had been widely reproduced in newspapers, but the quality magazine version appeared to be a different photo altogether.
In large part because their pictures were reproduced clearly enough to be appreciated, and because their name always appeared with their work, magazine photographers achieved near-celebrity status. Life became a standard by which the public judged photography, and many of today’s photo books celebrate “photojournalism” as if it had been the exclusive province of near-celebrity magazine photographers.
The Best of Life (1973), for example, opens with a two-page (1960) group shot of 39 justly famous Life photographers. But 300 pages later, photo credits reveal that scores of the photos among Life’s “best” were taken by UPI and AP photographers.
During the civil rights struggles in the South in the ‘60s, magazines would assign their own staff or pay freelance photographers more for a day’s work than UPI photographers made in a week. But those magazines regularly featured photos shot by UPI and AP staff photographers.
Newspaper photographers always enjoyed the luxury of working toward just one or two deadlines a day. And, most times, they could return with their pictures to their office, familiar surroundings, and a support staff to process the film and make prints.
But when UPI and AP photographers went toe-to-toe, getting a good picture was often the easy part. Today’s digital photo technology makes it a breeze for photographers to stay on the job while they send their pictures and captions to their office, but it wasn’t always so simple.
The news service skirmish used to involve lone photographers from each service who had to cover an event, leave the scene at the risk of missing something better, and get somewhere as fast as possible to process edit, print, caption, and transmit the pictures. The mad dash from an event to darkroom and back might be repeated two or three times on an onerous news day.
More often than not, there was no bureau nearby, so a “darkroom” involved a temporary operation that the photographer cobbled together in advance: a room that could be made dark, that had running water, electricity, and a phone. UPI worked out of hotel rooms, friendly local newspapers, public restrooms, and mobile homes parked near pay phones. Even a major Hollywood film studio, Paramount Pictures, once played host to UPI photographers trying to beat AP.
Converting a hotel room into a photo operation had its amusing moments. An upscale New Orleans Hyatt hotel room was transformed into a lab/darkroom with heavy black plastic gaffer-taped floor-to-ceiling over all the windows and door openings, and extension cords draped everywhere – to safelights, a film dryer, and a transmitter. The maid let herself in the first night to turn down the bed and leave chocolates on the pillows. No doubt wondering if Dr. Frankenstein had moved in, for the duration of the stay she stayed in the hall and pushed UPI’s chocolates under the door.
Even with multiple UPI photographers on a story, there was always a race to speed film from the photographer to the lab. By motorcycle from the first Super Bowl to the Los Angeles bureau. By ski couriers during the 1960 winter Olympics in Squaw Valley, Calif. And even by United Air Lines flight attendants at the 1968 Democratic National Convention in Chicago. UPI’s attractive young women film runners in eye-catching outfits were greeted by name and waved through security checkpoints by guards who hassled everybody else.
Foreign assignments often meant that in addition to a bagful of cameras and lenses, the photographer hauled a “portable” darkroom and transmitter. President Lyndon B. Johnson was en route to Australia in 1968 when he stopped in Pago Pago, American Samoa, for a few hours to give a speech while his plane refueled. UPI’s Los Angeles staffer transmitted five pictures, the first radiophotos ever transmitted from Pago Pago, using 700 pounds of extra gear lugged from Los Angeles and rigged up inside a U. S. Navy facility.
News service competition sometimes got so intense that one would steal the other’s story and rewrite it. AP once caught a thief with a story from India that quoted a Mr. Siht El Otspueht. UP’s version appeared in The New York Sun with the same quote. Siht El Otspueht spelled backwards, is “The UP stole this.” AP had caught a thief.
Annual national and international photo awards affirmed AP and UPI photographers in the top echelons of world news photography – kept on their toes by the presence of the “other guy” that kept them both working harder and shoot ing smarter. In 1967, AP’S Jack Thornell shot a Pulitzer winner right under the nose of one of UPI’s best. In 1978 John Blair’s shot won UPI a Pulitzer even though AP had two photographers practically rubbing shoulders with him.
But UPI was unique in the newsgathering business because its photo and word operations were separate but equal. Not only did UPI photo bureaus operate independently of their “newsside” but in many cities, and for years that included the New York headquarters, “photo” was in another building entirely. The unorthodox management structure was a secret weapon, since almost every UPI photo coverage decision, from plan to execution, and especially the film editing , was done by photographers or photo editors who had never been reporters.
AP functioned more in the manner most newspapers do, with the photo operation an ancillary extension of the newsroom, and until the 1970s AP’s regional newsphoto editors in Boston, Washington, Atlanta, Chicago, Dallas and Los Angeles were all former “word men” with little photo experience or expertise.
AP’s photographers were easily as capable and skilled as UPI’s, but the minute they surrendered their film to an AP “photo editor” they often ceded advantage to UPI, because the best pictures didn’t always get picked. AP would win year-end contests with excellent pictures that a “photo editor” had failed to select back when the story was news.
Lou Garcia, a UPI photographer, began his news service career with AP, where his duties included , producing a picture page a week using pictures from AP photographers around the world.. Garcia and his boss Max Desfor were regularly “amused and amazed,” Garcia says, to find that some of the AP’s “best” pictures hadn’t been selected by AP’s photo editor who supposedly “edited” the film.
“Picture-taking [AP] photographers were often dismissed early to avoid overtime” Garcia recalls, “leaving an editor who was considered management to pick the frame, a picture [chosen not on its own merits but] because it matched the AP wire story,”
Every UPI photo bureau had fewer photographers than the AP photo bureau in the same city. In Philadelphia in 1960, AP had seven photo staffers to UPI’s one. UPI photographers often made up the staff disparity by being more nimble, able to assign themselves and scramble to a story - something as simple as catching the last commercial flight of the day – while an AP decision percolated though its cumbersome, word-oriented process.
UPI photographers, while anonymous, were not leaderless. Frank Tremaine, vice president for Newspictures, had distinguished himself as Honolulu bureau manager when the Japanese bombed Pearl Harbor. He filed the first news reports on the attack and his wife, Kay, dictated the first eyewitness accounts of the bombing. He was aboard the U.S.S. Missouri when Japan surrendered in 1945. Tremaine adapted well to the rowdy “picture side” full of colorful characters and great photo editors.
UPI’s executive picture editor Harold Blumenfeld believed that UPI photographers on assignment should carry a camera wherever they went. He met several shooters arriving for the 1960 World Series at the Pittsburgh airport and noticed that John Quinn, of the Chicago bureau, carried no camera. It was, Quinn explained, in his luggage. Blumenfeld turned away and loaded everybody else into UPI’s car, leaving Quinn to contemplate his future while catching a cab to the hotel.
Thanks to Blumenfeld, UPI embraced 35mm cameras in the late1950s, when most newspaper and AP photographers were still in their “Mexican Justice” mode: stand-‘em-up-and-shoot-‘em. Though a few AP photographers regularly used 35mm cameras, AP did not begin a systemwide 35mm conversion until after AP member papers began complaining that AP photos events, shot with a flash on the camera, lacked the “liveliness” of UPI’s pictures of the same situation.
At the 1960 political conventions Blumenfeld decreed that UPI would shoot only 35mm, allowing photographers to use far smaller cameras using “available light” and a streamlining the lab operation. He hand-picked photographers from around the system who were already comfortable with the small format.
In the field, UPI photographers were their own editors. On major national and international stories – Super Bowls, Inaugurals, Political Conventions, World Series – involving a large staff, New York headquarters worked out the plans and logistics involving multiple photographers, and sent excellent film editors who could find that needle in a haystack. New York’s top editors, Ted Majeski and Larry DeSantis, were a breed apart, able to “rephotograph the photographs” as the film blurred past their editing loupes. The 35mm format guaranteed that photographers would shoot a lot of film. Young staffers tended to use more film than the “old timers,” like Washington’s Frank Cancellare, who learned careful shooting durng his years with 4x5 cameras. “Cancy” could shoot five or six excellent pictures on a single 35mm roll. UPI photographers at the 1964 Democratic National Convention shot ten cases, 3000 rolls of 36-exposure 35mm film, a potential of 108,000 individual pictures.
Newcomers to these events were always startled to see just one editor, Schneider 4x magnifying loupe in hand, zipping past every frame like a human motor drive, pausing only to notch the numbered edge of an occasional frame to be printed. Fearing that the speed of the edit meant good pictures were being missed, at the end of the day newcomers would examine their own film. They were invariably amazed to see that UPI’s photo editor hadn’t missed a frame.
And UPI had attitude. For most young UPI photographers, UPI was their home, their family, their political base, and their distraction. Everything else could wait, including their families and friends who were expected to understand, as they rushed to catch the next plane to another big story. Photographers willing to do that were rewarded with more and more big stories, and a far-above -average divorce rate.
Photographers from the two agencies shared a mutual respect. Trying to beat the other guys by day didn’t mean that UPI and AP photographers didn’t schmooze together at night after the work was done. Eddie Adams of AP and Gary Haynes of UPI could be found prowling Shinjuku nightspots together during the Tokyo Olympics in 1964, signing autographs for eager young Japanese who refused to believe that the (then) athletic 6-foot Americans weren’t Olympians.
Still, the relationships weren’t always cordial. UPI’s Bill Lyon, Southern Division photo manager, once dangled AP’s photo editor, Bob Otey, off a third-floor balcony at Orlando’s Cape Colony Inn, forcing the terrified Otey to admit he had held back a roll of NASA pool film he was supposed to have given to UPI – a violation of the pool agreement.
Morty Dagawitz, facing a wave of UPI layoffs, got a job at AP as a photo editor in 1971, and experienced culture shock. “AP staffers acted more like civil servants, going by the book and watching the clock,” he says. “I never met an AP photographer who had the love of photography that my New York UPI colleagues did.”
Accustomed to the UPI culture in which editors grabbed cameras, Dagawitz spent one lunch hour photographing a horse-jumping contest right outside AP’s office in Rockefeller Center. His photos of horses amid the skyscrapers got AP lots of play, but threats of a union grievance instead of praise from fellow staffers. AP editors don’t take pictures, his boss explained. “Once you’ve become an editor for the AP there is no going backward.’”
However comprehensive a news service photo report might be at day’s end, its value to clients was to have a variety of photos at deadline time. Newspapers large or small use news service pictures in the same way – a mix of national and regional news, sports, and features.
Only one picture could be transmitted every eight minutes on either agency’s national picture network. UPI’s editors always tried to pace UPI’s pictures from major stories so as not to bury editors in more photos of a single event than any publication could possibly use, to the exclusion of all else that happened that day.
The AP, until the mid 1970s, didn’t so much edit its picture report as dump a hundred-plus photos a day on members with no apparent pacing, or grasp of member’s needs or deadlines. A single major story would often dominate AP’s picture wire to the virtual exclusion of all else, dozens of photos on a single subject that left editors on deadline desperate for pictures of other events – foreign, national, sports.
In the 1970s large newspapers began to hire photo editors to direct photo staffs who also monitored news service pictures, and they began to critique the AP picture report. At first, AP claimed to serve so many masters that it couldn’t be all things to everybody. But the criticism continued, and Editor and Publisher magazine invited photo editors from a dozen papers large and small to comment. David Yarnold, assistant photo director of the San Jose (Calif.) Mercury, said that he was “as touched as anyone by the royal wedding, but 41 transmissions from London (noon to noon) the day BEFORE was a bit bloody much. ” (E&P)
The article led to several New York sessions with AP exectives and member photo editors who wanted to see AP picture service improve, and to better serve their needs. AP President Louis Boccardi sat in on one marathon session, and not long after , AP’s picture report became more user-friendly.
UPI pictures gave AP a run for the money right up until UPI ran out of money. UPI didn’t wither away because AP provided superior pictures of the world news. UPI’s “enemy” was within - its owners operating well beyond their competence, fumbling and frittering away a great enterprise, despite the heroics of loyal UPI staffers who made concession after concession after personal sacrifice as they kept competing with AP while trying to keep the ship afloat as the captains were scuttling it.
“The strongest bonds that hold UP together,” observed author Stephen Vincent Benet, “and what it boils down to, when the sentiment and wisecracks are skimmed off, is an actual and genuine love of the game. Other factors may well be that UP is an organization of young men, average age about twenty-eight, from small towns and midwest colleges of journalism, plain fellows of Nordic stock with scarcely a Harvard B.A. among them, and every executive has come from the ranks.”
UPI Newspictures, RIP.
