As the technology for reproducing photographs improved in the first decade of the 20th century, a new world of images began to make the world seem smaller and its manufactured goods more desirable. Along with motion pictures, which the Lumière brothers of France introduced to the world in 1895, photographs in reproduction led to new concepts of celebrity, culture, advertising, and entertainment, all of which depended on the availability of a mass audience.
One example of the new visual culture provided by photomechanical reproduction is the birth of picture magazines, so called because their contents were defined as much by photographs as by text. Although many historians credit the illustrated weeklies published in Germany in the 1920s—such as Berliner Illustrierte Zeitung and Münchner Illustrierte Presse—as early models of the modern picture magazine, an even earlier publication was the National Geographic. Begun in 1888 as a journal for about a thousand geographers, the magazine transformed itself to capture an audience of millions by incorporating photographs into its pages. By 1907 fully half of its pages were devoted to exotic images from around the world. More importantly, the National Geographic editors wrote text to fit the photographs on hand, rather than the reverse.
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