Romance

Loud-shirted John Jay Price, long chief cameraman for the extinct New York World, since 1927 operator of his own news picture service in Manhattan, is now rated by Publisher Roy Wilson Howard as "one of the country's outstanding news photog-raphers." Two years ago, however, Jack Price angered clannish press photographers by writing in Editor & Publisher: "Photography is no longer the specialized profession, requiring many years to master. Any reporter can make a really good picture within a short time if he will give a little care and attention to a camera."

Last week Photographer Price, on the theory that if reporters can handle cameras, photographers can manage typewriters, published his second book,* dedicated to the instruction of the "lads of the country whose goal is the camera staff of a newspaper." Fellow photographers could temper their hostility by reading Jack Price's ecstatic picture of a news cameraman:

"In a riot he must be among the rioters; in a parade, one of the paraders; at a feast, often the unbidden guest. He sizzles at a fire and gets chilblains at a flood. He has been insulted and assaulted so often that some sympathetic States have enacted special legislation to protect him.

"Besides being a ubiquitous bird, an ace strategist and an untiring worker, he is a master technician with perfect control of the mechanisms that he operates. To the citizen who does not want his picture in print, the news photographer is Public Pain in the Neck No. 1; to others he is the symbol of opportunity. His body belongs to the city editor, he has no soul, and his life is lived between the pulmotor and Paradise. But without him all news would be colorless and the newspaper just a broad expanse of funereal type."

*NEWS PICTURES--Round Table Press. Inc. ($3.50).

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