George Grantham Bain.
George Grantham Bain was a New York photographer who founded the first news photography service, Bain News, in 1898.
Born in Chicago, Illinois, on January 7, 1865, to George Bain and Clara Mather Bain, the family soon moved to St. Louis, Missouri, where George grew up. While attending St. Louis University and studying chemistry, he learned the basics of photography, including developing prints on a windowsill with direct sunlight. He graduated with a law degree in 1883, joined St. Louis’ Globe-Democrat staff as a reporter, and moved over to the Post-Dispatch a year later. The Post-Dispatch sent him to Washington, D.C., as its bureau correspondent.
Bain later went to work for the United Press and, in 1898 founded the first news photography service in the United States – Bain News Service. A visionary who saw the potential of coupling photographs with words in newspapers and magazines, his news photo service focused on people and events, from politics to sports, disasters to celebrations. The Bain News Service accumulated photographs of worldwide coverage, which were distributed to various newspapers and were enhanced by receiving local pictures from its subscribers as part of their reimbursement.
By 1905, he had reputedly amassed one million photographs. The building where he operated was swept by fire in 1908, destroying all the photos he had accumulated, but he started over, and by pooling photographs produced by a variety of sources, he created another centralized repository of images.
Newspaper Publishing by George Grantham Bain, early 1900s
Bain died in Manhattan, New York, on April 20, 1944. Today, most of his photographic collection survives at the Library of Congress, including some 40,000 glass plate negatives and 50,000 photographic prints. The bulk of the collection dates from the 1910s to the mid-1920s, but scattered images can be found as early as the 1890s and as late as the 1930s. The subjects include celebrities, parades, sports events, immigration, political events, aviation, World War I, and the Mexican Revolution.
©Kathy Alexander/Legends of America, updated April 2024.
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