Using images to tell a story, or simply photojournalism was made possible by printing and photography innovations that came around the middle of the 19th century.

Although early illustrations had appeared in newspapers, such as an illustration of the funeral of Lord Horatio Nelson in The Times (1806), the first weekly illustrated newspaper was the Illustrated London News, first printed in 1842. It presented the illustrations with the use of engravings.

The first photograph to be used in the illustration of a newspaper story was a depiction of barricades in Paris during the June Days uprising taken on 25 June 1848; the photo was published as an engraving in L'Illustration on 1–8 July 1848.

During the Crimean War, the ILN pioneered the birth of early photojournalism by printing pictures of the war taken by Roger Fenton.

Fenton was the first official war photographer and his work included documenting the effects it had on the troops, panoramas of the landscapes where the battles took place, model representations of the action, and portraits of commanders, which laid the groundwork for modern photojournalism.

Other photographers of the war included William Simpson and Carol Szathmari.

At the time, photos were used to mainly enhance the text rather than to act as a medium of information in its own right. However, this began to change with the work of one of the pioneers of photojournalism, John Thomson, in the late 1870s.

In collaboration with the radical journalist Adolphe Smith, he began publishing a monthly magazine, Street Life in London, from 1876 to 1877. The project documented the lives of the street people of London in photographs and text and established social documentary photography as a form of photojournalism.

Instead of the images acting as a supplement to the text, he pioneered the use of printed photographs as the predominant medium for the imparting of information, successfully combining photography with the printed word.

In 1887, flash powder was invented, enabling journalists such as Jacob Riis to photograph informal subjects indoors, which led to the landmark work How the Other Half Lives—documentation of squalid living conditions in New York City slums in the 1880s.

By 1897, it became possible to reproduce halftone photographs on printing presses running at full speed.

The "Golden Age of Photojournalism" is often considered to have started roughly around the 1930s and lasted until the 1950s. It was made possible thanks to the development of the compact commercial 35mm Leica camera in 1925, and the first flash bulbs between 1927 and 1930, which allowed next-level flexibility in taking pictures.