The Inquiring Photographers

For more than fifty years, a man stopped New Yorkers on the street every day to ask questions like, “Why are you still single?” and “Would you work for a woman boss?” His name was Jimmy Jemail, the New York Daily News reporter known to readers as “The Inquiring Photographer.”

Jimmy would carry his camera around New York City, stopping people to take their photo and ask them questions. They could be about current events, politics, or just trivial matters. In his very first column, he asked, “Should a wife believe the things she hears her husband say in his sleep?”

Here’s what men in 1925 told him when asked why they were still single:

And the time he asked “Would you work for a woman employer?”

Jimmy started working at the Daily News as a security guard in 1921. But on his very first day, the city editor recognized him from his days as a former football player and offered him a job as a reporter. Apparently that’s how people got journalism jobs in 1921.

Jimmy’s Inquiring Photographer column ran for so long that people assumed he must be the original Inquiring Photographer. But that was actually a man named John Chapman. John Chapman didn’t really like the job, and he quit to become a drama critic, creating the opening for Jimmy. Much like the Dread Pirate Roberts, Jimmy inherited the title of Inquiring Photographer. He held it for more than 50 years.

His column became so popular that it set a template that was copied across the country. Other newspapers hired their own Inquiring Photographers.

In Washington DC, the Times Herald hired an “Inquiring Camera Girl” for their column. She later became famous for something else entirely. Do you recognize her in this picture?

Maybe you’ll recognize her byline:

Yep, that’s Jacqueline Bouvier, soon to be first lady Jackie Kennedy, photojournalist for her local paper.

In her role as Inquiring Camera Girl, she published around 600 columns, including one where she asked a question of a young senator named John F. Kennedy:

The Library of Congress says that they frequently get people asking variations of the question, “Jackie Kennedy once took my mother’s photograph! Can you help me to find it?”

But I digress. Back to Jimmy. Over more than 50 years, Jimmy photographed and asked his questions of countless thousands of people, and got in trouble sometimes along the way. He once was restrained for asking President Charles de Gaulle of France whether the size of a man’s nose is an indication of character. A woman once called the police on him for asking if she remembered her first kiss and how she enjoyed it. And he once ran through a police line at a parade to ask Harry Truman why he likes parades. (The answer: “Because they make me feel like a kid again.”)

But in 1968, Jimmy was ready to retire. And just like the Dread Pirate Roberts, he passed his title along. His apprentice, John Stapleton, became the Daily News’ new Inquiring Photographer until his own retirement in 1991. He was profiled in the New Yorker in 1982.

The Inquiring Photographer columns may not be the journalism trend they once were, but there is one newspaper that has run a similar column every week for the past twenty years that you may still regularly see.

I’m talking, of course, about The Onion.

They used to call the column “What do you think?” and it featured photographs of six people all answering a question about the news of the week. The newspaper always ran the same six photos with different names and jobs, one of my favorite running gags. Now, the column is called “American Voices” and it features only three of the six each week.

But if anyone deserves the title of modern Inquiring Photographer, it’s probably Brandon Stanton, whose Humans of New York project has been going for 15 years and just concluded a major exhibit in Grand Central Terminal.

His platform is different, but like those Inquiring Photographers before him, he takes photos of New Yorkers and asks questions and publishes them together. It’s a similar idea, even if his photos are much better and the answers are more substantive than his predecessors.

He just has to keep going for another 35 years to catch up with Jimmy Jemail.

And that’s it for another newsletter! Thanks as always for reading. I’ll see you next time!

David