For most of the history of photojournalism, photographers and their editors have used slang, jargon that doesn’t mean much or sounds made-up to outsiders. We use words like dummy, presser, scoop, wire, embargo, cuts, nutgraf, advertorial, tab, -30-, breakout, stringer, and a couple of favorites at my newspaper for a long time, “three-murder Saturday,” and “call if the Aldridge falls.”

In news photography, we used our own slang within journalism slang, with terms like soup, slicks, stop, fix, dev, negs, push, pull, glass, soft, kickback, backfocused, Bigma, grip-and-grin, fast or slow, aunt Millie or uncle Bob, stand-alone, enterprise, wild art, chimping, and the item I am discussing today, “weather art.”

Newspapers used to lean heavily on their photographers to generate weather art, especially on the iconic “slow news day.” We would walk around downtown or jump in the car and go to the park, the shaved ice place, the pool or splash park – anywhere we thought we could make pictures of some local faces.

We sometimes called it “weather art” because it could illustrate  what the day was like. If it was a pretty day, we might look for a mom swinging her kids in the park. If it was a winter storm, we might get a local business owner or grade school custodian sweeping snow. If it was super hot out, we would look for kids running through a garden sprinkler in their front yards.

As newspaper sizes and page width have shrunk over the years, the space for weather art has diminished, but I still grab one here and there, especially during fall break, spring break, the holidays or summer, when school is out and we have less news, but still need to bring local faces to our readers.

An interesting debate in the middle of this is “people vs pictorial.” I knew a photographer in the 1980s who would try to photograph old barns, windmills in the middle of a windswept field, old apple trees, anything pictorial. I’ve made some of these in my day, of course, but most of my pictures are of people in the community, because, as editors like to say, “sunsets don’t buy newspapers.”