Of course, you are talking about news photographs, which practically worked out to pictures of violent events. A news photographer was a man who “”rode to the sound of the sirens,” driving like an ambulance driver himself, and arrived in time to take pictures. He did that often, many times a day, and, naturally, came up dry, more often than not, and kept on, until the odds favored him. He had a good Nikon, but that wasn’t essential. Lots of people had cameras– it was just that they weren’t willing to spend a week of chasing after possibilities to get a single picture. What cellphones did was to create the situation where bystanders had cameras, even though they had no prior intention of taking pictures.

I don’t know if you are familiar with the photograph, The Brownie Girl. This is a fundamentally different kind of picture, one taken by intent rather than by chance. It seems to have turned up about 1900, and the best evidence is that a commercial laboratory technician pirated a copy from some film he was processing. The picture shows a little girl, of perhaps seven or so, dressed in a tweed suit and picture hat, at the beach, pointing a Kodak “brownie” camera at the photographer, and charmingly giggling. Of course, this represented a certain level of technological progress. You can’t record a giggle with a shutter slower than 1/64 sec. or so. Presumably, the photographer was “daddy,” though of course there is not evidence. The picture’s element of playfulness, which raises it to the level of a significant work of art, is not about technique, so much as it is about the absence of a stranger.

I believe that the first female stage performer to have fans in the sense that Amanda Palmer, or Lady Gaga, or Lilly Allen have fans, was the ballerina Fanny Elssler (1810-1884). I mean that she had fans in the sense that energetic young middle-class men were willing to devote their energy to having sexual fantasies about a woman whom they had literally zero chance of actually sleeping with, or having a date with, or a long conversation with, or anything like that. They were willing to treat her like a queen, as a kind of avatar of the goddess Diana, or something like that.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fanny_Elssler

Here is an example of the kind of thing which happened when Fanny Elssler went on tour:

http://archive.mdhs.org/library/Image21.html

It was much more normal at the time for young men to devote their capacity for fan-dom to a political objective, for example, worship of someone like the Marquis de Lafayette or Giuseppe Garibaldi or Daniel O’Connell (the radical Irish politician), or Feargus O’Connor ( the “chartist” leader), or Lord Byron, going off to fight for Greek independence, or the historian Jules Michelet (), that is to say, a politician who had placed himself at the head of a democratic or nationalist movement. We are speaking, of course, of young men who, if they were not actually at school, under the immediate supervision of prefects and proctors, were nonetheless on a fairly short financial leash, one way or another. In our own terms, if you live in a college dormitory, and you wait for hours to get a glimpse of Richard M. Stallman during one of his visitations, that is what this kind of fan-dom was like.

() Michelet’s public lectures at the College de France kept the French government in a chronic state of alarm, because he attracted large numbers of young men of military age, who hung around for hours before and after the lectures, and who might suddenly decide to do something.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Feargus_O'Connor
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Giuseppe_Garibaldi