The front pages of Scandinavian “quality newspapers” often include aesthetically pleasing and enigmatic photographs that dominate the whole page. These pictures seem to deviate from the traditional function of press pictures as facts in news stories. At the same time, they can be understood as part of a modernist tradition in journalism where objectivity is the norm. By adopting a historical perspective, this article highlights the subjective and artistic dimension in photography as it developed in parallel with the ideal of objectivity in the 1930s. This approach makes it possible to understand today's front-page photographs as well suited in meeting the effects of digitalization such as “multivocality” and a general mistrust in photography's indexical status.