This article explores how, in the interwar period, wire and radio photography developed in tandem with an expanding illustrated daily press and transnationally organised news photography services. It argues that in the aftermath of World War I, the press adopted wire photography as a way to mediate hopes and anxieties for a new world characterised by shrinking distances, increasing global contact and interconnection, and an accelerated pace of daily life. The article, which analyses art historian Aby Warburg’s Atlas Mnemosyne, cabled photos of Charles Lindbergh’s reception in Paris in 1927, and radiophotos of the Hindenburg disaster sent from New York to Berlin, shows how image transmission enabled photography to break free of the purely indexical or documentary function often imposed on it and become the symbol of a blossoming global culture.