[1] In October 1944, the Post assigned Witman to its Sunday supplement, Pictures magazine, printed in higher quality rotogravure with much in colour.
His prolific production spans St. Louis and Missouri history from the Great Depression to construction of the St. Louis Arch, and such historic events as U.S. presidential campaigns of Roosevelt, Truman, Eisenhower and Adlai Stevenson from the 1930s to the 1970s, inaugurations of Missouri governors Lloyd Stark and Phil Donnelly, speeches by Charles Lindbergh, A. Philip Randolph, Carl Sandburg, and Winston Churchill's 1946 "Iron Curtain" speech in Fulton.
Such big stories were interspersed with his features on regional events such as local balls, carnivals and parades, county fairs, chowder festivals, national bird and dog field trials and fox hunts, Ku Klux Klan revivals in Georgia, the civil rights movement,[2] a group of religious rattlesnake handlers in Kentucky, and R. Buckminster Fuller's geodesic Climatron at the Missouri Botanical Garden.
His archive, chiefly 67,766 photographic negatives is now housed in the State Historical Society of Missouri and includes his imagery of baseball,[3][4] boxing, Produce Row, steamboats, early aviation, a Negro baptism, horse racing, the unemployed, the military, war workers, union strikes, the state legislature, the Symphony, schools, scouts, colleges, the Art Museum, musicians, the police court, the public library, the city hospital, the morgue, the Zoo, and the prison.
[9] Equally vertiginous was the photograph the pair made from an eyrie where, perched on a plank at the peak of the nave of St Louis Cathedral, they encompassed a ‘God's-eye view’ of the whole congregation attending the funeral mass for a local cardinal.
[10][11] From the mid-1930s he was a very early pioneer of the use of 35mm cameras in news photography for the Post,[12] such as the Leica, developed in Germany in 1925 and used by the trailblazing Berliner Illustrierte Zeitung.
He used his position to decry the American Bar Association's prohibition of news photographers in the courtroom, and helped moderate the effects of that ban in several states.