'LIFE Magazine and the Power of Photography' (Book Review)

Reviewed by Ken Tanaka

LIFE Magazine and the Power of Photography
By Katherine A. Bussard, Kristen Gresh, and 11 other editors and contributors
Princeton University Art Museum, April 2020
336 pages, 9 x 1.5 x 12.8 inches

The book at Amazon US, Amazon UK, and The Book Depository (with free worldwide shipping)

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Depending on your age it’s probably either hard to remember or imagine a world not saturated with images. We have long become completely accustomed to having instant access to visual support for nearly every subject or news item 24 hours a day. The thought of waiting until the arrival of a magazine to see photos of anything is simply beyond quaint; it’s inconceivable today.

But for much of the past century that’s exactly how Americans consumed much of their visual news. Weekly and monthly periodicals became a staple of the regular news information flow throughout middle-class America. Among these publications none made a deeper and broader impact than LIFE magazine, which, at its peak, had a subscribed circulation of over 8.5 million and reached an estimated 25% of Americans each week.

Published from November, 1936 to December, 1972 LIFE magazine’s strategic objective, as stated by its founder Henry R. Luce, was to exploit "the tremendous unrealized power of pictures." LIFE was certainly not the first photo-essay style magazine. It wasn’t even the second. But its quality of content and bold design soon made it the the leader of the pack. This book, and its currently COVID-shuttered exhibit at the Princeton University Art Museum, vividly illustrate why.

At this point you might be imagining that this is just another greatest-hits-of-LIFE-magazine photo collection. Nope. This is a solid body of scholarly work created by very knowledgeable art museum curators and historians. Although it’s certainly rich with imagery, this is unquestionably a reader’s book, not a "coffee table" book.

The book’s body starts where the magazine started, in 1936, with a reproduction of the simple three-page prospectus Henry R. Luce drafted to propose the magazine’s conceptual and strategic design to the Time Inc. executives. From there a series of 27 essays and features explore various facets and eras of the magazine, from its physical production, its navigation through many periods of social and political change, and its innovations in incorporating photography into the news essay. It ends at the magazine’s final issue cover and farewell statement by Ralph Graves, LIFE’s final managing editor.

LIFE Magazine and the Power of Photography is co-edited by two art museum curators who also created the current (2020) exhibition by the same title. My long-time friend Katherine Bussard is the Peter C. Bunnell Curator of Photography at the Princeton University Art Museum, the current-but-shuttered home of the show. Kristen Gresh is the Estrelita and Yousuf Karsh Senior Curator of Photographs at the Museum of Fine Arts, Boston, where the exhibition is scheduled to travel later this year, hopefully to an open museum.

So is a study of the late LIFE magazine’s history relevant today and, more specifically, relevant to photographers? I’d say absolutely to both questions. You’d be hard-pressed to find a better concise romp through America’s 20th century history and culture than this book. Now, more than most moments, you might actually find it comforting and anchoring to glimpse America experiencing crises during a century that featured plenty of tumultuous and frightening times. Yet here we still are.

Photographically relevant? Where else can you find a single place where some of the best works of Berenice Abbott, W. Eugene Smith, Henri Cartier-Bresson, Gordon Parks, and many other photographic pathfinders were published? This was ground zero for sculpting the form of the photo-essay and the photographic essay (not the same thing). This is where many founders of the medium’s standards strutted their stuff as young, energetic, inquisitive pros. This represented the moment when photographers were the nation’s eyes. Still relevant? Duh.

Ken

Some links:

Princeton Museum of Art

At the link above, be sure to take time to watch Kate Bussard’s wonderful short topical videos filmed in the exhibit. Nobody does this type of quick, razor-sharp exposition better than Kate. Also included is the exhibition’s opening lecture.

Yale Press flip-through video

Original contents copyright 2020 by Kenneth Tanaka. All Rights Reserved. Links in this post may be to our affiliates; sales through affiliate links may benefit this site.

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(To see all the comments, click on the "Comments" link below.)
Featured Comments from:

Sanjeev: "The LIFE magazine exhibition at the Princeton Art Museum was fantastic. I wanted to go back and see it a few times (the Museum is free thanks to the university) but the Covid shutdown happened."

Bill Tyler: "Mike, can you elaborate a bit on how you distinguish between a photo-essay and a photographic essay?"

Mike replies: That's a question I had too. Ken?

Ken replies: "Good question, Bill. The principal distinction, according to the book’s essay by Nadya Bair, was largely invented by LIFE's creator, Henry R. Luce. In brief, it comes down to who’s telling the story; a journalist or a photographer. In a 'photo-essay' it’s a journalist using words with photographs playing a supporting role. In the 'photographic essay,' Luce’s term, the photographer is telling the story, admittedly with a point of view. (Think Gene Smith.)

"Today, of course, the two terms are used indistinguishably. But in LIFE's early years Luce wanted to 'turn the dial up to 11' and go beyond what so many other photo magazines had already been delivering since the 1920s, especially in Europe. He really wanted to exploit 'the tremendous unrealized power of pictures.' That meant he wanted to let photographers tell stories, not just illustrate them.

"By the way, Be sure to explore the Exhibition Didactics and Installation Images documentation on that Princeton page. This is material that curators normally prepare for museum education staffs and docents to aid them in giving tours. It's unusual for this material to be given to the public but I suspect that the museum's emergency closure made it a logical decision to post."

Peter Culpepper: "My college library contained yearly bound volumes of LIFE. I found it difficult to study there."

John Camp: "I'm sure there are many great photos in the book, but in my opinion, the greatest single photo book ever published was Life's Picture History of World War II. The book was published in 1950 and there are dozens of photos in it that can only be called astonishing, many (most) uncredited. Given the risks being taken in some of the photos, I have to believe that many of the photographers were killed in the war. A few of the photos are in color, and the book also includes quite a few color paintings by military artists. (It's "Life's Picture History" not "Life's Photo History") although 90% of t he images are photos. The photos come from all sides in the conflict, American, British, French, German, Polish, Russian, Japanese, Chinese, Indian, North African, etc.) My father and two uncles with whom I was close fought in the war, and my father bought the book as soon as it came out. Over the years of my childhood, I literally destroyed it, turning pages until it fell apart. Forty years later, a friend bought me a vintage copy in good shape, and I remembered dozens of the photos in detail (and one haunted my dreams for years.) It is a book of its time—'German' and 'Nazi' were used interchangeably in the brief texts, and 'Jap' was often used. I have never seen another photo book that came close to it, not just because of the topic, but because the photos are simply so good."

Mike replies: I'd be interested to know the history of that book. I seem to have a dim memory that it was originally published in 1946 by Collier as Collier's Photographic History of WWII, which was later changed (by Collier) to The Picture History of WWII. I know I read about this long ago...either the LIFE volume in 1950 was the same book, abandoned by Collier and picked up by Time Inc. (which owned LIFE but was not then called Time-Life), or the LIFE title was a similar competitor but not the same. I just don't remember the details.

(By the way, this is why I abandoned my early ambition to become a bookman—all the bookmen I knew, such as William F. (Bill) Hale, Larry McMurtry, and Andy Moursund, had encyclopedic memories for details about books...Larry actually tracked individual books around the country in his head as they were exchanged between various parties. If he had sold a book ten years before he could tell you where it was, even if it was no longer owned by the party he sold it to. It's said that the founder of Kalmbach Publications, Al Kalmbach, a train man, could hear a train whistle during a car trip anywhere in the country and could tell you what train it was and where it originated and where it was bound, because he had memorized (or, probably more accurately, simply remembered) all the train schedules for the whole country. Bookmen have minds like that for books. I lacked the requisite kind of memory to be a real book man. I remember 'significant stories' (and visuals), not factual details.)

-et-: "One (very non-original) thought that this article brings to my mind is how much more of a factor print media was in those days than it is now. I grew up in a city of ~70,000 in West Virginia. It had a morning newspaper and an evening newspaper, and my parents subscribed to both. They also subscribed to the Sunday edition of The New York Times, and to Life, Look, Colliers, The Saturday Evening Post, National Geographic, The New Yorker, and The Ladies Home Journal. In addition, my father subscribed to Ellery Queen's Mystery Magazine and Alfred Hitchcock's Mystery Magazine, plus Galaxy SF, Astounding SF, and The Magazine of Fantasy and Science Fiction. My mother also subscribed to several other magazines that I have mostly forgotten except for the Smithsonian magazine and Archaeology. They did listen to the radio for news and for drama programs like Suspense, but did not get a TV until 1955, long after television had become part of the lives of most people. I suspect that this was because there was only one network station that could be received in that area in those days. —Tom"

Mike replies: On the other side of that divide, one thing I cannot seem to get used to about today is people walking along talking to another person remotely on some device which cannot be seen. Not only is it still strange to me to see someone animatedly talking to themselves, or appearing to, but the degree to which their focus is elsewhere is something I still find mildly disconcerting. They're not there—that is, their focus is not where their bodies actually are. I find it weird that you can encounter someone—on a walk, say—and have them completely ignore you. Your encounter with them in the real world is not as important as the virtual encounter they're having with whoever they're on the phone with. I just find it peculiar, is all. I haven't gotten used to it.

This is maybe a strange complaint from someone who spends all day online! 

Comments

[Sanjeev]

The Life magazine exhibition at the Princeton Art Museum was fantastic. I wanted to go back and see it a few times (the museum is free thanks to the university) but covid shutdown happened.

[Rob de Loe]

Thanks so much for the review Ken. I am definitely getting this book. I use Eugene Smith's Life Magazine essay "The Country Doctor" as an example of the photo essay approach in my course. I look forward to adding some more depth to that material with this book.

[David Saxe]

Interesting article. As a young boy growing up in Montreal in the 50’s, Life Magazine was my window on the world. In those days, news did not travel that quickly. What I remember about Queen Elizabeth’s coronation in 1952, was that news at that time from overseas travelled very slowly. Immediately following the coronation, the films of the event (movie and still) were sent undeveloped by air to North America where it would be processed and then included in the next week’s print edition. In all it took about a week to actually see the pictures in Life. Even the photos for the newspapers had a delay of about a day. At that time, it was considered to be very quick compared to 20 years earlier when it would take about a week, because at that time, the film would have to travel by ship. I might prefer that to these days where everything is instantaneous resulting in a more pressure-driven society.

[scott kirkpatrick]

The exhibit opened only two weeks before Princeton and all other US universities shut down. But the exhibit has gone online like many other academic activities. The opening video describes the approach taken, the history of a four year effort by a much larger group, and introduces the three main contributors. The very tightly edited set of eight (so far) two minute comments by Kate Bussard has turned the exhibit into a concise lecture course. The text for this course is the exhibit catalog, which appears to be a quite exhaustive trip though the planning, execution and thought processes that ended up producing a Life article, illustrated by extensive collections of ephemera -- the shapes that a photo article took along the way to its final form. I've ordered the catalog, which should give insights into how the stories they cover were affected by choice of images from the enormous number of shots that Life could commission and also through layout and caption development. When the Life image library became available online, I hoped that it would include outtakes from famous stories, but in fact very little beyond the published images is available. This exhibit goes well beyond that, showing both front and back of famous shots, with their handling and subsequent history showing in stamps and scars.

When I got serious about photography, in the late 1960s, the conversation in places like Jim Hughes' Camera 35 often centered around the reaction of some very fine photographers against Life magazine's view of the world and its channelling of photography into that framework. Danny Lyon wanted none of that. Gene Smith's battles with Life's editors were legend. I think you will find little of that debate in this exhibit. It's a trip in a time machine into the heart of the huge team enterprise which brought pictures to the world from the New Deal's taming of the west through WW II up to the Kennedy assassination and the moon landings. It was heart-warming to hear a Western Union telegram patiently explained to the modern audience.

[Albert Smith]

My pet peeve is shown in the second shot of the book (with dogs) and more than a few of the photo books in my personal library are borderline ruined because of this... photos spread across the binding which can never be spread flat enough to see the photo as it was actually shot.

I would gladly tolerate a smaller photo on one page or better yet I would not mind turning the book 90 degrees so the photo could occupy a single page in a larger scale.

I do miss Life magazine and all similar periodicals. Guess I'm old.

[But Albert, it was like that in the original magazine! It's funny because my thought was that this is ONE book in which crossing the gutter with a photo makes perfect sense...because they are replicating the spread in the magazine. --Mike]

[Dan Khong]

Mike

First, and just a few days back, you said the four letter word. Now, and before some readers can fully recover, you show and tell about the four letter word magazine.

Some hearts can barely take it anymore. Relief can only come after we get our hands on this book.

Dan K.

[David Dyer-Bennet]

It didn't occur to me to ask my parents for a subscription to Life for my photo interest.

It probably should have.

[PDLanum]

My education on Photography included the Time-Life series of books on Photography. I still have them and about once a year I look through them both to refresh my memory and to generate inspiration.

Our family subscribed to both Life and Look magazines from the late 50's through the early 70's when the coverage of the Civil Rights Movement - ah - became an issue among some of us... I do recall a lot of stories from Life through the years. Some of them have been covered by other media outlets due to the unfortunate fact that the photographers are/have died, but their work lives on.

[Allan Ostling]

I have placed an order for the book. I suspect it is going to make me wish I had not sold my Pentax-A* 300mm f/4 lens in 1985 (through Shutterbug Ads). With social distancing now advisable that focal length is back in vogue.

[Steve Rosenblum]

Wow, it is hard for me to believe that it has been nearly 50 years since I last held a freshly delivered copy of Life magazine in my hands. It would be difficult to overestimate the impact that magazines like Life and Look had on us in the pre-internet age of my youth when there were only 3 US TV networks mostly viewed in black and white. The photographs in these magazines really opened the world to us (and the Moon!).

[John Ironside]

With reference to David Saxe's comment on Queen Elizabeth's coronation, it was on 2 June 1953, not 1952. She became Queen immediately her father died in 1952.

My wife was able to watch the procession from the first floor of her family's photographic equipment business, James A Sinclair & Co, on the corner of Whitehall and Trafalgar Sq. They were known for Pt/Pd materials, and the Una and Newman-Sinclair Autokine cameras. But being only young, she fell asleep.
I was able to watch it live on the neighbour's TV, with a 10 or 12 inch screen, 405 line B&W, along with a dozen more friends and neighbours.
A week later we crocodiled from school to the local cinema to watch it in colour, together with the Ascent of Everest.

And Life was a big part of my photographic education, too. I kept the copy reporting on the JFK assassination for years.

[Andrew Sheppard]

'...that’s exactly how Americans consumed much of their visual news' - please, do remember that America is not exceptional, and that this would have been true anywhere in the world at the time. For example, Picture Post's weekly sales figures at its peak in 1943 were nearly 2m, which was 5% of the population in sales alone. I would guess the after-sale circulation would have been similar - making it the per capita equal of Life. it had almost a concurrent weekly life span, too, from the late 30s to the late 50s.

I am not meaning this as a negative comment about Life magazine, by the way - what kind of fool would try to think of one? Just wanting to say 'please, Mike - 'the World', when it's appropriate, not just 'America/Americans'. eh?'

[JOHN B GILLOOLY]

My book arrived yesterday and I'm looking forward to getting into it today. Sort of wish it were raining!

[scott kirkpatrick]

Mike, not only do I remember only a short time ago when it seemed like a businessman roaming an airport loudly having an unimportant sounding conversation or giving orders that didn't seem worth their volume would attract worried looks. Now it's taken for granted, but still a nuisance. And I live in a nuclear family in which at least the other three of us wander around with Blue Toothed audio in both ears. Conversation requires making eye contact and requesting an interrupt. What's the world coming to?

[scott kirkpatrick]

Following up on John Camp's recollection, my parents also snapped up a copy of Life's "Picture History of World War II," back in 1950, and I pored over it but not as aggressively as did John. Our copy left home with me and is still in good order:
https://flic.kr/p/2jcvKBi
From the masthead, one sees only Life editorial personnel:
https://flic.kr/p/2jcx679
One puzzle, of Robert Capa's D-Day shots only one appears and that is cropped small. But surely you remember this Gene Smith:
https://flic.kr/p/2jct4fs