LIFE MAGAZINE AND THE POWER OF PHOTOGRAPHY
Museum of Fine Arts, Boston
Through January 16, 2023
A current exhibit at the Boston Museum of Fine Arts (MFA) takes a deep look at Life Magazine. (That’s a journalism pun; Life’s chief competitor was Look.)
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| Life goes to press |
Life published weekly from 1883-1972 and monthly from 1978-2000. There’s still one called Life, but if you ignore magazines at the supermarket checkout, you might not be aware of that. It only does “commemorative” issues of iconic events and bears little resemblance to the original, though the photography remains stellar.
One might argue that the demise of Life doesn’t really matter. After all, one can go to Google Images and find any image one wishes. You could, but Life once offered that the Internet does not. At one time Life entered 25% of all American homes each week, which made it an influencer of public views on human-interest stories, but also of important social issues concerning war, race, technology, protest, and other public interest topics. I know of nothing substantive that reaches that much of the public today, unless one is naïve enough to think Tik Tok, Instagram, or Facebook are “substantive.” The latter actually contribute to the noise that distracts us from focusing on important things.
The MFA exhibit is small, but it’s more than random pictures. You will also learn about how photographers and writers collaborated and about Life’s discerning–read picky–editors and photo curators. One measure of this is a long table piled high with rejected 35mm slides–a million of them! The above 1946 photo of Natalie Kosek with a bin of rejected photos and scads more on her desk, the bulk of which will end up there after a page dumps her garbage. Another display shows strips of negatives that meticulous editors wearing jewelers’ loops pored over to select the best images, and contact sheets showing how they were cropped.
Life was a pioneer in bringing women aboard. Its first
photo cover was from Margaret Bourke-White, soon to be a favored Life contributor.
The subject is the Fort Peck Dam in Montana, and the internal spread shoed her shots
of instant shanty towns that housed and attended to the needs of the
construction crews. Other than New Deal agencies, I can’t think of another outlet
that meant as much to Depression era shutterbugs than Life.
The magazine went to war in the 1940s. Robert Capa contributed an image that, at first glance, might make you wonder why it was chosen given that it’s out of focus. When you realize that it’s an American GI swimming ashore of D-Day in 1944, that blurry shot perfectly captures the frantic chaos of the invasion of France, the grim determination of the soldiers, and the dangers they faced. The magazine also excelled in subtle propaganda during the war. Carl Mydans went on assignment at the relocation camps where Japanese-American were interned as “enemy aliens” during World War II, surely one of the most shameful incidents in this nation’s history. Instead of belaboring sorrow, Mydans gave us seemingly banal shots. That was the point; Mydans normalized Japanese-Americans to underscore that they were as “American” as their jailers.
Numerous Life Magazine photos became so familiar that they were mythologized. A lot of history textbooks duplicated a brilliantly ironic Bourke-White image of African Americans standing in a food line. Chances are good it’s labeled a Great Depression breadline. Not so! They were victims of a 1937 Louisville flood. Alfred Eisenstaedt captured the euphoria of Victory over Japan Day in Times Square (1945). Popular opinion holds that it’s two sweethearts kissing; in truth, they were strangers and didn’t meet again until many years later. Such indeed is the power of photography!
After the war, Life published another famous photographer, Henri Cartier-Bresson, whose people of Russia photos were rare glimpses behind the Iron Curtain. Frank Dandridge’s 1963 “Birmingham Bombing Victim” silently but powerfully portrayed the tragedy and pathos of racism and Neil Armstrong’s image of fellow Apollo 11 astronaut Buzz Aldrin—seen here reprinted in one of the aforementioned commemorative issues –altered the way Americans began to think of their solar system. Life seldom engaged in abstract art photography, but Fritz Goro contributed a stunning look at a red laser light fired through a pinhole in a razor blade. It’s especially stunning given that it was made in 1962.
Call me crazy, but maybe we need to revive Life and assign picky editors to Instagram.
Rob Weir
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