The Origins of Life

“To see life; to see the world . . . to see and to take pleasure in seeing; to see and be amazed; to see and be instructed.” With these words, Henry Luce persuaded his board of directors at Time Inc. to risk starting a new magazine. He proposed that Dime (that was to be its newsstand price) rely almost exclusively on pictures to tell stories. Seventy years ago today, on November 23, 1936, the company published the first issue of what would turn out to be one of the most influential magazines in history. They had changed its name to Life. It was so successful it almost ruined the company.

Life lasted in its original form for 36 years, from the thirties through the sixties, filling the gap between rotogravure and television. It became an arbiter of American taste and left behind photographic images that remain emblems of their turbulent era.

In 1936 Luce was already a formidable magazine publisher, having started Time in 1923 and Fortune in 1930. He knew that a wider use of photographs was helping tabloids like the New York Daily News attract readers, and Time editors were themselves including plenty of pictures. Luce thought a magazine that gathered the best images of breaking news, along with visuals on the arts, show business, and the human experience, would be a hit. For $92,000 he bought a moribund humor magazine called Life in order to use its name.

Magazine editors, partial to the written word, had always seen photos and drawings as secondary to text. Life reversed the notion, relying on pictures buttressed only by explanatory captions.

Changes in photography helped spur the magazine’s success. Small cameras like the German Leica let photographers take successions of crystal-clear pictures without changing film or fiddling with the focus. The mini-cameras were much more mobile than large-format ones like the Speed Graphic used by many press photographers. Editors had the luxury of picking the perfect picture from dozens. The magazine’s high-quality coated paper allowed reproduction vastly superior to that possible on newsprint or in most magazines.

Life’s editors also gave unprecedented freedom to their photographers to choose their shots and even their subjects. A photo by Margaret Bourke-White illuminated the cover of Volume 1, Number 1. It showed the Fort Peck Dam looking simultaneously classical and futuristic. Her story in that issue examined the lives of the workers who were building the colossal structure.

Life photographers like Alfred Eisenstaedt and Carl Mydans specialized in unposed documentary reportage. They pioneered the photo essay, which conveyed complex information using graphic images.

But a problem arose with the first issue. News vendors couldn’t keep up with the demand. The initial 435,000 copies sold out almost immediately. Circulation surpassed half a million in a month, an unprecedented performance for a new magazine. By March 1937 Life was selling a million copies of each issue.

Not anticipating the demand, the company had given advertisers bargain rates if they signed on for the first year. For those initial participants, Life became the best advertising deal going. Expensive paper and investments in printing facilities drove the company’s costs to 15 cents a copy, but combined revenues amounted to only 6 cents. Time Inc.’s profits plummeted. It wasn’t until 1939, with circulation topping 2.4 million, that the magazine began to make money.

It became ubiquitous in American homes. It brought readers the most striking images of news events. It published respected writers like Graham Greene, Carl Sandburg, and James Michener, and in 1952 it offered Hemingway’s The Old Man and the Seacomplete in one issue before the story appeared in book form.

The historian James Baughman noted that Luce’s magazines “affected opinion by not upsetting it.” Life was always aimed at the comfortable middle of America. It shaped tastes, set trends, and educated its middlebrow readers about everything from art to nuclear fission. While not shying from images of stark reality—grisly photos of Japanese atrocities in China, for example—the magazine took an upbeat view of the world. It reflected Luce’s idea that during the Depression it had a mission “to restore to Americans some delight and confidence in America.” Though many said that confidence had turned to complacency by the 1950s, Luce continued to want to “validate America for its own sake.”

For all of that, Life was hardly bland. Its pages contained some of the most striking photographs ever published. The middle years of the twentieth century were etched into history by the images that appeared in Life:

—Covering the Spanish Civil War, Robert Capa snapped a loyalist soldier at the very instant he was struck by a bullet. Capa later waded ashore with the first waves of troops at on D-day and captured an urgent record of the invasion.

—Alfred Eisenstaedt’s shot of a sailor in Times Square kissing—almost devouring—a nurse during the celebration on V-J Day summed up the nation’s joy. It remains the most widely reproduced of all Life’s photos.

—Gordon Parks’s 1948 portrait of a Harlem gang leader, like many of the best Lifeimages, went beyond journalism into the realm of genuine art. The youth’s face against a broken window formed a stark symbol of urban despair.

—It’s hard to remember the assassination of Robert Kennedy and not think of Bill Eppridge’s pietà of the dying senator, his head cradled by a hotel busboy whose hand he had just shaken.

—In June 1969 Life’s editors devoted a six-page spread to portraits of 217 American soldiers who had been killed during a single week in Vietnam, asserting that “more than we must know how many, we must know who.”

As the years passed, television more and more fulfilled the role that Luce had envisioned for Life—giving pleasure, amazing, instructing. Television news became increasingly immediate. Improved color sets let TV compete with slick magazines. Lifelost its purpose. Nudged along by increased postal rates, the magazine died in 1972. It was brought back as a monthly in 1979 and is now issued as a weekly newspaper supplement, a ghost of its former self.

Life is dead, but during its formidable reign it truly transformed the way we saw the world. It played a role in the rise of the visual image as a full-fledged partner of the written word for conveying information. Its editors published images of such immediacy and power that sometimes they defined the events they depicted.