LifeLifemagazine was born during a period of
sweeping social and political change, and
quickly became the eyes and conscience of its
continually expanding readership. Few
magazines captured the world through such a
powerful lens. No other picture magazine—
certainly neither Looknor Colliers—could guide
(or mold) the average American’s perceptions
of the world, nation, and neighborhood.Life’s
photo essays alternately celebrated individual
courage, attacked tyranny, praised technology
and science, and focused on the trivial,
superficial, and ephemeral sides of life.
Publisher Henry R. Luce described
photography as “a new language, difficult, as yet
unmastered, but incredibly powerful”—the most
important machine age communications medium because it offered an
objective window on the world. Yet Life’s pictures were mastered and
managed by photo editors who saw the importance of manipulating
gesture and nuance. Before television no other medium reached as many
individuals at once; and for decades no magazine stamped the collective
consciousness with as many indelible images.
For all its influence, however,Lifewas not an original idea. Even
its title belonged to a fifty-seven-year-old New York humor magazine
whose publisher greedily held on to it until declining sales forced him to
sell its name for $92,000in 1936. The buyer was thirty-eight-year-old
Henry R. Luce, cofounder of Timeand Fortune. By the early 1930 s the
idea of starting an American picture magazine was definitely in the air.
Publishers like Condé Nast and the Cowles Brothers (who published the
first issue of Looka month afterLife’s premiere) were contemplating their
own. Luce aspired to develop a suitable theater for photographs long before
he founded Life.Fortunewas the inadvertent rehearsal. With FortuneLuce
wanted to make the “most beautiful magazine in the world,” but not a
photography magazine per se. Nevertheless a key component of Fortune’s
visual personality was striking still-life and journalistic photographs by
Margaret Bourke White, Erich Salomon, and Edward Steichen.90