Where have you gone, Henry Luce?
Life magazine would be an indispensable resource in our current time of coronavirus-spurred social upheaval. Who wouldn’t want to spend time with a magazine that devoted page after page to capturing the sights we now encounter each and every day — the empty sidewalks, the factories mass-producing ventilators, the children poring over their schoolwork while looking out the window?
Alas, Life was shuttered two decades ago, but its founders would have been game for just such a high-minded mission. “Thus to see, and to be shown, is now the will and new expectancy of half mankind,” read the wordy prospectus for the magazine after Henry Luce became owner (and substantially reimagined it) in 1936. “To see, and to show, is the purpose of this new magazine.” From then through 2000, Life tasked its roster of legendary photographers with capturing the comings and goings of a changing world.
Such ideals did not, however, stop the bosses at Life from putting movie stars on its covers: On the cover of the April 11, 1955, issue, Grace Kelly scrutinizes the reader with a cool expression, arched back, and a sheath of blonde hair. If you take the time to page through that issue, though, you’ll find that the glamour girl is given relatively short shrift.
Kelly is featured in a series of photos from Oscar night, but much more prominently featured is a four-page spread that suggests the seriousness with which the magazine took itself. Illustrated in typical Life fashion, with photographs building in intensity over a series of pages, the images carry the storytelling, including the striking shot that opens the article: A factory worker is captured craning his head around equipment that carries a pallet of doses, the boxes of which read: “Polio Vaccine. RUSH.” The worker wears an expression on his face that suggests the importance of his job is not lost on him.
Yet, in the first year of the new century, the powers that be deemed Life to be expendable. It wasn’t exactly a casualty of the so-called demise of print media. Sure, the internet was already tempting away readers, but things weren’t so bad: Rolling Stone was still printed on generously proportioned paper, and single issues of the New Yorker could be picked up for a mere $3. The same year that Life ended, O, The Oprah Magazine, was launched to great success.
Truth to tell, Life itself remained a profitable enterprise, according to a report on the magazine’s demise for CNN.com. “It was still in the black,” said Don Logan, the chairman and chief executive of Time Inc., the magazine’s publisher since Luce took over. The article cited increased costs and competition from other media, but circulation remained robust: The figure given, 1.5 million readers, is nothing to shake a stick at.
So, why was the curtain closed on Life? In fact, the decision to end what was once a ubiquitous presence in readers’ mailboxes and on the waiting-room tables of dentists everywhere surely was about more than dollars and cents. The magazine had been considered yesterday’s news for a number of years. “Despite the exceptional efforts of a number of talented publishers and editors, the publishing formula for a monthly, general interest magazine was just not sustainable,” Logan and Norman Pearlstine, the editor-in-chief of Time Inc., told CNN. “A monthly, general interest magazine” — well, that made Life sound about as au courant as, say, an afternoon newspaper.
In fact, Life had gone on life support once before: In 1972, the powers that be canned the weekly version of the periodical, reviving it six years later on a monthly basis. By the mid-1990s, when I, as a preteen with a deep appreciation for the magazine’s history, took out a subscription, Life bore a family resemblance, but nothing more, to the dazzling publication of the reign of Luce (who died in 1967). Each issue still featured the magazine’s bold logo, but its spirit was rarely in evidence. I knew even then that to subscribe was an act of nostalgia, like buying a VCR in the age of streaming.
There was plenty to be nostalgic about: At its best, Life reminded readers of the special power of still images, even when judged against radio or television. The pleasure of looking at Life came in lingering over the pictures, which preserved in perpetuity the most fleeting of things — an expression a person held for a millisecond, or an action done in passing.
Consider one of the best features ever to appear in the magazine, W. Eugene Smith’s 1948 photographic study of Dr. Ernest Guy Ceriani, a general practitioner in the town of Kremmling, Colorado. In an example of the editors’ keen sense of layout, small photographs of Dr. Ceriani’s activities frame several pages. In one high-angle shot, the physician sits at the bed of an influenza patient; in another over-the-shoulder angle, he examines a tonsillitis-afflicted 4-year-old girl. These images build to a series of larger photographs that includes a tragic case: a 2 ½-year-old girl injured after being kicked by a horse. The captions provide context, but the pictures tell the story. A long-lost culture of chivalry is expressed in a photo showing the child’s cowboy-hat-wearing father clutching his wife in his arms while both look on at Ceriani tending to their offspring. The doctor’s own overwrought expression, as he applies bandages to the child’s left eye (which she will lose), is captured in a riveting close-up, afforded a full page.
Sixty years after the Luce era of Life commenced with Margaret Bourke-White’s photographs of the Works Progress Administration’s Fort Peck Dam, the magazine was reduced to cover stories on such wan, uninspired subjects as volcanoes and “100 Years of the Automobile in America.” The celebrity culture the magazine catered to even in its heyday was unstoppable. If the public was going to be gripped by still photographs, those photographs had better show movie stars on red carpets or pop stars at the beach.
In a final acquiescence to mass taste, in the mid-2000s, Life emerged again as a Parade-style newspaper supplement. These days, its title and logo are routinely slapped onto special publications occasioned by, say, the anniversary of Woodstock. Young readers will likely recognize the white-and-red graphic — in its time, a logo as distinctive as McDonald’s golden arches — but they have little sense of what it once stood for.
Not every Life photo was the stuff of high drama — the compellingly insouciant smile of debutante Brenda Diana Duff Frazier was immortalized on a famous cover from 1938 — but even the most playful or silly have gained fresh significance when viewed during a time in which we are prevented or discouraged from taking part in countless ordinary and extraordinary activities.
What the world needs now is not photographic tours of celebrities’ homes but images of the sort Life once presented with regularity: of life as it is lived, in good times and in bad.
Peter Tonguette writes for many publications, including the Wall Street Journal, National Review, and Humanities.
