Life Magazine Color Photojournalism

Life Magazine: Color Photojournalism

Life magazine, founded by Henry Luce in 1936 as the first American all-photography magazine, created the modern photo essay and established the visual language of American mid-century journalism. For thirty-six years it was the most widely read magazine in the United States and the primary visual news medium for a country that did not yet have televised news as a significant force.

The Life Formula

Life's editorial formula was straightforward and revolutionary: use photographs to tell stories. A major story would receive four, six, or ten pages of photographs with minimal text. The photographs were shot by staff photographers who developed extraordinary skills in narrative sequencing - telling the beginning, middle, and end of a story in images that could be scanned in a few minutes by a reader on a lunch break.

Life's early years were primarily black-and-white - color reproduction was expensive and time-consuming - but color photography became increasingly central to the magazine from the 1950s onward as Kodachrome and Ektachrome became fast enough for handheld photojournalism and color printing became economical. Life's color work was characterized by the saturated, warm palette of Kodachrome and the magazine's high-quality four-color printing.

The Staff Photographers

Life's stable of photographers was the greatest collection of photographic talent assembled by any single publication: Alfred Eisenstaedt, Margaret Bourke-White, W. Eugene Smith, Carl Mydans, Gordon Parks, Dmitri Kessel, Philippe Halsman, and dozens of others who defined the craft. Many of these photographers worked exclusively on color for the magazine's major pictorial essays.

W. Eugene Smith's photo essays - 'Country Doctor' (1948), 'Spanish Village' (1951), 'Nurse Midwife' (1951) - set the standard for documentary photography's capacity to create social change. Gordon Parks's fashion photography for Life in the 1950s was unprecedented both for its subjects and its formal quality. Margaret Bourke-White's World War II color coverage was the first systematic color photojournalism produced under combat conditions.

Life's Legacy

Life ceased weekly publication in 1972 when television had permanently displaced it as the primary news medium. It published monthly and in special editions through 2007. The body of work it commissioned and published between 1936 and 1972 remains the largest single archive of 20th-century American photojournalism and the model for every subsequent picture magazine.