Life magazine

» see life.com as it lived, on the wayback machine

~ the obit ~

life magazine is one of those american institutions that reached everywhere without ever really reaching turkey. i grew up seeing the photographs in encyclopedias and school books. the sailor kissing the nurse in times square. the earthrise frame from apollo 8. i did not know until much later that most of them had first appeared in life.

henry luce launched it on 23 november 1936 as a weekly built around photojournalism at a scale nobody had tried. the first issue printed 380,000 copies. within four months it was clearing a million a week. by the 1950s roughly a quarter of the united states was reading it. the weekly cadence held for 36 years and then broke. television took the advertising and mail subscriptions replaced newsstand traffic. the final weekly issue shipped 29 december 1972.

life came back as a monthly in october 1978 and stayed on that cadence until may 2000. time inc announced the closure that march to route resources into real simple and the newer titles. there is a small piece of trivia that reads too clean to be invented. the 1936 debut issue included a baby named george story under the headline "life begins," and story died of heart failure on 4 april 2000, weeks before the last issue went out. after the monthly ended, a weekly newspaper supplement carried the life name from 2004 to 2007. then occasional special editions only. the brand still surfaces as a photo archive and the occasional coffee-table book, but the magazine itself has been dead for a quarter century.

~ the rap sheet ~

~ what it was ~

life was the picture magazine. luce built it as a companion to time and fortune, but the pitch was simpler. hire the best photographers and let the images carry the story. margaret bourke-white shot for it, alfred eisenstaedt too. gordon parks and w eugene smith shot the second half of the run. the layouts were large and the captions were short. for americans in the 1940s and 1950s, life was how the outside world looked.

the format worked because television had not yet learned to do photojournalism, and the newspapers were still black-and-white and small. life ran color spreads on glossy paper the same week the news happened. that was the whole product.

~ how it actually ended ~

the 1972 death was slow. television networks were putting nightly news into every american living room and advertisers followed the eyeballs. by 1971, 96 percent of life's circulation came from mail subscribers, which is expensive to service and cheap to sell. the magazine was still profitable on paper. it just could not grow.

the 2000 death was a corporate reallocation. the monthly was clearing about 1.5 million copies. time inc had newer titles to fund. the boardroom math said the life brand was worth more as an archive than as a running publication with a masthead to pay. so they closed it.

~ what survived ~

the photo archive. life licensed millions of images through the years and the archive now sits inside meredith / dotdash and gets syndicated out to google image results and documentary reels. most of the american century's iconic photography passed through the life masthead at some point. the magazine is dead. the pictures are everywhere.

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