“Vsee life. See the world. Look at the faces of the poor and the gestures of the proud. Seeing strange things. Machines, armies, multitudes and shadows in the jungle. Seeing, and taking pleasure in seeing. See and be educated. See and be amazed.” Henry Luce, from the editorial for the launch of Life.
The publisher Henry Luce must have been damned crazy when in 1936, after founding Time and Fortune, he transformed Life, a satirical magazine from 1883, into what would become the newspaper that made history. Exceptional articles, scoops, wonderful images, we wouldn’t have seen the 20th century if it hadn’t been for her, the magazine of magazines.
Memorable publications
Among the memorable publications is that of the Normandy landing photographed by the legendary Robert Capa or that of the alleged kiss between the nurse and the sailor by Alfred Eisenstaedt in Times Square which announces the end of the war. Life, every image an icon, just like that. Whether it is news, war, customs, daily life, this courageous magazine has sent its correspondents to every corner of the planet: without its full-page images, long reports of words and photographs, we would have arrived poorer in the third millennium.
See Life, see the world
To see Life; To see the world (See Life), a motto that is a manifesto of free and curious journalism, capable of breaking down boundaries and eliminating distances. Who knows how the new generations would react today if they had Life in your hands, it would be a social experiment: leafing through large pages instead of shaking small screens, smelling the lead and caressing the paper, instead of keeping your gaze fixed inside the luminous rectangle of the smartphone. They would discover that what they are looking at only exists there, on that page where there is an exclusive image, an original news story, someone who is speaking right to them. A sort of dialogue that cannot be found anywhere else, not even by compulsively surfing the web.
Fifteen-year-old skiing prodigy Andrea Mead Lawrence trains for the Winter Olympics. Pico Peak, Vermont, United States. George Silk. © 1947. The Picture Collection LLC
The success of LIFE
Life owes its success – at the end of the war it had 13 and a half million copies sold – to the intuition of believing in the power of images, freeing them from being mere illustration, giving them back all the power to excite, document, inform, testify. Vietnam, the Second World War and the moon landing, war or peace photographs, what made this magazine unique and extraordinary was undoubtedly the quality: from 1936 to 2000, the magazine commissioned over 10 million photographs for 120 thousand articles. At its best, one in three Americans devoured its contents. It is unthinkable today to imagine these numbers and the emotion of having a newspaper in your hands.
Life magazine cover dedicated to the 1964 Innsbruck Winter Olympics. Photo by Ralph Crane
The power of images
Almost a century ago, therefore, Henry Luce had understood the power of images, enough to transform a magazine into legend. He had applied that shock to every area: the powerful images were not only the dramatic ones, but all those that could interpret and represent our life. To do this it was necessary to rely on authors who were singers of the time, explorers of the world: Henry Luce had invented illustrated journalism. Precisely on this ground, however, the magazine would have lost its primacy. With the arrival of television everything changes, moving images and sound are enchanting. A new era begins. Life will continue its publications until the 2000s, but the best season will remain the one from its foundation to the end of the 1960s.
The Milan-Cortina Olympics
Today, on the occasion of the Milan Cortina Winter Olympics, the exhibition “Olympics! Winter sports. Photographs from the Life archives 1936-1972” celebrates the magazine and its photographers in this magical period of time. At the Scaligeri excavations in Verona finally reopened after more than ten years of restoration – from 20 February to 2 June around one hundred images, many unpublished, divided into six thematic areas offer the opportunity to see alpine skiing and ice skating, slalom, cross-country skiing and everything that exists around winter sports. Sport is experience, spectacle, collective ritual and mirror of an era, but it is also challenge, effort, adventure and courage: all captured by a goal. Life’s photographs always have a strange effect: they are not just beautiful, none are just images, but fragments of history. From the Winter Olympics in Garmisch-Partenkirchen 1936 to Sapporo 1972, passing through Cortina 1956, the exhibition tells forty years of history crossed by planetary upheavals. From the pages of the magazine rises an epic power which finds its peak in spectacularisation in sport.
The important thing is to see
Henry Luce was aware of this, so much so that he founded it in 1954 Sports Illustratedthe magazine that transformed sport into stories, anecdotes, chronicles and, of course, great images. Faithful to his motto, the publisher who showed us the short century reminds us from the past that the important thing is to see, see and be amazed. © ALL RIGHTS RESERVED
The exhibition
Olympics! Winter sports.
Photographs from the Life archives 1936-1972
Scaligeri excavations of Verona
from February 20th to June 2nd
