LIFE Magazine will forever be an element of the American cultural landscape. It hasn’t been around as a weekly newsmagazine since 1972, but that hardly seems to matter. It’s survived in various iterations since then, including monthly issues and Internet content, but LIFE seems to belong in a different era – when life was simpler, and the news stories of the day could be captured and distilled down into one single iconic photograph.
Of course, this sense is based on pure myth – that somehow, issues were just less complex 50, 60 or 70 years ago. They weren’t, but it’s a testament to the power of photography and the brilliance with which LIFE photographers harnessed that power when you look at the magazine’s coverage of the civil rights movement or the Vietnam War.
The photos that appeared in LIFE over the years have transcended their place as simply pieces of journalism and become pieces of art. (Not to downplay journalism whatsoever, but it’s a true feat when photographs meant to illustrate the news for that day or that week are still recognizable decades later.)
So with that idea in mind, the folks at LIFE have published The Classic Collection, a large-format hardcover filled with 100 of the magazine’s most immediately identifiable images. The photos are presented in a kind of art gallery format, with one photo to a page, and no writing. Caption information appears in regular intervals on its own page, so as not to distract from the pictures themselves.
It’s an appropriate format – these photos are gorgeous. Journalistically, they tell the kind of stories we print journalists would need hundreds of words to convey, and artistically – well, what’s more artistically meaningful than the human experience?
The book is broken down into four sections – People, Places, Moments and The Sunny Side of Life, but almost all of these shots are about the people in them. From the revealing portraits of celebrities like Madonna, Ernest Hemingway and the Beatles to the heartbreak of Bobby Kennedy’s assassination and dead babies in the midst of a war to the jubilation of Harry Truman over that misprinted newspaper, these are the pictures that tell the American story.
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