LIFE COMES INTO FOCUS
Delving into Life magazine’s previously unseen archives for photographic gold
Few publications have captured the famous faces and unfolding events of the past century as vividly as Life magazine, which gained a reputation for photographic excellence from its launch in 1936 through to the print title’s closure at the turn of the millennium. Of the millions of images submitted to the periodical throughout its history, just 5% ever reached the printed pages, which means that there is an enormous archive of glass-plate negatives and a hidden history rarely seen by anyone – other than perhaps Walter Mitty.
A bold new project has now been launched to bring these forgotten images to light, following a partnership between Life magazine and Google Arts & Culture. Row upon row of storage shelves – spanning more than 1800m across three warehouses – have been fully digitised, and the result is that the public can now search in excess of four million images using Google’s innovative Life Tags (https://artsexperiments. withgoogle.com/lifetags), which help to categorise the photographs by subject.
Over the course of Life magazine’s existence, its photographers were granted unprecedented access to politicians, sports personalities and stars of the silver screen, so C&SC sifted through the archives to bring you some of the best images of celebrities and their cars.