How snaps became objects of desire
The first exhibition in the UK of prints culled from the archive of America’s bestselling Life magazine has just opened at London’s
Atlas Gallery.
The archive of more than four million items, of which nearly one million are photographs, bears testament to a remarkable achievement. At its peak, in the Forties, Fifties and Sixties, Life sold up to 13.5million copies a week, worldwide.
In 2013, a BBC Four documentary presented by the British fashion photographer Rankin described how, through its “extraordinarily vivid photojournalism, Life caught the spirit of America as it blossomed into a world superpower. The magazine told the story of America in photographs, and also taught America how to be American. No other magazine in the world held the photograph in such high esteem. At Life, the pictures, not the words, did the talking. As a result, the Life photographer was king.”
But Life was eventually brought down by new technology and, later, the internet. In 1978, it went monthly and in 2000, it closed. Today, the archive resides in an apartment block in Brooklyn, supervised by two women. The boxed images are stored in aisles presided over by life-size cut-outs of the photographers themselves. It keeps itself going by chasing copyright and with occasional print sales.
These are picking up, following a slow start. Most of the Life photographers made images for publication, not to hang on walls. Henri Cartier-bresson, for instance, did not make prints to sell until the Eighties – about the time that galleries like Atlas first opened, to sell such work.
In 2011, when the Drouot auction room in Paris sold the collection of John G Morris, the long-term Life magazine photo editor, Morris said: “My hope is that this auction will change the outlook on photojournalism in the money markets.”
Perhaps thinking of such images as Man Ray’s Glass Tears (1930-32), which sold for more than $1million to the Hyatt Hotels owner John Pritzker in 1999, he expanded by saying: “Photography auctions in the past have consisted primarily of aesthetically beautiful prints which did not necessarily have much to do with telling the truth about life through the daily newspapers and in magazines. It remains to be seen how these kinds of photographs will go at auction.”
In the event, the sale was extremely positive. A unique print of a gipsy wedding by the Life photographer Robert Capa, for which the negative had long been lost, sold for a doubleestimate record of €20,000 (about £17,500 then). As a measure of the market’s progress, Capa’s record advanced to £115,000 last year, for his memorable image of a soldier being shot during the Spanish Civil War.
The 44 images at Atlas Gallery, which represents the Life archive in the UK, date from 1931 to 1991 and give a good feeling of what the magazine was about. Prices range from £950 for a print of Bob Landry’s joyous 1945 photograph of Fred Astaire, Putting on
the Ritz, to £39,000 for a rare artist’s proof of Alfred Eisenstaedt’s iconic photograph V-J Day in Times Square, of a sailor kissing a nurse during the celebrations on Aug 14 1945.
The exhibition also includes images of media celebrities such as Steve Mcqueen, the Beatles and Marilyn Monroe; troops at war and concentration camp survivors; people in rows watching a 3D cinema and children agog at a puppet theatre.
Seven photographs are by Margaret Bourke-white, including the one that graced the first Life cover in 1936, demonstrating her skill as a leading photojournalist in a primarily male environment. Bourkewhite’s rare early work can fetch six figures, but because Life owns the copyright and can print copies posthumously (she died in 1971) with an embossed signature and certificate of authenticity, the examples here only cost between £1,500 and £3,000.
In contrast, the archive has hardly any left of Andreas Feininger’s classic 1951 portrait of the powerful union of cameraman with technology, titled
The Photojournalist. While examples have sold at auction for between $30,000 and $46,000, Atlas has a signed artist’s proof from the archive priced at £26,000.
In 2017, The New York Times commented that, concurrent with the decline of newspapers, a devaluation of photojournalism had been taking place and the craft could no longer be pursued as a profession in the same way. The pictures at Atlas Gallery thus reflect a bygone era when highquality black-and-white analogue images were made by professionals for mass consumption. Now they have become objects of desire for collectors.
The pictures reflect a bygone era when images were made for mass consumption