FRIDAY SURPRISE: LIFE is what happens while you're busy making other plans.

In 1936, an audacious Henry Luce changed the way we looked at the world. He took a staid publication, gave it a new, photojournalistic makeover, and created the legendary LIFE Magazine.

Luce hired the best photographers he could find, and sent them out to cover whatever was interesting - if not always the biggest story. LIFE became the must-read periodical for the next several decades, owing to a combination of superior illustration and good writing. People of my generation, and those of the previous one, can easily remember at least one great LIFE photo - if not a whole bunch. That's what LIFE was about, and it is not too great a stretch to say that LIFE defined American photojournalism.

Many of LIFE's photographers would become well-known, like Margaret Bourke-White...




Alfred Eisenstadt...




Gordon Parks...




Ralph Morse...




Robert Capa...





Joen Loengard...




Co Rentmeester...




...as well as many more whose names weren't as familiar, but were stupendous "shooters" in their own right. LIFE was THE gig to have, and it attracted (and got) the best talent.

Now, in the digital era, Google and TIME have teamed up to bring the entire LIFE photo archive to the web. The hundreds of thousands of images in the LIFE vault are being digitized and indexed by Google as fast as their scanners will scan. At this moment, only about 20% of the collection has been archived - but more photos are added every day, and they hope to be finished with the project in mere months.

The collection includes everything - photos that have been published, and those that haven't. You'll get to see images that didn't make the "cut", those that weren't good enough to be published, as well as those iconic images for which LIFE was so well known.

Visit the LIFE/Google archive at this link.

-=[ Grant ]=-

Tags: photography

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