I will admit I am biased. My father worked for Life magazine from 1937 through 1946. He was Life bureau cheif based in London during the Second World War. The Life photographers were under his charge taking their assignments from London.
Robert Capa being one of them. It was Capa's distorted, blurred images of the D-Day invasion becoming the historical record of the infamous day. Stephen Spielberg credited his photographs with being the visual impetus for his telling of the horrors in his film Saving Private Ryan. Of historical note Capa's negatives were ruined by being left on a dryer too long hence the blurring. Capa was the only still photographer making the landing with the first wave and only eleven of his images survived the dark room dryer.
Life -Google archive
Robert Capa
YES, I am excited! Many of you will not fully apreciate the impact Life Magazine had on our culture prior to the dominance of television. The historical, cultural record of our history in the 20th Century.
Life magazine provided a visual history of our times for decades. Those images have languished in cold storage, hidden from the public until today.
Henri Huet
Life magazine announced Tuesday that is is making more than 10 million of its archival photographs publicly available through a partnership with Google.
The archive includes many iconic images from throughout the 20th century taken by famous photographers like Gordon Parks, Margaret Bourke-White, and Dorothea Lange.
This 1936 image is of migrant worker Florence Thompson, taken in Nipomo, Calif. Another Lange photo of Thompson became one of the most iconic images of the Great Depression.
(Credit: Life/Dorothea Lange)
Currently, many of the photos--searchable by keyword--are available through Google Image Search. And many more will be added in the coming months, Life said.
The project mirrors one introduced in January in which Flickr began hosting thousands of images from the U.S. Library of Congress as part of its "The Commons" initiative. Between the two different efforts, the public now has access to a wide range of photographs from the 20th century, many of which are among the most famous images of the century.
Life said that as many as 97 percent of the photographs it will make available have never been seen by the public before. These likely include shots taken at the same time as some of those that have become famous. An example is a photograph of migrant worker Florence Thompson in 1936 by Dorothea Lange that was clearly part of the same series of shots that produced what many would say is the single most famous image of the Great Depression, a close-up of Thompson with two of her children tucked into her shoulders. The newly available image shows a wider angle of the woman.
WaPo
For researchers students, collectors and our national history in pictures this is, indeed, historical.
Picasso
Maude Callen/W. Eugene Smith
I can't do this collection justice. I implore you to visit/browse the collection. If you find an image enjoy you may even purchase a copy image.
Life magazine archive