Ena Ozaki
Ena Ozaki (she/her) is a PhD candidate in the American & New England Studies Program at Boston University, where she also earned her MA in American & New England Studies. Her research explores the intersection of American print culture and modernity at the turn of the twentieth century, with a particular focus on the development of the magazine as a popular media form. Her dissertation examines how magazine journalism responded to and tackled problems of urbanization and industrialization in turn-of-the-century America.
Exhibition Review: Life Magazine and the Power of Photography
Temporary exhibition, Ann and Graham Gund Gallery at the Museum of Fine Arts, Boston: October 9, 2022–January 16, 2023
To see and to show. These are the words journalist Henry Luce used to describe the purpose of his new magazine in a 1936 prospectus. Tentatively named The Show-Book of the World, the magazine would become one of the most influential publications shaping twentieth-century American mainstream culture: Life. Co-organized by Kristen Gresh of the Museum of Fine Arts, Boston and Katherine A. Bussard of the Princeton University Art Museum, “Life Magazine and the Power of Photography” at the MFA (October 9, 2022–January 16, 2023) posed important questions regarding how the general-interest magazine shaped American perspectives on the world.[1] What made this exhibition and its award-winning extensive catalog possible was the museums’ and the contributors’ recently granted access to the Life Picture Collection and the Time Inc. Records at the New-York Historical Society. Delving into photographs and documents of those archives, the show explored “the creation and impact of the carefully selected images found in the pages of Life—and the precisely crafted narratives told through these pictures” to demonstrate how the magazine encouraged conversations about war, race, technology, and national identity in the twentieth-century United States.[2] The exhibition’s particular focus was on the interactions between editors, reporters, and photographers, and the curators uncovered this process of visual storytelling in depth. Visitors could see how a particular photograph was taken, selected, interpreted, and (re)used for publication to tell a particular story. The exhibition nudged us to (re)read stories behind the images, which are sometimes overlooked in the name of objective journalism.
“Life Magazine and the Power of Photography” opened with Henry Luce’s 1936 prospectus articulating that his new magazine would be an innovative periodical in terms of its emphasis on the power of photography as a form of journalism.[3] In the prospectus, he stresses the ubiquity, abundance, and accessibility of photography in the twentieth-century journalism. He goes on, however, to maintain that the potential of photography has yet to be fully realized and it is still less influential than “written news.” For him, photographs are “taken haphazardly,” “published haphazardly,” and “looked at haphazardly.”[4] Thus, he argues, photographers and what he calls “camera editors” who could strategically take or edit photographic images to make them more telling and newsworthy are needed for the successful use of photography in journalism. His intention was to package carefully edited and selected images in a coherent story, or in his own words, to make “an effective mosaic.”[5] The language of the prospectus encouraged visitors to understand the centrality of photography in Life, and at the same time, to ponder big questions. In what ways did Life craft that mosaic? For whom did it work best and most effectively? If Life told certain stories through a single photograph and discarded others, how did such narrative distortion affect the spread of racist and colonialist worldview?
The exhibition interwove a series of works by photographers working with Life—both salaried and freelance— and stories about the magazine’s editorial practices. Specific stories were investigated in great depth. They showed that the magazine’s visual storytelling process was highly collaborative. First, the editorial team crafted assignments for photographers, and photographers visualized the idea of the assignments while working with researchers and reporters. The editorial team then selected images and reviewed the caption text submitted by photographer-reporter teams. After this, the art director and layout artists worked with writers and researchers to finalize the page design. The final layouts were then carried by train from New York to Chicago, the location of the magazine’s printer, R. R. Donnelley & Sons, to be printed and distributed.
Margaret Bourke-White’s photograph of the new Fort Peck Dam in Montana was featured as the cover in the magazine’s first issue. This was the first Life photograph visitors encountered in the exhibition —and its cover story “Franklin Roosevelt’s Wild West” were the earliest products of that collaboration. One of the first female photographers working with Life, Bourke-White photographed the dam as part of the New Deal project. Henry Luce assigned her to take pictures of dam construction and told her to pay special attention to “something on a grand scale that might make a cover.”[6] Beyond the expectation of Luce and the editors, she also captured in her photographs was the life of people working at and living in the dam’s construction site, in whom she saw the nineteenth-century Wild West.
The photo-essay, or photographic essay, was one notable feature of Life’s photojournalism. The magazine’s definition of the photo-essay is somewhat elusive; as photographic historian Nadya Bair points out, its definition changed over time, along with the shifting place of photography in the media landscape.[7] Still, the exhibition demonstrated that the photo-essay always played a central role in the magazine. In addition to Bourke-White’s above-mentioned “Franklin Roosevelt’s Wild West,” the exhibition particularly focused on several other photo-essays: Bourke-White’s “Women in Steel” (August 9, 1943), Gordon Parks’s “Harlem Gang Leader” (November 1, 1948), and “Nurse Midwife” by W. Eugene Smith (December 1, 1951).
Although the magazine often represented the view of its mostly white, middle-class audience, the exhibition devoted some space to Black photographers who played an important role in shaping public awareness of social issues through their photo-essays and photographs. In “Harlem Gang Leader,” Parks documented 17-year-old gang leader Red Jackson and his everyday life by juxtaposing peaceful scenes with his family and girlfriend and violent ones with his fellow gang members. In another photo-essay documenting the turbulent Black history of the 1960s, Frank Dandridge took approximately four hundred images to cover the bombing of the 16th Street Baptist Church in Birmingham, Alabama on September 15, 1963. His image of Sarah Jean Collins, a survivor of the bombing, appeared in the September 27 issue. As an African American photographer, Dandridge was presumably able to access Collins’s bedside in the University of Alabama’s segregated hospital.[8] The exhibition lays out the interaction of photographer in family in more depth than the actual picture essay in the magazine, giving important insights into how picture stories were crafted by Life.
The show also reminded visitors that Life’s careful and strategic visual storytelling in its photographs and photo-essays sometimes reveals disconnections between text and image, which sometimes paradoxically reinforce the impact of photographs. This is exemplified in another civil rights article, “They Fight a Fire That Won’t Go Out” (May 17, 1963), with Charles Moore’s photographs of a civic protest in Birmingham. While Moore captures firefighters and police attacking the protestors with hoses and dogs, captions suggest that the protestors provoked the attackers. For example, on a spread with the heading “The Dogs’ Attack Is Negroes’ Reward,” a sequence of three photographs of a police dog, barking at and chasing about a Black male protester and ripping off his pants, are accompanied by the caption, “This extraordinary sequence…is the attention-getting jack pot of the Negroes’ provocation.” The heading and caption contradict with Moore’s sympathetic views with the demonstrators that can be seen in most of his photographs in the article. It was Moore’s shocking photographs, however, not captions and headlines accompanying his works, that helped to spur the fight against racial injustice and the passage of the Civil Rights Act of 1964.
The final panels of the exhibition were devoted to showing Life’s influence as a brand-name magazine and its historical impact. The magazine inspired similar magazines in Europe (Match [Paris-Match], Picture Post, Nuit et Jour, Heute, and Point de Vue Images du Monde). It also served as an impetus for the creation of American publications such as Ebony; in 1945, publisher John H. Johnson modeled his publication for Black audiences after Life’s format. To enhance and maintain its popularity and brand power, Life invested in promotion, kept a record of readers’ responses shown in letters to the editor, and republished photographs for a different purpose. By the late 1960s, as a response to the civil rights movement, Time Inc. started the Life Educational Reprint program. Editors republished photographs about US race relations that the magazine previously published in past issues, including well-known works by Gordon Parks and Charles Moore, in seven volumes of reprints for schoolteachers. The reprints explore African American history in a roughly chronological order, from slavery to recent coverage of riots and protests. The program’s educational nature and emphasis on history offered a glimpse of Life’s engagement in historical memory-making through the repurposing and repackaging of its photographs.[9]
One of the most impressive things about the exhibition was that it was more than an exhibition about this publication; it also served as a critical thinking space where, through the magazine’s visual storytelling process, visitors reflected on the power of visualization perpetuating racist and colonialist imaginations. While learning about the collaborative effort between reporters, editors, and photographers of the magazine, at the Museum of Fine Arts visitors were also navigated to works by contemporary artists Alfredo Jaar, Alexandra Bell, and Julia Wachtel.[10] The inclusion of their works raised critical questions about the power and potential of images in journalism, which overlapped with the editorial practices of Life that the exhibition revealed. The contemporary works provided viewers with the opportunity to ponder whether images can tell everything about the story behind them, what power dynamics are embedded in journalistic narratives, and how news become part of history over time.
Alfredo Jaar’s The Silence of Nduwayezu (1997), part of his six-year Rwanda Project, focuses on the eyes of Nduwayezu, a boy who witnessed his parents being killed in the Rwandan genocide in 1994. Nduwayezu’s traumatic experience affected his ability to speak. In a dark space, after visitors encountered an illuminated wall text describing the tragedy he experienced, they were overwhelmed by the millions of identical photographic slides of his eyes on a light table. Jaar combined text and image because he thought it would be impossible to tell this tragedy—the product of Belgian colonialism that created a racialized hierarchy among ethnic groups and tensions between the Hutu and Tutsi peoples—only with photographs. The absence of violent images was also intentional. “I didn’t want to add to the pornography of violence that surrounds us,” the artist explains in an interview video displayed in the space. “I do not show the bodies. I do not show the tragedy…. I’m inviting you, the audience, to have your eyes one inch away from the eyes of Nduwayezu as if you want to enter his soul, and try to see what you couldn’t see because the media decided that you shouldn’t see it.”[11] This paradoxical approach to images was also applied to another one of his installations in the exhibition, Real Pictures (1995), where he put photographs of the genocide in black boxes. He described the content on each box, and viewers were prompted to read the images through the description rather than see them directly. The artist hoped that the stories on the box would “trigger images that might be even more powerful than the images themselves.”[12]
While the exhibition showed the efforts of photographers Gordon Parks, Frank Dandridge, and W. Eugene Smith to cover American racism, it also reminded visitors that the history of Life cannot be discussed without delving into its racist coverage of American culture. In an interview video displayed at the exhibition, Alexandra Bell points to the Life article titled “How to Tell Japs from Chinese” (December 22, 1941) as an obvious example of the magazine’s involvement in racism. Published immediately after the attack on Pearl Harbor, the article compares the portraits of Japanese wartime Prime Minister Hideki Tojo and Chinese public servant Ong Wen-hao, marks on their faces, and instructs the reader how to “distinguish friendly Chinese from enemy alien Japs” based on “anthropometric” information. [13] The article also speaks to the orientalist perspective in the magazine—or in its publisher Henry Luce—by depicting Chinese as others who “sometimes pass for Europeans.”
Even though the “How to Tell” article might be a blatant example of wartime journalism, American media, needless to say, has a long and deep history of perpetuating racist and colonialist perspectives. Four exhibited works from Bell’s Counternarratives (2017) series critically revealed racist biases in New York Times articles, which are often obscured under the assumption of objective journalism. “A Teenager with Promise” is one obvious example of her critique. In it, she corrects the misleading NYT articles on the shooting of Michael Brown, which juxtapose his profile and that of his killer Darren Wilson and describe the victim as a teenager with problems. She removed the original headline “A Teenager Grappling with Problems and Promise,” blacked out unnecessary and racially biased sentences, placed a full-page photograph of Brown wearing his high school cap and gown, and added a new headline reading “A Teenager with Promise.” In an interview video displayed at the exhibition, Bell explains that Counternarratives is a critical thinking space rather than an answer, and also a critical response to newspapers’ “euphemism,” which is seemingly neutral but actually “just plain old racism.”[14]
The challenge to neutrality and objectivity could also be seen in Julia Wachtel’s installation. Inspired by a Life article about the Tule Lake internment camp in California (“Tule Lake,” March 20, 1944), Wachtel juxtaposes two of the same photographs of Japanese internees in a barrack in different resolutions on two large-scale plywood panels. On the right panel, she put an identical reproduction of the photographic image that was in Life with the oil paintings of Douglas MacArthur. On the other panel, she superimposed a pixelated painting of the 442nd Regiment on a blurred image of the same photograph. The installation represented gaps between facts and memory and between micro and macro perspectives. According to her interview video that was displayed at the beginning of the installation, the plywood panels are a recreation of the internment camp barrack, and whereas the right panel represents “the official history,” or the mainstream historical narrative, the left one serves as a disruption of that narrative and a distortion of historical facts as represented by the pixelated image. She describes this distortion as the symbol of magazine reproduction.[15] In the same interview, she also says that the installation symbolizes multiple time frames indicated by the difference between the oil painting and the pixelated painting, which can only be seen from a distance. The representation of different time frames and perspectives was linked to Life’s visual storytelling process and memory-making process through its photographs afterward.
“Life Magazine and the Power of Photography” served as a great opportunity for visitors to see the process of visual storytelling: how this popular magazine tapped into the visual impact of photography, embedded narratives into images, and made the published photographs into iconic representations. Along with the panels and objects related to Life, the works of the three contemporary artists fascinatingly addressed the underlying themes of the exhibition, and reminded visitors about visual media as a form of authority that perpetuates and normalizes colonialist and racist imagination and memory. Alfredo Jaar paradoxically reminded us of the power, potential, and limitation of photography and visualization. Alexandra Bell encouraged visitors to think critically about journalistic narratives that seem to be neutral. Julia Wachtel provided insights into the elusiveness of visual representations and fluctuations of historical memory. Life as a weekly magazine ceased publication in 1972, but the exhibition reminded us of biases and prejudices, which remain deeply rooted in modern journalism during and beyond the era of the magazine.
[1] The exhibition opened at the Princeton University Art Museum on February 22, 2020, and closed halfway due to the COVID-19 pandemic on March 15, 2020. The MFA exhibition was originally planned to be run from August 19 to December 13, 2020. A virtual tour of the Princeton exhibition is available online: https://artmuseum.princeton.edu/video/exhibition-tour-life-magazine-and-power-photography (Accessed July 1, 2023).
[2] Exhibition panel, “Life Magazine and the Power of Photography”; James Christen Steward and Matthew Teitelbaum, foreword to Life Magazine and the Power of Photography, eds. Katherine A. Bussard and Kristen Gresh (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2020), 6–7.
[3] The idea of visual narratives combining photographs and text was not new in the US, but as Thierrty Gervais points out, Life was a pioneering publication whose publisher invested in photography to make it feasible to publish quality photographs on a weekly basis. For European predecessors that inspired Luce and Time Inc. executives, see Thierrty Gervais, “Making Life Possible,” in Life Magazine and the Power of Photography, 28–41.
[4] Henry Luce, “A Prospectus for a New Magazine.” Princeton University Art Museums collections online, Accessed July 1, 2023. https://artmuseum.princeton.edu/collections/objects/136930.
[5] Ibid.
[6] Ben Cosgrove, “LIFE’s First Cover Story: Building the Fort Peck Dam, 1936.” Accessed July 1, 2023. https://www.life.com/history/lifes-first-ever-cover-story-building-the-fort-peck-dam-1936/
[7] For the characteristics and development of Life’s photo-essays, see Nadya Bair, “Photo-Essays at Life” in Life Magazine and the Power of Photography, 128–63.
[8] Katherine A. Bussard, “Spatializing Race Relations in the Pages of Life Magazine,” in Life Magazine and the Power of Photography, 232-67.
[9] For the Life Educational Reprint program, see Katherine A. Bussard and Kristen Gresh, “Life Magazine and the Power of Photography,” in Life Magazine and the Power of Photography, 24; Bussard, “Spatializing Race Relations,” in Life Magazine and the Power of Photography, 264–5.
[10] These works were not included in the Princeton exhibition.
[11] “Hear from Alfredo Jaar,” https://www.mfa.org/video/hear-from-alfredo-jaar (Accessed July 1, 2023).
[12] Ibid.
[13]“Hear from Alexandra Bell,” https://www.mfa.org/video/hear-from-alexandra-bell (Accessed July 1, 2023)
[14] Ibid.
[15] “Hear from Julia Wachtel,” https://www.mfa.org/video/hear-from-julia-wachtel (Accessed July 1, 2023).