{"id":922,"date":"2023-09-06T11:36:45","date_gmt":"2023-09-06T15:36:45","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/sites.bu.edu\/ampersandjournal\/?p=922"},"modified":"2023-09-06T11:36:45","modified_gmt":"2023-09-06T15:36:45","slug":"ena-ozaki","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/sites.bu.edu\/ampersandjournal\/2023\/09\/06\/ena-ozaki\/","title":{"rendered":"Ena Ozaki"},"content":{"rendered":"

Ena Ozaki<\/strong> (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.\u00a0<\/span><\/em><\/p>\n

Exhibition Review: Life Magazine and the Power of Photography<\/em><\/strong>
\nTemporary exhibition, Ann and Graham Gund Gallery at the Museum of Fine Arts, Boston: October 9, 2022\u2013January 16, 2023<\/strong><\/p>\n

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<\/em>, the magazine would become one of the most influential publications shaping twentieth-century American mainstream culture: Life<\/em>. Co-organized by Kristen Gresh of the Museum of Fine Arts, Boston and Katherine A. Bussard of the Princeton University Art Museum, \u201cLife Magazine<\/em> and the Power of Photography\u201d at the MFA (October 9, 2022\u2013January 16, 2023) posed important questions regarding how the general-interest magazine shaped American perspectives on the world.[1]<\/span><\/a> What made this exhibition and its award-winning extensive catalog<\/a><\/span> possible was the museums\u2019 and the contributors\u2019 recently granted access to the Life<\/em> Picture Collection and the Time Inc. Records at the New-York Historical Society. \u00a0Delving into photographs and documents of those archives, the show explored \u201cthe creation and impact of the carefully selected images found in the pages of Life<\/em>\u2014and the precisely crafted narratives told through these pictures\u201d to demonstrate how the magazine encouraged conversations about war, race, technology, and national identity in the twentieth-century United States.[2]<\/span><\/a> The exhibition\u2019s 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.<\/p>\n

\u201cLife Magazine<\/em> and the Power of Photography\u201d opened with Henry Luce\u2019s 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]<\/span><\/a> In the prospectus, he stresses\u00a0 the ubiquity, abundance, and accessibility of photography in the twentieth-century journalism. He goes on, however, to maintain that the potential of photography \u00a0has yet to be fully realized and it is still less influential than \u201cwritten news.\u201d For him, photographs are \u201ctaken haphazardly,\u201d \u201cpublished haphazardly,\u201d and \u201clooked at haphazardly.\u201d[4]<\/span><\/a> Thus, he argues, photographers and what he calls \u201ccamera editors\u201d 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 \u201can effective mosaic.\u201d[5]<\/span><\/a> The language of the prospectus encouraged visitors to understand the centrality of photography in Life<\/em>, and at the same time, to ponder big questions. In what ways did Life<\/em> craft that mosaic? For whom did it work best and most effectively<\/em>? If Life<\/em> told certain stories through a single photograph and discarded others, how did such narrative distortion affect the spread of racist and colonialist worldview?<\/p>\n

The exhibition interwove a series of works by photographers working with Life<\/em>\u2014both salaried and freelance\u2014 and stories about the magazine\u2019s editorial practices. Specific stories were investigated in great depth. They showed that the magazine\u2019s 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\u2019s printer, R. R. Donnelley & Sons, to be printed and distributed.<\/p>\n

Margaret Bourke-White\u2019s photograph of the new Fort Peck Dam in Montana was featured as the cover in the magazine\u2019s first issue<\/a><\/span>. This was the first Life <\/em>photograph visitors encountered in the exhibition \u2014and its cover story \u201cFranklin Roosevelt\u2019s Wild West\u201d were the earliest products of that collaboration. One of the first female photographers working with Life<\/em>, 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 \u201csomething on a grand scale that might make a cover.\u201d[6]<\/span><\/a> 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\u2019s construction site, in whom she saw the nineteenth-century Wild West.<\/p>\n

The photo-essay, or photographic essay, was one notable feature of Life<\/em>\u2019s photojournalism. The magazine\u2019s 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]<\/span><\/a> Still, the exhibition demonstrated that the photo-essay always played a central role in the magazine. In addition to Bourke-White\u2019s above-mentioned \u201cFranklin Roosevelt\u2019s Wild West,\u201d the exhibition particularly focused on several other photo-essays:\u00a0 Bourke-White\u2019s \u201cWomen in Steel\u201d (August 9, 1943), Gordon Parks\u2019s \u201cHarlem Gang Leader\u201d (November 1, 1948), and \u201cNurse Midwife\u201d by W. Eugene Smith (December 1, 1951).<\/p>\n

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 \u201cHarlem Gang Leader<\/a><\/span>,\u201d 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<\/a><\/span>. As an African American photographer, Dandridge was presumably able to access Collins\u2019s bedside in the University of Alabama\u2019s segregated hospital.[8]<\/span><\/a> 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.<\/em><\/p>\n

The show also reminded visitors that Life<\/em>\u2019s 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, \u201cThey Fight a Fire That Won\u2019t Go Out<\/a><\/span>\u201d (May 17, 1963), with Charles Moore\u2019s 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 \u201cThe Dogs\u2019 Attack Is Negroes\u2019 Reward,\u201d 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, \u201cThis extraordinary sequence…is the attention-getting jack pot of the Negroes\u2019 provocation.\u201d The heading and caption contradict with Moore\u2019s sympathetic views with the demonstrators that can be seen in most of his photographs in the article. It was Moore\u2019s 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.<\/p>\n

The final panels of the exhibition were devoted to showing Life<\/em>\u2019s influence as a brand-name magazine and its historical impact. The magazine inspired similar magazines in Europe (Match<\/em> [Paris-Match<\/em>], Picture Post<\/em>, Nuit et Jour<\/em>, Heute<\/em>, and Point de Vue Images du Monde<\/em>). It also served as an impetus for the creation of American publications such as Ebony<\/span><\/em>; in 1945, publisher John H. Johnson modeled his publication for Black audiences after Life<\/em>\u2019s format. To enhance and maintain its popularity and brand power, Life <\/em>invested in promotion, kept a record of readers\u2019 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<\/em> 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\u2019s educational nature and emphasis on history offered a glimpse of Life<\/em>\u2019s engagement in historical memory-making through the repurposing and repackaging of its photographs.[9]<\/a><\/span><\/p>\n

One of the most impressive things about the exhibition was that it was more than an exhibition about<\/em> this publication; it also served as a critical thinking space where, through<\/em> the magazine\u2019s 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]<\/span><\/a> 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<\/em> 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.<\/p>\n

Alfredo Jaar\u2019s The Silence of Nduwayezu<\/em><\/a><\/span> (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\u2019s 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\u2014the product of Belgian colonialism that created a racialized hierarchy among ethnic groups and tensions between the Hutu and Tutsi peoples\u2014only with photographs. The absence of violent images was also intentional. \u201cI didn\u2019t want to add to the pornography of violence that surrounds us,\u201d the artist explains in an interview video displayed in the space. \u201cI do not show the bodies. I do not show the tragedy\u2026. I\u2019m 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\u2019t see because the media decided that you shouldn\u2019t see it.\u201d[11]<\/span><\/a> This paradoxical approach to images was also applied to another one of his installations in the exhibition, Real Pictures<\/em><\/a><\/span> (1995), where he put photographs of the genocide in black boxes. He described the content on each box, and viewers were prompted to read<\/em> the images through the description rather than see<\/em> them directly. The artist hoped that the stories on the box would \u201ctrigger images that might be even more powerful than the images themselves.\u201d[12]<\/span><\/a><\/p>\n

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 <\/em>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<\/em> article titled \u201cHow to Tell Japs from Chinese<\/a><\/span>\u201d (December 22, 1941) as an obvious example of the magazine\u2019s 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 \u201cdistinguish friendly Chinese from enemy alien Japs\u201d based on \u201canthropometric\u201d information. [13]<\/a><\/span> The article also speaks to the orientalist perspective in the magazine\u2014or in its publisher Henry Luce\u2014by depicting Chinese as others who \u201csometimes pass for Europeans.\u201d<\/p>\n

Even though the \u201cHow to Tell\u201d 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\u2019s Counternarratives<\/em><\/a><\/span> (2017) series critically revealed racist biases in New York Times <\/em>articles, which are often obscured under the assumption of objective journalism. \u201cA Teenager with Promise\u201d is one obvious example of her critique. In it, she corrects the misleading NYT<\/em> 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 \u201cA Teenager Grappling with Problems and Promise,\u201d 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 \u201cA Teenager with Promise.\u201d In an interview video displayed at the exhibition, Bell explains that Counternarratives <\/em>is a critical thinking space rather than an answer, and also a critical response to newspapers\u2019 \u201ceuphemism,\u201d which is seemingly neutral but actually \u201cjust plain old racism.\u201d[14]<\/span><\/a><\/p>\n

The challenge to neutrality and objectivity could also be seen in Julia Wachtel\u2019s installation<\/a><\/span>. Inspired by a Life<\/em> article<\/a><\/span> about the Tule Lake internment camp in California (\u201cTule Lake,\u201d 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<\/em> 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 \u201cthe official history,\u201d 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]<\/span><\/a> 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<\/em>\u2019s visual storytelling process and memory-making process through its photographs afterward.<\/p>\n

\u201cLife<\/em> Magazine and the Power of Photography\u201d 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<\/em>, 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 <\/em>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.<\/p>\n

[1]<\/span><\/a> 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<\/a><\/span> (Accessed July 1, 2023).<\/p>\n

[2]<\/span><\/a> Exhibition panel, \u201cLife<\/em> Magazine and the Power of Photography\u201d; James Christen Steward and Matthew Teitelbaum, foreword to Life Magazine and the Power of Photography<\/em>, eds. Katherine A. Bussard and Kristen Gresh (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2020), 6\u20137.<\/p>\n

[3]<\/span><\/a> The idea of visual narratives combining photographs and text was not new in the US, but as Thierrty Gervais points out, Life <\/em>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, \u201cMaking Life<\/em> Possible,\u201d in Life Magazine and the Power of Photography<\/em>, 28\u201341.<\/p>\n

[4]<\/span><\/a> Henry Luce, \u201cA Prospectus for a New Magazine.\u201d Princeton University Art Museums collections online, Accessed July 1, 2023. https:\/\/artmuseum.princeton.edu\/collections\/objects\/136930<\/a><\/span>.<\/p>\n

[5]<\/span><\/a> Ibid.<\/p>\n

[6]<\/span><\/a> Ben Cosgrove, \u201cLIFE\u2019s First Cover Story: Building the Fort Peck Dam, 1936.\u201d Accessed July 1, 2023. https:\/\/www.life.com\/history\/lifes-first-ever-cover-story-building-the-fort-peck-dam-1936\/<\/a><\/span><\/p>\n

[7]<\/span><\/a> For the characteristics and development of Life\u2019s photo-essays, see Nadya Bair, \u201cPhoto-Essays at Life<\/em>\u201d in Life Magazine and the Power of Photography<\/em>, 128\u201363.<\/p>\n

[8]<\/span><\/a> Katherine A. Bussard, \u201cSpatializing Race Relations in the Pages of Life <\/em>Magazine,\u201d in Life Magazine and the Power of Photography<\/em>, 232-67.<\/p>\n

[9]<\/span><\/a> For the Life<\/em> Educational Reprint program, see Katherine A. Bussard and Kristen Gresh, \u201cLife <\/em>Magazine and the Power of Photography,\u201d in Life Magazine and the Power of Photography<\/em>, 24; Bussard, \u201cSpatializing Race Relations,\u201d in Life Magazine and the Power of Photography<\/em>, 264\u20135.<\/p>\n

[10]<\/span><\/a> These works were not included in the Princeton exhibition.<\/p>\n

[11]<\/span><\/a> \u201cHear from Alfredo Jaar,\u201d https:\/\/www.mfa.org\/video\/hear-from-alfredo-jaar (Accessed July 1, 2023).<\/p>\n

[12]<\/span><\/a> Ibid.<\/p>\n

[13]<\/span><\/a>\u201cHear from Alexandra Bell,\u201d\u00a0 https:\/\/www.mfa.org\/video\/hear-from-alexandra-bell<\/a><\/span> (Accessed July 1, 2023)<\/p>\n

[14]<\/span><\/a> \u00a0Ibid.<\/p>\n

[15]<\/span><\/a> \u00a0\u201cHear from Julia Wachtel,\u201d https:\/\/www.mfa.org\/video\/hear-from-julia-wachtel (Accessed July 1, 2023).<\/p>\n

 <\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

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 […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":22232,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":[],"categories":[17],"tags":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/sites.bu.edu\/ampersandjournal\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/922"}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/sites.bu.edu\/ampersandjournal\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/sites.bu.edu\/ampersandjournal\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/sites.bu.edu\/ampersandjournal\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/22232"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/sites.bu.edu\/ampersandjournal\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=922"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/sites.bu.edu\/ampersandjournal\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/922\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":923,"href":"https:\/\/sites.bu.edu\/ampersandjournal\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/922\/revisions\/923"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/sites.bu.edu\/ampersandjournal\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=922"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/sites.bu.edu\/ampersandjournal\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=922"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/sites.bu.edu\/ampersandjournal\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=922"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}