Editors: The public is invited to a booksigning and reception for Professor Erika Doss in the CU-Boulder Fine Arts Gallery at 5 p.m. on Nov. 28. The event is sponsored by the fine arts department and the CU Book Store.
Why was Life magazine so wildly popular and influential?
Erika Doss, professor of art history and director of the American Studies program at the University of Colorado at Boulder, set out to explore those questions in "Looking at Life Magazine," the first book to take a critical look at the magazine from different points of view.
"I've been interested in Life since I was a kid, but it was always a love/hate relationship," Doss said. "I loved it for its visual materials but hated it for its frequently conservative politics and its wavering on the Vietnam War."
Founded in 1936, the weekly had a circulation of 5 million by the end of its first year and held a central spot in America's cultural life for more than three decades. It ceased publishing last year, although there will be special editions, such as the one just published on the Sept. 11 terrorist attacks on America.
The book's 13 contributors examine the magazine's portrayal of attitudes toward gender, class, race and ethnicity, in addition to its social and political views. Edited by Doss, the book was published in October by the Smithsonian Institution Press.
"Looking at Life is really about looking at pictures," Doss said. The great photographers of the time -- W. Eugene Smith, Gordon Parks, Carl Mydans, Margaret Bourke-White, Dorothea Lange and Ansel Adams all did photo essays for the magazine. On the masthead, photographers were listed over reporters.
The photographers enjoyed the latitude the magazine gave them, including the opportunity to do photo essays requiring extensive space, Doss said. But they also resented the way the magazine sometimes presented their work, changing the order of photographs and using layouts to create a particular effects.
In one of the most blatant examples, Life ran frames from the Zapruder film of President John F. Kennedy being shot, but positioned the negatives out of sequence to enhance the dramatic effect.
Life reflected the views and interests of its founder and publisher, Henry Luce, who wanted to present an image of a uniform and classless nation, Doss said. It was an image of a huge American middle class based on hard work, patriotism, consumerism, capitalism and Protestant Christianity. And it was a middle class that never existed as it was portrayed.
Luce believed that Life would provide what every American needed to become a more thoughtful, educated person, she said. But in addition to cerebral roundtables of experts discussing modern art, there also were lots of good-looking women, nudity, big cars and an emphasis on fashion.
One of the most interesting aspects of Life to Doss was how it reflected the cultural attitudes of the time, and how its views sometimes changed.
"Life was reprehensible in its first decade in its depictions of African Americans as racial stereotypes," Doss said. For example, a 1937 feature about Huddie Ledbetter, a black musician better known as Leadbelly, was subtitled "Bad nigger makes good minstrel." Yet by the 1950s, the magazine was supporting civil rights and had hired famed black photographer Parks as a reporter.
The pre-eminent magazine chronicling and championing World War II also became increasingly conflicted toward the Vietnam War. In 1969, Life published photographs of one week's worth of U.S. casualties in the war - 217 people. One letter from "an adamant hawk" said the article caused "an agonizing 180-degree change of attitude."
By the 1970s, Life was wrestling with racial and gender tensions, including black nationalism, civil rights and women's liberation.
American magazines had begun moving toward niche publications when Life ceased weekly publication in 1972. It started publishing as a monthly in 1972 and finally ceased altogether in May 2000.
If there is a modern equivalent to the role that Life played in America during its heyday it probably would be People magazine, Doss said. While Life celebrated its view of a national culture, People, founded in 1974, epitomizes the celebrity culture that is so prominent in American life today.