An Exhibition Revives the Legacy of “Life” Magazine
The newsmagazine’s iconic and influential photo-essays were a collective effort. For contemporary artists, they’re rich territory for the interrogation of print media.
Margaret Bourke‑White, Flame Burner Ann Zarik, 1943
© LIFE Picture Collection
Had Life magazine still existed the second week of March 2020, one could easily imagine its editors scrambling to pull together a large feature that contextualized the rapidly unfolding COVID-19 pandemic. Global in scope, with scientific, personal-interest, and economic angles, it was precisely the kind of story that the magazine, in its mid-twentieth-century heyday, helped millions of readers understand. What made Life unique, and what helps make it an object of enduring historical fascination, is that the stories it told were primarily visual.
© LIFE Picture Collection
Yet in recent decades, the curators Katherine A. Bussard and Kristen Gresh argue, that historical fascination has not led to much scholarship on the “complexities and collaborations behind its famed photo-essays.” Their book, which features twenty contributors, and the related exhibition, LIFE Magazine and the Power of Photography, curated with the assistance of Alissa Schapiro, proposes a “material history” that outlines the process by which photographs were transformed into stories on the page. That undertaking involved “layout artists, a story-building team, caption writers, researchers, negatives editors,” according to Gresh. “Life is often thought of as a monolith, whether because of Henry Luce or particularly famous individual photographers. So it was exciting to uncover this collective effort.”
© LIFE Picture Collection
The Life exhibition opened at the Princeton University Art Museum in February 2020, less than three weeks before the pandemic brought much of the world to a halt. “We lived in a virtual world for those first months of the pandemic, which reminded us of the importance of physical objects and underscored one of the show’s most important themes,” Gresh says. The show remained open in Princeton until September, but continuing pandemic-related challenges meant it didn’t open at its second location, the Museum of Fine Arts (MFA), Boston, until last October.
© LIFE Picture Collection
The two-year delay offered Gresh the opportunity to rethink its presentation. She and her colleagues not only developed a polyvocal audio guide but also adapted the exhibition’s three-part structure by adding “contemporary moments” that feature artworks by Alfredo Jaar, recent work by Alexandra Bell, and a new commission by Julia Wachtel in the galleries between its main sections. These artists’ practices, Gresh notes, “really interrogate the media; they have long been thinking about the significant issues we address in the historical sections of the exhibition.”
Gresh has chosen several works by Jaar that provoke reflection on the first section, which explores how the magazine’s photographs came into being. Among them are two pieces from his Rwanda Project: The Silence of Nduwayezu (1997), which is composed of one million slides piled onto a light table, and Real Pictures (1995), in which graphic photographs are hidden inside archival boxes bearing descriptive labels. They suggest, respectively, what can and cannot be conveyed in photographs and which kinds of pictures make it into mass-media settings.
The MFA has acquired a third work by Jaar that bears more directly on the exhibition’s subject: Life Magazine, April 19, 1968 (1995), which is composed of three poster-size photographic prints. The leftmost image is an enlargement of the iconic photograph of Dr. Martin Luther King Jr.’s funeral procession that was printed in the magazine; the other two offer the same image, only faded and desaturated. In the middle print, Jaar has placed black circles over the faces of Black mourners and, in the rightmost print, red circles over the faces of white mourners. The difference in the number of circles is striking. It’s a simple device, and “using words would not be as powerful,” Gresh says. “The second and third images are basically whitewashed, which could reference the whitewashing of our own history of racism, or more specifically the whitewashing of Life magazine’s narratives. The triptych format could also reference traditional Christian altarpieces.”
Alexandra Bell’s artworks offer an emotional yet critical view of American print media.
In 2017, Alexandra Bell became widely known for her series Counternarratives, which alters the front page of the New York Times with revisions to headlines and photographs marked in red pen that reveal the paper’s racial biases. She presented the work as large wheat-pasted posters around Brooklyn and, subsequently, in—and on—museums. The Boston show includes four of those works, which, Gresh says, “play a crucial role in framing a larger conversation for our visitors about implicit biases and systemic racism in photojournalism.”
All works courtesy the Museum of Fine Arts, Boston
“I see news as an art object,” Bell told the New Yorker critic Doreen St. Félix after she began the series. In this way, her contributions to the Life show, including Gang Leader (2022), about the disconcerting white-nationalist activities of Vice Media co-founder Gavin McInnes, offer an emotional yet critical view of American print media that resonates with Jarr’s work and provokes new ways of reading the history of Life. As Gresh notes, “We want to do justice to all different types of photography.”
This article originally appeared in Aperture, issue 249, “Reference.”
