Did you know that an advertisement in the first issue of Life magazine, from November 1936, suggested smoking FIVE Camel cigarettes during the Thanksgiving meal! One after soup, one after salad, one during the second helping of the turkey meal, one during dessert and one more after dinner with coffee. According to the ad Camel cigarettes are supposed to “ease tension…speed up the flow of digestive fluids…increase alkalinity…and help your digestion to run smoothly”. WOW
That issue of Life magazine and other similar magazines back in the day usually had outrageous advertisements from companies that had all sort of fantastic claims. From Ballantine’s Ale suggesting three full drinks of its ale to judge its purity, body and flavor to using Wildroot with Oil for removing dandruff, or Mr. T. Pott suggesting a person drink six cups of tea a day to pep you up, make food taste better, and help you sleep. There are countless more example in older magazines from before and during the Mad Men days.
What does this have to do with photography? Expectations. The introduction of Life in 1936 as the first photographic news magazine with an emphasis on photojournalism changed how people got their news and how pictures were interpreted. Photographs needed to be bold and tell a story like the advertisements that were running in the magazines. The public’s expectations based on these grand advertisements that often promised larger than life outcomes transferred to the pictures they saw with the articles in the magazine. Life magazine needed great photographers that could tell impactful stories with their pictures to keep up with the advertisements. Some of those photographers are famous today. Margaret Bourke-White photographed a dam for the first cover on November 23rd, 1936. She’s joined in the credits as a staff photographer with Alfred Eisenstadt, Thomas D. McAvoy and Peter Stackpole. Likely you’ve heard of Bourke-White and Eisenstadt but both McAvoy and Stackpole were accomplished photographers that had long careers at Life and afterwards. Others that you may have heard of that later joined the staff of Life include Robert Capa, Cornel Capa, Gordon Parks, Arthur Fellig, aka Weegee, Philippe Halsman, W. Eugene Smith, Harry Benson, Douglas Kirkland and many others.
Today we have available to us the back issues of Life freely available on Google Books. Every issue from the first in 1936 to December 1972 has been scanned and is available for browsing on any device that connects to the web. Looking at back issues of magazines such as Life can help your photography. Rather than getting a book published by a specific photographer, say Robert Capa or even Life’s “The Year in Pictures” each newsstand issue of Life is a collection of work done under a deadline, not a collection of photographs curated and considered a best of. What you’ll see in each issue is the best of that assignment the photographer was tasked to document and get the story. Paying attention to how the photographers told those stories with composition, lighting, exposure and angle of view will train you to think of the same things when you are photographing. A photographer, no matter the genre of interest, tells a story of the scene they are photographing. Often there is not a lot of time to work the scene to full completion. Moments happen fast, whether it’s on the street with people moving in different directions, the action of sports, wildlife spontaneity, natural events with changing light and weather or a fleeting expression on a model in a portrait studio. Looking at pictures from past masters and how they accomplished their assignments week after week, month after month and year after year will clue you in on their processes used to consistently produce impactful images that tell stories.
The key is the deadline and urgency of getting the story told. A best of book or a photographer’s monograph only shows the best work because it’s curated over time. These types of books are certainly helpful towards a photographic education, but the weekly issues of a photojournalist style magazine will have more lessons per issue to evaluate and learn from than anything else available. There are not many examples of photojournalistic magazines still available today that have long form articles with accompanying stories illustrated with photographs. Most of this journalism is done through the remaining newspapers both online and in print. However, the source of images for the long articles is often not a photographer working the story with the financial security a staff position affords. More often the modern photojournalist works a story then tries to sell it to a publication later. The cost of travel and shooting may impact the final result if a photographer feels a need to continue moving and shooting. Or worse, the pressure associated with being replaced by “citizen journalists” that post pictures to social media. Media companies are more than happy to replace a salaried employee or freelance photographers fee with a by-line credit from a picture pulled from Facebook or Instagram.
There are many very good photojournalist photographers today making incredible images and getting published in reputable magazines and papers. But sadly, they’re a drop in the ocean of images being produced and posted to all kinds of platforms from social media to news sites.
This situation reduces the overall quality of pictures published compared to the images from the days of Life magazine’s run of financial success. So generally, using pictures you see today is not as effective a learning tool as pictures taken by a working secure staff photographer. Go to an antique mall and pick up a back issue of Life, Time, or National Geographic and look at the pictures illustrating the articles for a good lesson on getting the photographic job done right on a consistent basis.