Published by Thames & Hudson
"If your pictures aren't good enough, you're not close enough." Robert Capa (photographer who landed on Omaha beaches on D-Day landings, died in Indochina after stepping on a landmine in 1954.)
Introduction:
A collection of images taken by the staff photographers and a few others for "LIFE" magazine. Some of the greatest journalistic photographers ever, have filled this publication with a catalogue of images which records our historic, cultural and social events of most of the 20th Century (from 1936).
This book is probably too complete to be reviewed in one hit and do the publication justice. There have been some 90 photographers who have worked within this unique group. The photographs are as legendary as the photographers who took them. They cover the famous and the infamous as real people. Every conflict from 1936 onwards in detail, they told the story in their images as the photographers viewed it, not as a political weapon. Images from Vietnam by Larry Burrows that are so haunting and hard hitting, that once seen they will never be forgotten.
They covered the aftermath of war and the devastation and the leaders which created it. Social change and racial inequality. The world changed and the photographers of LIFE magazine captured it in images.
Images of entertainment legends from Monroe to Elvis shot in iconic imagery that the public have grown up all around the world. This magazine was the trail blazer for all glossy magazines today.
The photographers within this book are story tellers, their images have no need for additional text. The occasional title giving the reader a name when relevant, the rest is history. The contextual content of the images is shown by the styles of the era, perfectly taken images with just enough background material to tell the time and place and enough detail to give the message or the story.
Several of these photographers died whilst completing their art. Robert Capa died in Indochina, Larry Burrows in Vietnam just 21 years of age. A man who shot his first images for "LIFE" magazine aged just 16.
A visual encyclopaedia of the 20th Century, a book that should be shown at every place of education. A book with just pictures, that creates so much imagery and emotion in every photograph, that I could never tire of looking at them.