The first comprehensive consideration of Life magazine’s groundbreaking and influential contribution to the history of photography

From the Great Depression to the Vietnam War, the vast majority of the photographs printed and consumed in the United States appeared on the pages of illustrated magazines. Offering an in-depth look at the photography featured in Life magazine throughout its weekly run from 1936 to 1972, this volume examines how the magazine’s use of images fundamentally shaped the modern idea of photography in the United States. The work of photographers both celebrated and overlooked—including Margaret Bourke-White, Larry Burrows, Henri Cartier-Bresson, Frank Dandridge, Alfred Eisenstaedt, Fritz Goro, Gordon Parks, and W. Eugene Smith—is explored in the context of the creative and editorial structures at Life. Contributions from 25 scholars in a range of fields, from art history to American studies, provide insights into how the photographs published in Life—used to promote a predominately white, middle-class perspective—came to play a role in cultural dialogues in the United States around war, race, technology, art, and national identity.

Drawing on unprecedented access to Life magazine’s picture and paper archives, as well as photographers’ archives, this generously illustrated volume presents previously unpublished materials, such as caption files, contact sheets, and shooting scripts, that shed new light on the collaborative process behind many now-iconic images and photo-essays.

Like Invisibles and Snapshots of Dangerous Women, Outsiders is an accessible visual tour through life experienced on the margins of mainstream society. Squired through the social turmoil of the 1950s, 60s, and 70s by artists like Diane Arbus and Nan Goldin, Outsiders is an unforgettable look at people whose identity is in flux. Idealists, outsiders, and those brave enough to be themselves shot by visionary photographers including Diane Arbus, Garry Winogrand, and Nan Goldin reveal the roots of America's influential counterculture.

Today color photography is so ubiquitous that it's hard to believe there was a time when this was not the case. Color Rush: Seventy-five Years of Color Photography in America explores the developments that led us to this point, looking at the way color photographs circulated and appeared at the time of their making. From magazine pages to gallery walls, from advertisements to photojournalism, Color Rush charts the history of color photography in the United States from the moment it became available as a mass medium to the moment when it no longer seemed an unusual choice for artists. The book begins with the 1907 unveiling of autochrome, the first commercially available color process, and continues up through the 1981 landmark survey show and book, The New Color Photography, which hailed the widespread acceptance of color photography in contemporary art. In the intervening years, color photography captured the popular imagination through its visibility in magazines like Life and Vogue, as well as through its accessibility in the marketplace thanks to companies like Kodak. Often in photo histories color is presented as having arrived fully formed in the 1970s; this book reveals a deeper story and uncovers connections in both artistic and commercial practices. A comprehensive chronology and examples of significant moments and movements mark the increasing visibility of color photography. Color Rush brings together Ansel Adams and William Eggleston, Eliot Porter and Cindy Sherman, Edward Steichen and Stephen Shore, and examines them in a fresh context paying particular attention to color photography's translation onto the printed page. In doing so, it traces a new history that more fully accounts for color's pervasive presence today.