Without question the best photojournalists in the world, from the middle of the 1930's to the mid-1970's, worked for LIFE Magazine. They provided a window to the world especially before the age of television. Here from their archives are some of the magazine's most memorable photographs. Click here for the photographer credits and descriptions.
Sixty years ago this week one of the worse tornado's ever to hit an urban area hit Waco, Texas. By the end of the rampage 114 people were killed which makes it one of the twenty worse tornado's every to hit the United States.
LIFE Magazine reported:
Today, six decades later, the 1953 Waco tornado remains tied with the 1902 Goliad twister for the grim distinction of Texas’s deadliest, and is the 11th deadliest in U.S. history.
In the immediate aftermath of the tornado, LIFE’s John Dominis and correspondent Scot Leavitt, who had just recently moved to Texas, made their way to the devastated city. All of the photos in this gallery, many of which never ran in LIFE, are Dominis’s; in a note sent to LIFE’s editors in New York, Leavitt noted that “through virtually all [of Dominis's] shooting, rain fell, the sky was dark and the mood was somber.”
Shirley MacLaine and daughter Sachi
My mother, Mary Mixner, passed away in 1986 and there isn't a day that goes by that I don't think of her. Contemplating what would have made her happy today since I know she is with me, immediately I knew she would be thrilled to be included in a gallery of 'celebrity moms'. Mom, so loved meeting celebrities and hearing about the one's her children had the honor of meeting over her life.
So Mom, here you are right between Jackie Kennedy and Elizabeth Taylor. This one is for you Mom!
Here are some famous celebrity moms from LIFE Magazine!
Jackie Kennedy and Caroline
Mary and Ben Mixner
Elizabeth Taylor and Daughter
Joan Crawford and Children
Judy Garland and Liza
Natalie Wood and her mother
Nancy Reagen and her son Ron, Jr.
Jane Fonda and her daughter Vanessa
LIFE Magazine featured four students graduating from college in 1969 and Hillary Clinton was one of them. Here is how LIFE describes the photographs:
Long before Yale Law, before Arkansas, before marriage to Bill, the Senate, the White House, her own (first?) run for the White House, the State Department and the ubiquitous “texts from” meme that just keeps on giving, she was Hillary Diane Rodham, the older sister of two brothers and the over-achieving daughter of loving, politically conservative parents from suburban Park Ridge, Illinois.
Intelligent, intensely curious and, from a young age, driven to find a way to somehow contribute to the world around her, Hillary Rodham enrolled at Wellesley College in the fall of 1965. It was there, in Massachusetts, that the moderate Republican underwent her transformation (she might characterize it as “an evolution”) to committed Democrat.
By the time she graduated from Wellesley in May 1969, Hillary Rodham was already such a notable figure that she was featured, along with four other speakers from four other schools — and excerpts from their commencement addresses — in the June 20, 1969, issue of LIFE, in an article titled, simply, “The Class of ’69.”
Her speech was, perhaps not surprisingly, less strident and confrontational than those of the other student speakers quoted in the issue; as early as 1969, Hillary was showing signs of that phenomenal ability to modulate her message — without diluting or compromising it — that helps explain so much of her success in public life. The other student speakers featured in that June 1969 issue included Yale’s William Thompson; Justin Simon at Brandeis; Mills College’s Stephanie Mills, now an author and fellow at the Post Carbon Institute; and Brown University’s Ira Magaziner — a high-profile student activist who went on to become a business strategist and, coincidentally (or not), a senior adviser in the Clinton White House. Today, Magaziner works for the Clinton Foundation.
Here, LIFE.com presents a series of pictures by photographer Lee Balterman, only one of which would run in the June 20 issue of LIFE, made at the Rodham home in Park Ridge in mid-June 1969, a week and a half after she graduated. Leaving aside the insights into late-Sixties fashion that these pictures afford, one senses in Balterman’s informal portraits a nimble — and perhaps somewhat restless — intellect at play. Here, the pictures suggest, is a self-possessed young woman coming fully into her own.
Reggie Dwight (Elton John)
LIFE Magazine had a feature in their September, 1971 issue of rock stars at that time with their parents. The entire feature is pure fun and some made me laugh outright. You will especially like the one with Reggie Dwight (Elton John!). Enjoy.
Gracie Slick
Richie Havens
Joe Cocker
Frank Zappa
For many Americans, especially in the early years of the Vietnam War, LIFE Magazine was their major source of news. The first cover story on the war was October 27, 1961. From that point on there were over two dozen cover stories. One of the most powerful and most talked about was the week they printed all the pictures of those killed in one week in the war.
In many ways, the Vietnam War was the last one where photojournalists were the media stars.
Here are some of those covers.
In LIFE magazine's year end issue in 1971, they devoted near a dozen pages to "Homosexuals in Revolt". The magazine sent out photographer Grey Villet to do a photography essay on the emerging and somewhat militant 'gay rights' movement. This week on the LIFE site, they released previously unpublished photographs from that photo shoot.
LIFE reported in this extensive story:
It was the most shocking and, to most Americans, the most surprising liberation movement yet. Under the slogan “Out of the closets and into the streets,” thousands of homosexuals, male and female, were proudly confessing what they had long hidden. They were, moreover, moving into direct confrontation with conventional society. Their battle was far from won. But in 1971 militant homosexuals showed they they were prepared to fight it…They resent what they consider to be savage discrimination against them on the basis of a preference which they did not choose and which they cannot — and do not want to — change. And while mist will admit that “straight” society’s attitudes have caused them unhappiness, they respond to the charge that all homosexuals are guilt-ridden and miserable with the defiant rallying cry “Gay is Good!”
Life Magazine has pulled from its archives unpublished photographs of the late Steve McQueen. The star was the toast of Hollywood when the magazine sent photographer John Dominis to hang out with the sexy icon for three weeks. The star's nickname was the 'king of cool'.
In the 1960's and 1970's, he was big box office.
McQueen's best known movies were The Magnificent Seven, The Great Escape, The Thomas Crown Affair, Bullitt, Papillon and The Towering Inferno. He received an nomination for an Academy Award for the Sand Pebbles.
The actor was known as a 'man's man' and was an avid race of motorcycles. He had a collection of over hundred classic cycles. McQueen lived life hard and on the edge by drinking heavy, using cocaine and smoking endlessly. He dies of cancer at the age of 50
New York City got wracked by a major blizzard at the end of 1947. In that epic blizzard a total of 25.8 inches of snow fell on Manhattan in just 24 hours on the day after Christmas. At the time, there was no weather channel, television meteorologists, tracking storms through the Internet nor even coverage of it live.
For most Americans, LIFE Magazine which arrived on their newsstands and in their home gave most citizens the first real pictures about the famous blizzard. That issue didn't arrive until almost a week after the storm!
Here are some great old photographs of that storm.
One of the great photojournalists was Margaret Bourke-White. In the July, 1946 issue of LIFE Magazine, she displayed her photographs of Mohandas Gandhi. LIFE reports on this magnificent spread that appeared in that issue:
"Very few public leaders of the 20th century were — and remain today — as instantly recognizable to quite literally billions of people around the globe as Mohandas Karamchand Gandhi (1869 – 1948). Albert Einstein, JFK, Winston Churchill, Martin Luther King, Jr. — there is a kind of evocative power in the most famous pictures of these men that immediately calls to mind the era in which each of them lived, and the deeds and words that elevated them from the merely great, or celebrated, to the realm of the iconic. Gandhi unquestionably belongs in this group of defining figures, and no single picture has become more closely associated with his life, and his way of life, than Margaret Bourke-White’s 1946 portrait of the civil-disobedience pioneer reading newspaper clippings beside his cherished — and enormously symbolic — spinning wheel.
Incredibly, though, that particular photograph did not appear in the LIFE magazine article for which it was originally shot. Bourke-White, of course, was one of the century’s most intrepid chroniclers of conflict and strife: her pictures from Buchenwald in 1945, for instance, and from the horrific violence that attended the 1947 partition of India and the creation of Pakistan are among the most powerful of her extraordinary career. But she was also capable of sensitively documenting the quieter — and, in many cases, the more representative and revelatory — moments from the lives of the great and the powerless, alike."
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