The first issue of Henry Luce’s LIFE magazine was dated November 23, 1936. It stopped weekly publication in December 1972, and was widely mourned. But Time Incorporated, Luce’s company, published semi-annual issues until 1978; then published the magazine monthly for 22 years and weekly (as a newspaper supplement) from 2004 to 2007. Phew! Is it dead yet? No.
“CHICAGO CUBS, CHAMPIONS AT LAST” is the cover line of a ninety-six page issue of LIFE on newsstands this past November 4th, two days after the Chicago baseball team broke its 108 year losing streak and won the World Series. LIFE combines color photographs taken of the games with black-and- white photographs taken at Wrigley Field over the past century. There are no advertisements. Call it a book-a-zine, if you like.
Within the Time Inc. Books division of Time Incorporated, LIFE creates twelve to fifteen special newsstand editions a year. Their subjects often benefit from the use of the LIFE Picture Collection that grew in the wake of the weekly LIFE and holds the published and un-published work of its 90 staff photographers. “The Great Space Race—How the U. S. beat the Russians to the Moon” and “Hidden Hollywood—Rare Images of a Golden Age” are editions published earlier this year.
Christina Lieberman, LIFE’s Director of Photography, feels it is the dimensionality of LIFE photographers’ work that stands out in any pile of images—the emotional depth, the energy, the beauty, the unexpectedness, the clarity. Such added dimensions, she feels, stem from a photographer’s ability to spend time with the subject. In turn that ability stems from LIFE’s reputation for reporting fairly whatever it is that people celebrate.
Time Incorporated also sells modern prints from the LIFE Picture Collection that were signed by staff photographers in the 1980s and 1990s, but it stopped the sale of vintage prints some 20 years ago. Alfred Eisenstaedt’s “Children at a Puppet Theater in Paris” is yours for $55,000. Carl Mydans’s picture of General Douglas MacArthur wading ashore in the Philippine Islands is $32,000. But many of the 200-odd signed prints that Time Inc. might sell during a year are priced between $2,000 and $3,500. Half the profit goes to the photographer or his or her heirs.
John Loengard
