Google is a media behemoth. The company mastered search back in the nineties and has gradually worked to engulf just about anything else you can do on the web (or your phone) ever since. Usually I hate this type of activity, please reference Microsoft or NewsCorp as examples of companies earning my ire, but I still see puffy little hearts whenever I think of Google. I suspect my school girl crush probably has a lot to do with things like the Life Magazine Photo Archive.
Life Magazine was started in 1883, but it probably would have gone the way of Beadle’s Monthly or Potter’s American Monthly had it not been acquired by Henry Luce in 1936. Luce was a media titan in the early part of the 20th century. He owned Time, Fortune and Sports Illustrated and it was figured that one in five Americans read one of his publications every week. He bought Life not for its general interest content, but for its intriguing name. He turned the weekly into what is regarded history’s greatest fount of photojournalism. The way in which the magazine covered the biggest stories of the 20th century made it the best selling magazine of all time.
If you were a photographer in the 20th Century, you dreamed of being in Life the way young ballerinas dreampt of dancing in the New York City Ballet. Life made words mere modifiers of the image. The New York Times points out this week that while text may have been secondary to the image in Life, it is necessary to the storytelling in this millennium. Google has done fantastic job of bringing these images to a world-wide modern audience, but without context, some of the relevance is lost.
While there is no easy way to browse content, it’s hard not to love what Google has done. Here are a few of the notable images you can find with a little digging on Google’s Life Magazine Archive:
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Chicago presents the latest point in the ongoing debate about privacy in our technologically advanced world. The New York Times 
