That was one of the few pictures Life didn’t get. Everything seemed possible for the magazine in its glory days: its photographers peeked into the human womb to show fetuses, and they were there on the beaches of Normandy as American troops invaded and in Buchenwald when the death camp was liberated. Life virtually invented photojournalism–and, with a stable of photographers that included Alfred Eisenstadt, Philippe Halsman, Margaret Bourke-White and David Douglas Duncan, it set a standard of excellence that has never been matched.
No task was too unthinkable, no expense too great. Life bought the Zapruder film of JFK’s assassination. Life published distinguished fiction like Hemingway’s “The Old Man and the Sea.” Life signed up the original seven astronauts to exclusive contracts. Life outfitted a chartered Boeing 707 with a developing lab to get pictures of Winston Churchill’s funeral to the United States on deadline in 1965. The editorial formula also included a healthy dose of silliness (“Life Goes to a Party”) and even prurience (“How to Undress in Front of Your Husband”–a 1937 photo essay) that anticipated latter-day trends.
Perhaps it was too good to last. It was certainly too expensive. Beset by the rise of television and postal rates, the magazine was folded by Time Inc. in 1972, 36 years after its founding. But it wouldn’t stay buried. The publishers revived Life in 1978. It was recast as a monthly, and that was probably a fatal flaw: it robbed the magazine of the immediacy that had given Life such vitality when it came out weekly. It also shrank from its big, bold 13-inch-by-10-inch format. In a marketplace glutted with new magazines, Life’s distinctiveness was lost. Circulation tumbled to 1.5 million last year (it had reached 8.5 million at the peak of its first incarnation), and ad pages dropped 8.9 percent. “From the advertising point of view, the magazine was way too general and had no specific audience,” said Prof. Samir Husni, an expert in magazine journalism at the University of Mississippi. Last week Time Inc. pulled the plug again; the May issue will be the last, except for occasional special editions. This time, alas, Life seems really dead.
