Bigger than Life

Back in the print-only, pre-digital-photography days, Life magazine was considered the gold standard for photo-journalism. Many famous photos, like the one at the right of a sailor kissing a nurse in Times Square on V-J day, were first published in Life.

Now Google has made an archive of millions of Life magazine photos, including many unpublished images, available online at images.google.com/hosted/life.

The archive can be searched from the page linked above, or just add source:life to any image search in Google from the regular search screen. Some of the archive's subject tags make precise subject searching somewhat iffy, but simply browsing through the results is fascinating. You can browse by decade, also, starting with the 1860's (yes, there was photography then, but not in the 1750's, as the web page hints—perhaps this is a typo?).

At any rate, photos of historical figures is a highlight of the collection, even back as far as the Victorian age—above at left is a photo of Queen Victoria herself.

Landscape photography is another area in which Life photographers excelled. On the right is a scene of shipping on the Yangtze River in China in the 1940's.

After you put in search terms or click on a link to browse, you'll see a page of thumbnails just like in a normal Google image search. Click on the picture of interest and you'll get a larger image (plus a link to a full-size image) and you may see information such as who took the photo, when and where it was taken, and additional information about the scene.

Trivia, tragedy, celebrity, ordinariness, action, tranquility—it's all a part of Life and you can find images of just about anything in this collection.


Note: all images in this blog post were taken from the Google Life Photo Archive. Photos in the archive are for personal, non-commercial use only. Remember always to credit the source of photos used in papers and presentations.