Life Magazine’s Innovative Photography at MFA Boston

Life Magazine’s Innovative Use of Photography

MFA Boston Presents Unprecedented Exhibition Exploring Life Magazine’s Innovative Use of Photography

On view October 9, 2022–January 16, 2023

Photo captions:

BOSTON (September 12, 2022)—In the period from the Great Depression to the Vietnam War, the majority of photographs printed and consumed in the U.S. appeared on the pages of illustrated magazines.

Among them, Life—published weekly from 1936 to 1972—was both extraordinarily popular and visually revolutionary.

Estimates for pass-along readership—the number of people who shared each copy of Life in spaces like waiting rooms and offices—suggest that the magazine may have regularly reached about one in four people in the country.

The photographers who worked for Life bore witness to some of the most defining moments of the 20th century—and the magazine’s use of photography shaped the way many Americans experienced, perceived and remembered these events.

Co-organized by the Museum of Fine Arts, Boston (MFA), and the Princeton University Art Museum, Life Magazine and the Power of Photography offers a revealing look at the collaborative processes behind many of the publication’s most recognizable, beloved and controversial images and photo essays.

The exhibition brings together more than 180 objects, including original press prints, contact sheets, shooting scripts, internal memos and layout experiments—drawing on unprecedented access to Life’s picture and paper archives.

Added to the exhibition for its presentation at the MFA, Life Magazine and the Power of Photography also incorporates works by contemporary artists Alexandra Bell, Alfredo Jaar and Julia Wachtel, whose critical reflections on photojournalism and the politics of images frame urgent conversations about implicit biases and systemic racism in contemporary media. 

Life Magazine and the Power of Photography is on view at the MFA from October 9, 2022 through January 16, 2023 in the Ann and Graham Gund Gallery.

The exhibition is co-organized by the Museum of Fine Arts, Boston and the Princeton University Art Museum.

“This major exhibition is an invitation for our visitors to experience a time when photographs first began to influence world events and narratives—and how they continue to do so today”

“Life’s groundbreaking use of photography shaped important 20th-century dialogues in the U.S. around war, race, technology, art and national identity.

Through a generous collaboration with the Princeton University Art Museum, we are exploring this process in a more critical and complex way than ever done before, and at a moment when technologies of distribution have evolved and disrupted the recording of history.” 

said Matthew Teitelbaum, Ann and Graham Gund Director.

Life Magazine and the Power of Photography was curated by Kristen Gresh, Estrellita and Yousuf Karsh Senior Curator of Photographs at the MFA; Katherine A. Bussard, Peter C. Bunnell Curator of Photography at Princeton University Art Museum; and Alissa Schapiro, an independent curator and doctoral candidate in art history at Northwestern University.

In 2016 the curators were among the first to delve deeply into the Time Inc. Records Archive, which was newly available at the New-York Historical Society. In 2019, the MFA and Princeton University Art Museum became the first museums to be granted full access to the LIFE Picture Collection, the magazine’s photographic archive.

The exhibition and the accompanying book grew out of these unparalleled research opportunities, which helped to advance new scholarly perspectives on Life’s pictorial journalism. The book was named the 2021 recipient of the Alfred H. Barr Jr. Award for museum scholarship. 

“I am thrilled to be adding three contemporary moments to the exhibition in Boston. Through powerful and provocative works by Alexandra Bell, Alfredo Jaar and Julia Wachtel, who each interrogate news media through their practice, viewers are invited to reflect on contemporary media consumption and our inherited historical narratives”

curator Kristen Gresh

Exhibition Overview

Among the over 30 photographers featured in Life Magazine and the Power of Photography are Margaret Bourke-White, Robert Capa, Henri Cartier-Bresson, Frank Dandridge, Alfred Eisenstaedt, Charles Moore, Gordon Parks and W. Eugene Smith.

The exhibition also emphasizes the contributions of women to the magazine’s success—not only photographers such as Bourke-White, whose monumental image of the Fort Peck Dam graced the first issue, but also negative and picture editors such as Peggy Sargent and Natalie Kosek.

Additionally, Life Magazine and the Power of Photography considers the ways in which the magazine—through the vision of its founder, Henry R. Luce, its editorial teams’ points of view and the demographics of its readers—promoted a predominantly white, middle-class perspective on politics, daily life and culture, even when documenting the country’s reckoning with racism and xenophobia.

The exhibition makes a point to trace Life’s complex, and sometimes contradictory, approach to such stories through the inclusion of works by photographers from different backgrounds and perspectives that captured difficult images of ethnic discrimination and racialized violence, ranging from the Holocaust to white supremacist violence of the 1960s. 

The exhibition is divided into three historical sections, interspersed with immersive contemporary moments.

The first section, “Getting the Picture,” focuses on the creation of Life photographs, exploring multiple factors such as the details of the assignment, the idea for the story developed by the editorial staff, the selection of a particular photographer for the job, and the photographer’s own decisions about how to best capture the images needed to construct a story.

Once a photographer completed an assignment, his or her undeveloped rolls of film and notes were sent to Life’s offices, where editorial teams selected images and determined how to adapt them for the printed page.

The second section, “Crafting Photo Stories,” examines the making of a photo-essay, a format with stunning visuals and minimal text that Life claimed to have invented.

The complex process involved negative editors, picture editors, art directors, layout artists, writers, researchers and fact-checkers in the construction of each page. The third section, “Life’s Photographic Impact,” considers the power and reach of the magazine, whose circulation peaked at 8.5 million in 1969.

Here, the exhibition explores not only responses from readers—who wrote letters to the editor and even offered assistance to individuals profiled in the magazine—but also how Life perpetuated its own influence by repackaging its photographs and using technical sophistication and business savvy to outpace its competitors. 

Contemporary works by Alfredo Jaar (born Santiago, Chile, 1956), Alexandra Bell (born 1983) and Julia Wachtel (1956) appear in immersive moments installed between the three historical sections. Jaar questions the ethics of representation and the politics of images in his photography, installations, films and new media works.

The exhibition features Real Pictures (1995) from his Rwanda Project and the U.S. debut of his multimedia installation The Silence of Nduwayezu (1997) from the same series.

It also includes the triptych Life Magazine, April 19, 1968 (1995), in which he manipulates the magazine’s iconic photograph of Dr. Martin Luther King Jr.’s funeral procession to point to the disproportionate number of Black mourners relative to white ones.  Similarly, works from Bell’s Counternarratives series (2017–18) highlight racial biases in annotated pages from The New York Times.

Finally, in a newly commissioned work by the MFA, Wachtel directly responds to photographs from Life and engages in deep critical discourse about popular culture and politics, as well as media consumption.

Public Programs

In conjunction with Life Magazine and the Power of Photography, the MFA is hosting a four-session course (Wednesdays, October 19–November 16) that delves deeper into topics explored in the exhibition, from gender dynamics and female labor to how Life’s coverage of Hollywood stars, socialites, politicians and activists helped to solidify a sense of national identity. The course is supported by the MFA Associates, MFA Senior Associates and Weekend Guides in honor of Barbara Martin.

Additionally, the Museum is hosting two free exhibition-related programs: the Barbara and Burton Stern Lecture (October 30, 2–3 pm) with contemporary artist Alfredo Jaar and the Barbara Martin Lecture (December 4, 2–3 pm), a conversation between the exhibition’s curators and writer Alexandra Zapruder, whose grandfather Abraham Zapruder captured the infamous home movie of President John F. Kennedy’s assassination, to which Life acquired exclusive rights.

Member Preview takes place October 5–8. Timed-entry exhibition tickets, which include general admission, are required for all visitors and can be reserved on mfa.org starting September 14 for MFA members and September 20 for the general public.

Life Magazine and the Power of Photography is sponsored by Bank of America. Generously supported by Patti and Jonathan Kraft, with additional support from Kate Moran Collins and Emi M. and William G. Winterer. With gratitude to the Phillip Leonian and Edith Rosenbaum Leonian Charitable Trust for its generous support of Photography at the MFA.

Audio Guide

The exhibition is accompanied by an audio guide, available for free on the Museum’s app MFA Mobile, which features perspectives from 11 contemporary voices on Life’s use of photography.

While some of the featured individuals are former Life contributors like reporter Stanley Fink and photographer Frank Dandridge, others are the subjects of Life’s photographs, like Flávio da Silva or relatives of those who captured some of Life’s influential moments like Alexandra Zapruder—author and granddaughter of Abraham Zapruder.

Additionally, the audio guide highlights contemporary artists Alexandra Bell, Alfredo Jaar, Julia Wachtel and Kim Yasuda as well as conflict photographer Matthias Bruggmann and documentary photographer Susan Meiselas.

Publication

The accompanying 336-page book, published by the Princeton University Art Museum and distributed by Yale University Press, examines Life’s groundbreaking role in mid-20th-century American culture and the history of photography by considering the complexity of the magazine’s image-making and publishing enterprise.

The book includes essays and contributions by the three co-curators and 22 additional scholars of art history, American studies, history and communication studies. It was the winner of the College Art Association’s 2021 Alfred H. Barr Jr. Award, praised for “bring[ing] a new complexity to Life’s legendary picture-making enterprise and suggest[ing] why Life’s signal role in fostering consensus and collective memory is ripe for further unpacking.” 

About the Museum of Fine Arts, Boston

The MFA brings many worlds together through art. Showcasing masterpieces from ancient to modern, our renowned collection of nearly 500,000 works tells a multifaceted story of the human experience—a story that holds unique meaning for everyone. From Boston locals to international travelers, visitors from across the globe come to experience the MFA. Through both art and audience, the Museum brings together diverse perspectives—revealing connections, exploring differences, creating a community where all belong. Plan your visit at mfa.org.

Related stories

State Library of New South Wales 20th Century photography

State Library of NSW new Photography Gallery exhibition Shot

10 important photography exhibitions in Australia

Photography: Real & Imagined at National Gallery of Victoria