Reaching Out, Mutter Ridge, Nui Cay Tri, South Vietnam, October 5, 1966 (Larry Burrows)
This article is part of America Unfiltered, the new project of University College Dublin’s Clinton Institute and EA WorldView.
It is adapted from a chapter in the book Life Magazine and the Power of Photography, edited by Katherine A. Bussard and Kristen Gresh. An exhibition of the same title is at the Princeton University Art Museum until June 21, 2020:
Reflecting on Life Magazine’s World War II years, publisher Henry Luce observed: “Although we did not plan Life as a war magazine, it turned out that way.”
This was less accidental than Luce suggests. A good deal of Life’s editorial and creative energies went into its coverage of the lead-up to and duration of World War II and of wars and international conflicts beyond 1945. To be sure, Life was not envisaged as a “war magazine” at its founding in 1936, but war and international conflict became ideal focal points of its worldview and helped secure its role as the most popular picture magazine in the United States.
Luce conceived of Life as a national mirror, though a corrective one, in which the US would see “a clearer image of itself and a broader sense of common referents”. That democratic vision was also imperial and global in conception, as he famously articulated in his prospectus for the magazine’s launch:
To see life; to see the world; to eyewitness great events; to watch the faces of the poor and the gestures of the proud; to see strange things—machines, armies, multitudes, shadows in the jungle and on the moon;…to see and take pleasure in seeing; to see and be amazed; to see and be instructed.
This worldview combined the will “to see” with a geopolitical will to power, reflecting ideological perspectives in line with the US rise to globalism and its subsequent Cold War priorities. In the pages of Life the imperial American gaze is universalized and leavened via the democracy of its scope, the realism of its aesthetic, and the use of humanitarian frames and iconography. Adopting this vision, Life positioned itself as a champion of American exceptionalism and an interpreter of the United States’ new political role in global affairs.
Photography was key to this imperial perspective. It provided stimulating visual forays into a world opening up to American dominance and illustrated the sense of global wonderment expressed by Luce. War provided an especially rich visual terrain for a “new photojournalism” that would create dynamic, attention-grabbing images of conflict and suffering and provide candid close-ups of ordinary Americans at war.
This mission of seeing and instructing shaped Life’s coverage of international affairs from the build-up to a global war in the late 1930s to the ignominious US retreat from Vietnam in the early 1970s. Luce’s ideological will was not simply stamped on all of Life’s reporting on war; rather it influenced the prominent editorial guidelines, even as it was often tested or resisted by writers and photographers.