When LIFE reached 50

Marines help a comrade wounded in a firefight, Vietnam 1966

Caroline Kennedy, wedding day 1985

Glancing through my collection of books and magazines I came across the special issue of the LIFE magazine released to mark its 50th anniversary. At one time TIME and LIFE were the most popular, ‘in demand’ publications – the first for its news value and the other for its pictorial quality and material.

LIFE celebrated 50 years in 1986 and the Autumn 1986 issue opened with an editorial titled ‘Celebrating an Extraordinary Half Century’. 

The opening paragraph said: “LIFE is 50. It’s hard to imagine a time when the magazine didn’t exist, but in the mid-1930s there was simply nothing like it in America. Up to then, published photographs were posed and static. A few years earlier, a marvellously portable 35mm camera had been developed that could take pictures of almost anything under the sun, and Henry R. Luce and his colleagues at Time Inc. made plans to use it for an entirely new publishing venture. The project, shrouded in secrecy, emerged full-blown in November 1936, and journalism was for ever changed.”  

The agent for both journals in Ceylon (as Si Lanka was then called) was McCallum Book Depot. The shop was opposite Colombo Fort railway station – a convenient place for readers who were travelling by train to pick up a book or a magazine. They also ran the Fort station bookstall, if I am not mistaken.   The cover page in LIFE 50 carried pictures of some key events during the 50 years including boxer Cassius Clay, American president John Kennedy and wife, and first man on the moon. At a time when technology was nowhere near what it is today, LIFE 50 achieved a high level both in the quality of the photographs as well as their reproduction. The presentation was also neat. 

After a series of double-page spreads of selected photographs of major happenings, ‘An Almanac of Disasters, Heroes and Hurrahs’ followed. Stamp size pictures were selected for each of the 50 years under the headings Big Events, Winners, What’s New, Couples, Bad News, Heroes, and In Style. 

To give a few examples: Hitler invading Poland starting World War II (Big Events1939), America’s most critically-acclaimed film, ‘Citizen Cane’ (Winners 1941), Howard Hughes flies around the world in three and three-quarter days (What’s New 1938), Princess Elizabeth weds Lieutenant Philip Mountbatten (Couples 1947), Thalidomide proved to have caused thousands of birth defects (Bad News 1962), Canada’s Dionne quintuplets turn three (Heroes 1937) and Bubble gum, a wartime casualty, is back (In Style 1946). 

‘Exploring the human frontier’ under the title ‘Body & Mind’ the first picture was the first used in Vol.1 No.1 (1936) with the words ‘LIFE begins,’ showing a new born being taken out. 

In all the issue’s 152 pages carried either full page or double-page pictures. Some were in black and white and some in colour.

LIFE 50 is indeed a magazine to treasure.