THERE was a sad inevitability to Time Inc.'s announcement that Life magazine will cease publication.
The first American newsmagazine built around photojournalism has lingered in a kind of half-life for the last three years as a weekly color supplement distributed by subscribing to newspapers, including the Los Angeles Times. That was the third incarnation the title had undergone since it stopped independent weekly publication in 1972 to be followed by occasional and, then, monthly issues. No other general interest publication has ridden the wave of popular taste in media for quite so long, but this time the tide was too strongly against it.
The middle ground between pictures that move and still photographs that stand as art has been eroding for some time, and that space in between is where Life always lived.
Paradoxically, the end comes at a time when the visual storytelling that once was the magazine's franchise innovation has become a ubiquitous cultural property. Digital technology, color reproduction and the unlimited space on newspaper websites have made this something of a golden age for newspaper photojournalism, when the level of ambition and achievement never has been higher.
Life always lived in the moment, and its history is a chronicle of journalism's adaptation to popular taste. As such, it's also a rather remarkable list of firsts. We tend to think that the title began in 1936, when Henry Luce launched the country's first all-photo newsmagazine to accompany Time and Fortune. In fact, Luce acquired a by-then moribund magazine founded in 1883, sold off its subscriber list and gave it a makeover. At its peak, the old magazine was one of the nation's most celebrated illustrated weeklies, the place where Charles Gibson first drew his celebrated Gibson Girls and where Norman Rockwell got his start.
Luce understood that photography was subsuming illustration as a mass medium and wanted a publication built around that realization. At its launch, his Life was all about celebrity and entertainment, and perhaps because of that the magazine was the first of its era to make a place for a substantial number of female editors and photojournalists. The onrush of history and World War II also pushed Life toward another first of continuing relevance: the blend of hard news with entertainment and cultural news. In the 1950s and early 1960s, science -- particularly exclusive coverage of the manned space program -- was added to the mix, addressing a readership whose educational level had risen on the back of the GI Bill.
