You’ve probably read the news on APE or PDNPulse or elsewhere…Life magazine’s vast photography archive is making its way online with the help of Google. I posted about Life’s digital foray before, but that page remains the same. PDN’s behind-the-scenes article suggests that Life has more up it’s sleeve planned for the Life.com domain. Only 20 percent of the archive is online at the moment, and the remaining 8 million or so mostly-unpublished pictures will be made available in the coming months, according to Google’s blog.

The PDN article, too, delves into some the financial questions behind the site. Time Inc., who are the owners of the Life empire, and Getty hope the portal will drive traffic to the soon to be released Life magazine site and also offer print sales to the general public through print-on-demand service Qoop.com. Hard to say how all of the contracts over the years will affect the final form of the collection, and one wonders whether photographers or their estates are receiving proceeds from the venture (if any proceeds are due). Commenters on APhotoEditor.com’s thread about the endeavor have been wondering whether more business-savvy photographers in the 80s and 90s, who likely didn’t sign work for hire agreements, will be in the collection or not. Interestingly, PDN’s article suggests that the Life archive will not go after bloggers’ and other personal use of the photos.

I’ve also seen comments online wondering why the collection wasn’t incorporated into the vast Flickr Commons (home to the Library of Congress’ huge archive, among others’) project or at least use Flickr’s engine for community annotation and tagging. Presumably, a great deal of the Life archive remains under copyright and, as such, wouldn’t fit into the Flickr Commons model.

Wish I had more time to sift through the Life archive, but in the meantime, here’s W. Eugene Smith’s Country Doctor and Spanish Village essays, a strange photo of a bowling alley and archery range, covered wagons used in World War I, Salvador Dali, a running surfer, and a dual cigarette holder for lovers.

Life magazine (the insert, not the great publication of yore) had the jump on Saturday Night Live all the way back in 2004 as part of a package on that year’s election. Bill Shapiro, former managing editor of the insert version of Life, explained the shoot:

As the election neared and it was becoming clear that every vote would
matter, we decided to ask a wide range of famous Americans why there were stepping up to the ballot box. We photographed Madeleine Albright, Manny Ramirez, Andre 3000, and Tucker Carlson (who told us, “People vote when they feel threatened. So it’s a good sign, in my view, that half the country doesn’t vote in the presidential election”) among others. Of course, we photographed John McCain and Tina Fey together. He was thrilled to meet her and they got along very well: They had lunch and he gave her an impromptu tour of the Senate building. Makes us wonder if when McCain met Palin for the first time, he said, ‘You know, you remind me of someone…”

And just for good measure, here’s Tina Fey as Sarah Palin on this year’s premiere of SNL, the show’s highest rated debut since 2002. Apparently Sarah Palin liked the parody, too.

This looks interesting.  Seems as though Life magazine will soon be publishing their archive online.  Right now, there’s just a placeholder page with a place to put your email for updates when the site adds content.  From the page: “Whatever you want to look at, whether it happened an hour ago, a century ago, or any time in between, you’ll be able to find it here quickly, easily, and for free.”  Sounds great to me.  (via APhotoEditor.com)Bonus fact: the first cover of Life (below) was shot in Montana by a female photographer, Margaret Bourke-White (wikipedia bio, some pictures).  While a couple of notable female photographers come to mind from that era, Dorothea Lange, for instance, I’d imagine the field of photojournalism back then was dominated by men back then even more so than today; makes me happy to think that beginning of the most important magazine in the history of photography was shot by Margaret Bourke-White.