America in Pictures: The Story of Life Magazine

THIS PROGRAMME CONTAINS SOME STRONG LANGUAGE.

Set up in 1936, LIFE magazine believed that pictures

could change the world.

The brainchild of publisher Henry Luce, it was a weekly

news magazine packed full of extraordinary photojournalism.

Through America's most dynamic decades - the '40s, '50s and '60s -

LIFE documented its growth into a world superpower.

The torch has been passed to a new generation of Americans.

But not in words - in pictures.

Really, LIFE is a celebration of America,

that's what they're celebrating in the pages of LIFE -

its power, its shift, its change.

It's a fantastic magazine,

because at that time, America was a fantastic place.

At LIFE, the photographer was king.

They pioneered new forms of photojournalism like embedding

and photo essays, and they caught the big moments in American history.

These were people directly in front of me who were being shot.

From political assassination to the civil rights movement.

I keep asking you this, but you weren't scared for your life at all?

I didn't think about it. I really didn't think about it.

It was about the pictures.

And the new sexual freedom.

I was able to go live in Hugh Hefner's mansion

and stay for ever and ever and ever.

What was that like?

Well, it made me horny, I'll tell you that!

To me, the men and women who shot for LIFE

are the gods of photography.

I'm on a pilgrimage across the USA

to find out how THEY told the story of America,

what made them tick and what made them click.

I'm starting with the first era of LIFE photographers from 1936,

so I've come to Martha's Vineyard

to meet a very special guy, Ralph Graves.

-Hi!

-Hello.

-You must be Ralph.

And you must be Rankin. Almost certain of it!

-Nice to meet you.

-Come on in.

-How you feeling?

'Ralph held the top job at LIFE, managing editor.'

When he started in the early days, he was a cub reporter.

It's those days I want to talk about.

Because unlike any other magazine,

at LIFE, it was the photographers who led

and the reporters who followed.

Our job was to help the photographer get the story.

We carried the photographers' bags,

sometimes very heavy bags and sometimes quite a lot of them.

We were the pigs

and the photographers were the big-time farmers.

No other magazine held the photograph

or the photographer in such high esteem.

The list of guys whose bags Ralph carried

reads like a who's who of photography.

But they started with just four - Thomas McAvoy, Peter Stackpole,

Alfred Eisenstaedt and Margaret Bourke-White.

Bourke-White had the honour of shooting the very first LIFE cover.

Glamorous, dynamic and completely fearless,

she became a household name,

and Ralph knew her very well.

She was very painstaking

in the way she photographed anything.

It took for ever! She liked to use lights, flash lights for everything.

I don't think she trusted God to handle the sun properly.

SHE was going to do it!

She had a quite a reputation as a very hot property.

Beautiful woman. Very well dressed, always looked like a lady.

Which she wasn't, totally.

She slept with a fair number of generals,

but they were important to her cause.

And an occasional colonel, if he had authority

for something she wanted to shoot.

The LIFE picture editor sent a cable to another LIFE photographer,

Eliot Elisofon, who was also covering World War II in Europe.

This message was very insulting.

It said, "Bourke-White is getting stories that you aren't getting

"and pictures that you aren't getting.

"What's the matter with you?"

And Eliot sent back one of the legendary cables in LIFE's history.

He said, "Bourke-White has a piece of equipment that I don't have."

All those generals and colonels knew about it!

Bourke-White's methods may have been unique,

but her three colleagues in those early days were just as inventive.

Thomas McAvoy specialised in disguises

and hidden cameras to catch people with their guard down.

Peter Stackpole was the mad scientist,

tinkering in his home workshop where he invented an underwater camera.

But for me, the master of the first four was Alfred Eisenstaedt.

Fleeing his native Germany in 1935, he brought with him

a candid style of photography that became LIFE's trademark.

He's the one photographer who worked for the magazine

from the beginning to the end on over 2,000 assignments.

"Eisie" would become the grand old man of LIFE

and a photography legend.

Eisie to look at was not much.

He was short, he was stocky,

but very proud that he could do one-handed push-ups.

One-handed! I was pretty damn impressed.

And I saw him do it.

He could shoot anything that moved.

So quick with a candid camera,

lights almost never needed,

and one or two shots, and he was finished.

Let's go on to something else.

Needle sharp, very certain of his skills.

These are all American military men saying goodbye

to their sweethearts and wives at Pennsylvania Station.

These were taken, not with a Leica, but with a Rolleiflex.

You know why? Because with a Rolleiflex, I could focus like this,

with the old Rolleiflex, like this, and hold it for minutes, like this.

As you see, I talk to you like this, and watch you and click there.

Click. See? Do this and watch you again.

Absolutely motionless, like a stone.

They didn't know that I photographed them.

But if I would do this, they would see me.

"What are you doing?" See, like this.

Here like this. Click.

I think all photographers look to Eisie as this kind of guy

who we put up on a pedestal.

If you know anything about photography,

you put him on a pedestal.

He made him feel, to me, really cheeky and naughty,

and the fact he does one-handed press-ups

and was shooting for the magazine into his late 70s is incredible.

Part of why the photographers of LIFE

are so influential is the millions of people who saw their work.

The first issue rolled off the press in 1936.

Every copy sold out on the first day.

America took to it instantly.

With success on the home front established in its first few years,

it was the onset of World War II

that really secured LIFE's place in American hearts and minds.

America didn't just want LIFE, it needed it.

From 1941 onwards,

American husbands, sons and lovers were overseas fighting.

You could hear about what they were going through on the radio,

but the only place you actually saw it was in LIFE.

The horror of it and the occasional glory of it.

The first photograph ever published of an American soldier dead

was in LIFE magazine.

LIFE was defined by its bravery.

Its photographers dangled from helicopters

and crawled into caves.

They dodged bullets and survived prisoner-of-war camps.

Robert Capa's pictures of the Omaha Beach landings,

Bob Landry's of French collaborators,

or W Eugene Smith's work in the Pacific.

These are some of the most harrowing and emotional images

in the history of photojournalism. It was a tough time for America,

but right to the end of the war, LIFE was there for them.

-VOICE-OVER:

-It was the long-awaited moment, and the lid was off!

Unparalleled were the scenes as multitudes

surged around Miss Liberty throwing restraint to the winds!

And when victory was declared, LIFE was there again.

The magazine caught the jubilation and the spirit of America in 1945,

and nowhere better than in this single famous frame by Eisie.

I love the spontaneity of this shot.

He stood, he waited and he grabbed it.

I'm going back to the same spot in Times Square

to try to get my own Eisie moment.

Hi, guys. You haven't got any idea where this was shot, do you?

-Where that was shot?

-Yeah.

-I think it was over there.

Look, there's a Coca-Cola sign right down there.

I just spoke to the cops, and the cop says that there is

a Coca-Cola sign, and he's saying that Coca-Cola have had

that sign there for ever and ever,

so he's saying that it's most probably this way.

If you were shooting this way, that would be the Paramount,

and that's Bond's.

After half an hour of searching, I'm sure I've found the spot,

but hadn't found anything to shoot.

But Eisie must have been smiling down on me,

because just when all hope was lost,

these two popped up in the crowd.

-Hi, I'm Rankin, nice to meet you.

-Hi.

I'm a photographer from London

doing a documentary about LIFE magazine,

and you guys almost look perfect for the photograph,

-and we were wondering if we could quickly duplicate it.

-OK.

-If you could do the kiss, that would be brilliant.

-I go like this?

You go like that, yeah. Hold on, hold on, hold on!

That's it, and kiss. Kiss! Kiss! That's it! That's it! That's it!

Hold on, wait for the cab!

Lean her over, lean her over!

Here we go. OK, go! Go!

CHEERING

That's amazing, one more.

That's good kissing!

CAR HONKS HORN

Yeah, we love it as well. Brilliant!

Nice!

Thank you! So lovely to meet you. Thank you.

America after the war was a changed place.

It had become a superpower

and was learning how to deal with that responsibility.

LIFE was growing up, too. The four start-up photographers were now 38

and they were developing new ways of telling stories.

Over ten or 12 pages, with just the tiniest amount of text,

LIFE brought people their news

by turning it into gripping, compelling stories

using only photographs. They called it the photo essay,

and it brought an intensity to news stories

that had never been experienced before.

Some of LIFE's essays are seminal.

Stories like Leonard McCombe's Career Girl

which took the issue of women in the workforce

and turned it into a touching melodrama.

And W Eugene Smith's Country Doctor,

essentially a call to arms for more GPs,

but through his eyes, a poignant and heroic look

at the work of a rural physician.

'A few blocks from Times Square lives John Loengard,

'one of LIFE's most influential photographers.'

He shot many brilliant photo essays for LIFE

as well as some amazing portraits.

He also impressed the soldiers in Vietnam

with his toughness and appetite for dog, lizard, even rats,

when food was scarce.

John's not only a brilliant photographer.

He went on to become LIFE's picture editor.

I could talk to him all day about his work,

but that's not why I'm here.

I want to ask him about LIFE's photo essays, and in particular,

about the two giants who created its Golden Age

in the late '40s and early '50s.

So in your opinion, was the photographic essay a LIFE invention?

I don't know whether the essay was. The term was.

It was one that Henry Luce coined about a year after LIFE started,

so something that he coined looking at what the magazine had done.

And, you know, it really started in the first issue.

Bourke-White had gone out to do

a story on the workers at the Fort Peck Dam

and how they spent Saturday night.

And of course, what it does is

it takes the whole dam-building story on the west,

which was news, and gives it a human dimension.

I love that idea of it being an insight into people's lives,

actually as they were doing it.

Which you couldn't have done before,

as you didn't have cameras that were necessarily as fast,

-film that was as fast...

-You didn't, no.

..to be able to picture these people

in the midst of what they were doing in life.

And you didn't really have the publications

that gave the opportunity

to instruct photographers in that possibility.

If you skip ahead to after the war, you have a change.

And here, right after the war,

one big thing is women wanting to stay in the workforce,

women going to work, and to pick out one girl,

one person in New York, and focus on her, which Leonard McCombe did.

And Leonard had an absolutely brilliant way

of being able to photograph absolutely ordinary things,

telling you so much about the people in them.

"Marilyn and Gwyned take their morning baths hurriedly,

"according to a strict rotation schedule.

"The other placidly waits her turn,

"and reads aloud from the St Charles Cosmos-Monitor,

"which is mailed to them daily, and remains a firm link with home."

The Bourke-White photographs to these,

-there's an intimacy, there's a closeness.

-Yes.

And actually, as you go through it, gets closer and closer and closer.

"After a telephone squabble with Charlie, Gwyned bursts into tears.

"She's under continual strain,

"because she's anxious to make a success of her career.

"Tears might be caused merely

"by the shattering of a tumbler or a cigarette burn on a new dress.

"In this case, it was the simple and harmless vagueness

"of Charlie Strauss."

For intimacy, McCombe's photo-essays have never been equalled.

But the other master of the photo-essay, who I have a special,

personal interest in,

is W Eugene Smith.

It was seeing his work as a young man that made me want to become

a photographer in the first place.

W Eugene Smith, who I would argue

is possibly the greatest photographer that was on the staff,

he was doing essays that had

extraordinary drama and emotion to them.

"Having done his best for the child, Ceriani is worn out and tense.

"He has stitched the wound in her forehead,

"but already knows that nothing can be done to save her eye,

"and tries to think of a way to soften the news for her parents."

There's just an extraordinary

amount of empathy in his photographs.

Whereas with Leonard,

you're surprised at how intimate things are.

With Gene, I think you're surprised

at how you understand exactly how anybody in the photograph feels.

"In the kitchen, while the women whisper,

"Ceriani telephones the priest,

"to tell him that the old man will not live through the night."

I think that he had this extraordinary ability,

and what came with it was some personal liabilities, if you want,

we all have them.

And sometimes, they got in his way.

I'm learning that to be The Man From LIFE meant many different things.

Smith was definitely the tortured genius - LIFE's Van Gogh,

partly because he had such empathy for his subjects.

I do like to become so immersed in their life,

that I become a part of their life.

Maybe even a contributing part, although this is not my intent.

And then I like to speak from that position.

I like to speak of what I am participating in.

A unique blend of journalism and art

the photo-essay became

the very definition of what LIFE was all about.

All the next generation of photographers needed was stories,

and America was going to provide them...

# Don't know why I love you

# Don't know why I care

# I just want your love to share

# I wonder why

# I love you like I do

# Is it because

# I think you love me, too?

# I wonder why

# I love you like I do... #

The 1950s were the boom years for America.

In a time of increasing affluence and after wartime austerity,

LIFE was playing back to its readers

images of their country and themselves,

that seemed both authentic and reassuring.

Millions of people could discover modern American life,

be stimulated by it and feel part of it.

I can't begin to tell you all the things in LIFE this week,

and every week.

News, sports, fashions, politics, everything.

I have my copy. Why don't you get yours?

At your nearest news dealer tomorrow.

LIFE and America were now going steady,

and nothing was going to split them up.

Nearly 100 million Americans looked at the magazine every week.

That's more than half the country. Incredible.

The man in charge of choosing and laying out the stories

was the director of photography.

Ron Bailey held that post

and witnessed the impact LIFE had on ordinary Americans.

What do you think the American population loved about it so much?

I'm not sure.

You know, for many years it was the way we could see the world.

We find it hard now with all the television, and all the cable,

and all the internet where you can see videos, but, you know, LIFE...

We always thought of LIFE as a way of seeing the world.

And it carried....

..carried a lot of influence.

As a photographer, that's what you strive for.

You strive to be able to have your photographs touch other people

and make them feel something, and LIFE photographers had that.

When I think about it that gives me goose bumps, I'm like,

"Wow, to be able to get those stories, to go and do those things,"

and not just essays but, brilliant science photos or brilliant portraits.

You know, they had the ability to touch people.

Right.

One of the most powerful stories we did while I was at the magazine

was in 1969, and it was an editor's idea to take pictures,

pick up pictures from families of the week's dead in Vietnam.

I think it was 220-something.

And we carried a photograph of everyone killed in that week.

To me, that was the most powerful thing

we could have done against the war, and I was against the war.

Sometimes I think back on, you know,

what was the impact of this magazine?

And the impact was there in, I guess, a thousand other ways

when I was growing up.

It was, you know...

You looked at LIFE magazine and that was how you saw the world.

What Ron said is quite shocking.

For one publication to be the window of the world

is massively influential.

I knew LIFE's coverage of Vietnam had turned people against the war,

but talking to Ron made me realise LIFE always had that power.

Right from the beginning, telling America

what to think, not just about big world events,

but about itself.

LIFE always cared about the big issues of the day,

but was devoted to small-town America.

Stories of the lives of ordinary people, their work,

their pleasure, their anguish.

The magazine returned to them again and again, across the decades,

as if the small town summed up everything that LIFE believed in.

But why?

'I've come to Wilson, North Carolina, to meet photographer Burk Uzzle.'

That's the famous red-eye gravy.

Hold onto it - it'll walk by itself right out the door if you're not careful.

'Burk came from a small town,

'travelled the world taking pictures for LIFE, and now he's back in one.'

How do you think small town America, somewhere like this,

kind of reflects America as a whole?

I think... It's an interesting question because in a way it reflects

what I both like and dislike about LIFE magazine.

The great thing about working for LIFE magazine

was that it, in those days, what you, what you went for,

the ideology of the magazine, was to go for that superb moment,

the exalted moment.

Even in a quiet people story, it was that really intense moment.

Well, that brings me to a small town.

Why would I live in a small town?

In a way, it's more intense here than it ever was in New York,

all the years I lived in New York.

Because I get to know the people more deeply.

I'm more involved with them.

So there's an intensity of involvement, possible,

within all the aspects of American culture in this little town

of Wilson than I ever had in New York.

But why do you think LIFE was so obsessed with the small town,

because, I mean, it was, you've got

so many small town stories in the magazine.

LIFE was about the population at large.

LIFE was not Vogue magazine. LIFE was not Conde Nast.

And LIFE, because of its small town orientation,

seemed to care about real people.

So LIFE, because it was interested in the small town, cared...

I feel like it did.

And you could go into a small town as a LIFE photographer

and it would be like some TV star walking into town.

I mean, you were a celebrity if you walked into town

and said you were from LIFE magazine back in those days and...

They would open the town up to you.

And then it was your job to be respectful

and to treat it seriously, and to love it in your own way.

Burk's been taking photographs for over four decades and I love

that he feels the small town reveals something wider about America.

'At 23, he was the youngest photographer ever hired by LIFE.'

Pretty impressive. Then he went on to work at Magnum for 15 years.

But, despite a career to die for,

he feels he's making his best work today.

Well, Rankin, this is one of the floors of the studio.

This is the small studio.

This is the small one?!

Oh, wow, that's wonderful.

'Some of his recent work is closer to fine art,

'but there's still echoes of LIFE in a lot of it.

'And you can see him in every frame.'

Why do you think you are still taking pictures?

Because a lot of the LIFE photographers,

when it finished, they gave up...

Went into real estate?

Yeah.

Because the fact that you're still shooting

and the work is incredible, is brilliant, and I wondered why?

One of the first big conversations I ever had with a LIFE photographer

when I was 23 years old, there was a LIFE photographer in the bureau

by the name of Robert W Kelly who took me and says,

"Burk, you're a young photographer, I want you to know the secret to being a LIFE photographer."

And I said, "What's that?"

And he says "You shoot every picture for the managing editor."

And I thought to myself, "You stupid shit,

"you don't have a ball to call your own!"

I mean, if you're taking pictures for the fucking managing editor,

you know, give it up right now!

Because you've got nothing to stand on. There's no YOU there.

There's no "there" there!

'Most photographers would have killed for a staff job at LIFE,

'but Burk's not most photographers.

'Always a free spirit, he turned down their offer

'and worked freelance, determined to keep his independence.'

There's some interesting LIFE stories in here.

I'm going to have to do it down here. See, this is how LIFE worked.

I wanted to do a story on growing up in North Carolina.

This is Cousin Balgie, this is my wife's uncle.

And this is her father's porch.

The story you haven't heard is that,

when they were doing the layout and the art director was

Bernie Quint, and he made a layout and cropped out the dirt.

-How could you do that?

-That's the point of the picture!

And he kept saying, "Well, this is the way I feel it."

I said, "Well, you know what, you didn't fucking grow up there,

"these are my pictures and you can't do that to my work, about my place!"

And he said, "I can so, I'm the art director,"

and I said, "Well, I'll be damned if you can,"

and I picked up a layout and I tore them up

and threw them on the floor and I picked up my colour transparencies

and I walked out of the room.

What did they do?

Well, they had some serious talks about my future at LIFE magazine!

With the director of photography,

and he said, "You can't treat Bernie Quint that way,"

and I said, "He can't treat my pictures that way!"

Burk's work blows me away.

It doesn't matter where he is,

whether it's a sheep ranch in Wyoming

or a kitchen in Minnesota, he finds that intimate human thing,

that moment where the subject actually reveals themselves.

It's close, it's personal,

and it's intimate.

Then again, he wasn't always allowed

to get quite as intimate as he wanted.

I was able to go live in Hugh Heffner's mansion,

and stay for ever and ever and ever.

What was that like?

Well, it made me horny, I tell you that!

There was a lot of pretty poon-ta... a lot of stuff walking around!

And I was married at the time and my wife,

I was living in New York, she said, "You're doing a story on Hefner, huh?

"Well, where are you going to be staying?"

And I said, "Well, close," and she says, "Well, I'm coming to Chicago."

And she came out and she checked into a hotel right down the street

and so, I get, you know, I was able to reconvene with my wife

whenever I would come out of the mansion and that was a good thing.

For someone like me, who's used to big city America,

I didn't think places like this still existed.

Burk's invited me

to bring my camera to the weekly service at the Wilson Cowboy Church.

Yes, you heard me. The Cowboy Church.

# I am holden to the Lord

# I am holden to the Lord

# If I could I surely would

# Stand on the rock with Moses too... #

You've got this, the horse, the flag, the ruins of the building,

there's a lot of things going on at once. And all the body language.

It's just amazing.

# Sinner run and hide your face

# Sinner run and hide your face... #

Working alongside Burk, I realise the LIFE photographer

was constantly performing a balancing act

between joining the community and keeping enough distance to document it.

Here at Cowboy Church,

we think about horses and how things happen...

Some men from LIFE came, made a fuss, got the shot, and left.

But those that got the best out of small town America, like Burk,

made real connections.

Jesus died on the cross in obedience to the Father....

And despite the modest subjects we're shooting,

a bunch of horses, families, and a church service,

the big themes of America are somehow revealed,

patriotism, faith, nationhood, and community.

# ..Stand on that rock

# Where Moses stood. #

It's been really great, actually, it's been really great.

And I think Burk...

He's very interesting, I watched him all through the service

and he doesn't "partake" of the service.

He's very stoic about the whole thing, which I kind of respect,

because I'm very much of the same mind.

I'm there to look and document, not to be involved.

But I got a bit carried away with the parson,

I liked him a lot.

By 1956, LIFE was 20 years old, and coming of age.

With a yearly profit of 17.5 million,

the magazine was exceptionally wealthy.

It was so successful that advertisers were falling over

themselves to buy more and more pages.

All that money allowed LIFE's photographers to do weird and wonderful things.

They devised a host of bizarre cameras to capture

the ever-advancing scale of man's achievements,

from deep below the ocean surface,

to miles up into the Earth's atmosphere,

and even into outer space.

LIFE pushed the boundaries of what could be photographed,

creating world class, jaw dropping images

that shook the world at the time.

But most importantly,

the money enabled LIFE's photographers

to get closer to their subjects than ever before.

'I've come to Connecticut to meet photographer Bill Eppridge.'

-Bill.

-Hey. How are you? Good to see you.

-Good to see you.

'Bill's skill was stealth.'

-You got your camera there.

-Always.

Observing his subjects like an undercover agent,

he often spent six months on a single story.

It's this commitment to embedding with subjects

that was the breakthrough in getting to the truth...in pictures.

Just a common, ordinary, everyday couple crossing the street.

You go to the next spread...

..and that's what they are.

She came from a very fine family on Long Island.

To make money to support her habit, she was a prostitute.

He came from a very fine family in New Jersey.

To make money, he stole, he boosted from cabs, he was a petty thief.

All for money for heroin.

And I went and I lived with these people, virtually,

for 22, 23 hours a day.

And tried to be invisible.

And that thing of embedding yourself,

that was very particular to Life magazine.

I mean, very few other magazines would have had

the chance to do a six-month story.

Yeah, it required time, but the magazine would give us the time.

Embedding with two heroin addicts threw up all kinds of complications

and moral questions for the Life photographer.

Bill frequently found himself tangled up in lawbreaking,

and sometimes life-or-death situations.

My biggest problem at this point - knowing about it.

Do I call the police, do I photograph it?

I mean, the guy could have died.

It's a very big dilemma.

It's like standing there watching somebody on fire,

and you've got a bucket of water in one hand

and a camera in the other hand - what do you do?

The heroin essay undoubtedly changed people's opinions of drug addicts.

Even now, the images feel daring.

There's no barrier between Bill and the couple.

We see them as they really lived, as they really were.

In 1968, he embedded with Senator Robert Kennedy

on his Presidential campaign. After victory in California,

Bobby and his entourage came to the Ambassador Hotel in Los Angeles

for what was meant to be a triumphant speech.

Bill was about to take a career-defining picture.

One I know well.

My thanks to all of you. Now, it's on to Chicago, and let's win there.

Bobby came off the stage, found us,

and Bill Barry, who was the one bodyguard,

said in very stern voice -

and I know, I'm this far away from him, I'm there -

Barry said, "No, Senator, this way!"

And Bobby said, "No, Bill,"

and just turned on his heel and walked back towards the kitchen.

I saw people diving for cover, what I thought was diving for cover.

They weren't.

These were people directly in front of me who were being shot.

Everybody out, just please stay back.

Just the doctor, come right here.

Is there a doctor in the house?

We took a couple steps forward and came upon Bobby lying there.

As I got to his feet, into a position,

the crowd just opened for a second,

and there he was, and the busboy was still holding him,

Juan Romero, still holding him,

and I took one frame, it was totally out of focus.

The second frame I made, he's in focus,

but Juan Romero is looking down at him.

The third frame, as quickly as I could make it,

Juan Romero looks up towards me

and there's this kind of look of "Help me" in his face.

I've never been able to hang that picture on the wall.

-I can't.

-You've never shown it?

I've shown it, I've shown it, but not in my home.

I cannot put it up, just because it brings back memories

that I don't want.

That picture still terrifies me.

And it...

I also think about what happened in this country afterwards,

and what should not have happened,

politically.

I'm sorry I had to make it, but it had to be done.

Bill's image definitely captured a moment.

Robert Kennedy's assassination stunned America.

Another irrational act to add to the anguish and conflict

that was dividing the country.

Bill's picture said it all. Something precious had been lost.

I've met a few Life photographers now,

and it's clear that every one of these guys had a role to play

at key moments in American history.

They were right there at the coalface, camera in hand.

I don't feel dressed for the occasion, Bill.

Yeah, well, hey, the fish don't know!

Just being in the company of guys like Bill has been

an education for me.

But LIFE photographers were like a school of artists,

an exclusive club.

And their clubhouse was the photographers' common room,

Room 2850.

My first visit to that office,

I was a...a junior in college,

so that probably would have made me about...19.

Wow.

Was it amazing?

It was. It was.

That's when I started learning.

And...I just did nothing else but learn,

at that magazine.

Every one of those guys was a teacher,

and I figure that's where I got my Masters degree,

and maybe partway to a PhD.

You walk in that office

and you just never knew

who was going to be there.

I mean,

Eisenstaedt, you walk in, he'd be sitting there doing something,

Carl Mydans right next to him.

I met Eugene Smith in there one day,

once, I had the privilege of speaking to him,

and it was in 2850.

I heard he was a bit grumpy?

Oh, yeah. Yeah.

But hey, everybody's got to be something.

LIFE was like a family,

and Room 2850 was where the torch was passed.

Bill's generation saw dramatic changes,

and the unravelling of a society

which LIFE had to some extent helped hold together.

LIFE and its photographers

went to new and dangerous places.

The biggest story in 1960s America

was happening halfway around the world.

The war in Vietnam was tearing America apart.

No war had been so vividly documented,

so dramatically photographed as Vietnam,

and the British photographer Larry Burrows

worked harder at it than most.

You can't let yourself think.

For nine years he returned time and time again

to record the events in that tragic conflict.

To anyone but a photojournalist,

that persistence must have seemed like an act of madness.

Eventually, he met his death there,

shot down in a helicopter in 1971.

I've come to meet Russell Burrows,

the son of LIFE's greatest war photographer.

A lot of war photographers are seen as quite macho,

but from what I've heard,

your dad was almost the opposite of that.

Yes, he was not a dare-doing man.

He was a mild-mannered man

who went to war.

GUNFIRE, EXPLOSIONS

He talked about his experiences of war,

but he'd never discuss the danger.

It was no different going to Vietnam

or spending a night at the Victoria and Albert Museum, photographing.

He prepares for war like a soldier preparing for battle.

He's a veteran.

During the last 20 years,

he's covered Cyprus, Suez, the Congo,

the Chinese-India conflict, and South Vietnam.

There have been moments, yes,

when your lips go dry, and you sort of reflect those, yes.

I think anybody that does not,

does not have any fear

is a complete idiot.

And have you heard the rumours

that guys that were fighting saw him as a kind of lucky mascot?

Because he seemed to get away with,

you know, not being shot.

Yes. For nine years in Vietnam,

he went again and again to the front.

He took chances that other people would consider, perhaps, ridiculous.

But they were calculated risks.

There was one particular story called One Ride With Yankee Papa 13,

which involved 17 helicopters,

four of which were shot down,

and quite a lot of people were killed and wounded.

And...

..we tried to rescue a pilot off a ship,

and we were trapped between these two 30-calibre machine guns.

The pilot was slumped over the controls.

We could see him.

Farley ran across, I ran after him.

And visually, there were many...

The sound of gunfire and all that was happening,

but trying to do it visually was extremely difficult.

It looked documentary.

It was frustrating.

The co-pilot that had to climb onto our ship

had two bullet holes,

one in the arm, one in the leg,

and one we hadn't noticed, a third one

which was just under the armpit.

And he died.

It was a very sad moment, a very touching moment,

when our crew chief broke down and cried.

And so often I wonder whether it is my right

to capitalise, as I feel so often,

on the grief of others.

But then I justify in my own particular thoughts

by feeling that if I can contribute

a little to the understanding of what others are going through,

there's a reason for doing it.

There were letters of complaint

about the graphic nature of some of LIFE's war pictures,

but the magazine held firm.

John Shaw Billings,

its first Managing Editor, once said,

"If free men refuse to look at dead bodies,

"then brave men will have died in vain."

Back home, America was burning.

A change was sweeping the nation as black America fought for equality.

Just like Vietnam, LIFE's coverage of the Civil Rights Movement

was opinionated. And deliberately so.

From black bus riders

who sat in the white seats in Mississippi

to heavy-handed police treatment in Alabama,

the man from LIFE

wasn't dodging any punches.

He was getting stuck into the biggest issue of the day.

LIFE gave these stories such prominence,

there was no way America could ignore them.

The '60s saw unprecedented change,

but was LIFE merely reporting it,

or was it driving it?

To answer that question,

I've come to the South Bronx

to meet one of its most fearless photographers, John Shearer.

This has got energy, this area, right?

It's not like Manhattan.

To look at John's work

you might think he was a combat photographer,

but these photos aren't from a distant battlefield.

They were taken in America's back yard.

When riots broke out at Attica Prison,

John chose to walk in with his cameras.

He spent four days inside in a riot

where 41 men lost their lives.

LOUDSPEAKER: We want to stop the slave labour here.

So, we're in the Bronx.

Has it changed much?

You know, this street, it feels like I was here yesterday.

It's really been able to hold on

to that wonderful character it had, you know?

Can you tell me the ways that you felt America was changing

when you started as a staffer at LIFE?

Well, America, you know, is exploding,

I mean, I think I was lucky enough to live through the '60s,

and to be a working photojournalist during the '60s.

The world was really changing radically, and...

and I guess I was changing with it,

I was, my horizons were changing,

and my, my views about things were changing.

Did you ever feel the issues around the Civil Rights Movement

affected you directly at all?

Oh, no question about it.

I mean, there was a greater need for Black voices,

Blacks to help tell that story,

and I covered Selma, Birmingham

and went to Jackson, Mississippi, to cover the Klan and other stories.

That was my beat, you know.

And, you know, to me, certainly in terms of covering things,

that was more important to me than covering like a Vietnam,

cos that was our story, you know.

And so, when I had the chance,

I said, "No, I'll stay, I want to stay and cover this."

I keep asking you this, but you weren't scared for your life at all?

I didn't think about it.

I really didn't think about it.

It was about the pictures, you know.

-And you know how that is.

-Yeah...

Yeah... I'm saying yes,

but the bravest I get is turning the air conditioning off in my studio.

But I'm here in the middle of the South Bronx,

and there's a good reason for that.

John's brought me here

because this was the site of another of his reportage missions.

In 1972 he embedded for six weeks with a street gang

known as The Reapers.

Now this has all changed.

This is where we shot the gang meeting picture.

I think Eddie stood on those steps over there,

the steps on the right, and he would talk to all the fellas.

But they were deciding that night

if they were going to go to war on another gang.

One of the things you learned over the years

is you always had a little bottle of vinegar with cotton in it,

in your shirt pocket. So that way, if you were ever in a situation

where there was tear gas or any of that kind of stuff,

you could stick that cotton in your nose to keep your eyes clear.

And those were all the little things

that you always had going on, you know.

Also, you know, you tended to

always dump your film, as you went along, through the day,

so if you got into a jam, you know,

you wouldn't have to worry about losing all the day's work, you know.

So there was a couple of delis

and other places I would typically stash my stuff

-during the course of the day.

-Wow.

-So I didn't have a lot of it on me.

-That's so brilliant.

-Yeah.

John's an incredible guy,

dedicated and totally fearless.

I'm amazed the freedom he had

to go out on his own and bring back the story.

His "beat", as he modestly described it,

were the big stories of the late 1960s.

But LIFE's frontline coverage of Civil Rights

and Vietnam seems to me a last gasp of campaigning photojournalism.

By the early 1970s, a new national obsession was taking hold.

One I know intimately - celebrity.

So long the champion of making the ordinary extraordinary,

LIFE needed to feed this appetite.

Despite publishing portraits of America's great and good since its earliest days,

celebrity culture put the magazine under pressure.

LIFE needed a different kind of photographer.

A pushy, hungry, talent to get to the stars.

Glaswegian Harry Benson was their man.

-Hello.

-Oh, Mr Rankin. Very nice to meet you.

-Nice to meet you. Who's this?

-This is my son, Oscar.

-Nice to meet you.

-Very nice to meet you, yes.

-I'm a big fan.

This enticing picture of Greta Garbo

is a classic Benson celebrity portrait.

It's a kind of hybrid shot. Reportage with a hint of paparazzi.

How did you take these? Did you hide for these?

-No, I was on a boat.

-On a boat?

-A kind of hiding.

But I didn't mess up her holiday by chasing her.

-Yeah. You just did one?

-Well, maybe more than one.

Harry's treatment of Greta Garbo was a sign of things to come.

As public figures began to put barriers up,

photographers needed to devise ways to overcome them.

Well, I mean, my background was completely different, Rankin.

I came from Fleet Street. London Daily Express.

It was competitive.

And it was fun.

When I came to America

and...and I started working for LIFE,

LIFE was a dude ranch.

You know, fancy. Limousines. You know.

I was hungry.

Still hungry. You're still hungry now!

Yeah, I was hungry. I was hungry...

That's why I would go and do any job.

You're just like a rat, you're looking for ways to...

-Capture something?

-To capture, if you have your wits about you.

To get your morsels, right?

-And if you work hard, you're inclined to get lucky.

-Yeah.

I think you're incredibly humble about it, I have to say, Harry.

Because I think that, number one,

you've got a fantastic eye.

And number two, you know, yes, I agree with you,

hard work gets you in those places, but to get that close to people

and to be able to capture those images is very...

is very much a talent.

When there is an opportunity, the door opens slightly. It's...

You ram your way through it?

Yeah, just like a rat. Or a nasty dog coming to you.

Harry's determination to get the picture

meant he got some amazing portraits of famous,

often very elusive people.

And that's how LIFE used him.

If they had a tough subject, send in Benson.

They didn't come much tougher than chess genius Bobby Fischer.

Considered by many to be the most gifted player of all time,

he was just as famous for being a cantankerous grump.

Bobby Fischer, everyone knew he was a piece of shit.

He was terrible.

-A nightmare to deal with?

-Absolutely!

But then it's a challenge.

It was worth fighting for, to get as close as you can.

And get out. My idea has always been get in,

get as close as you can and get out.

I don't want to become friends with these people.

None of them. I don't...

I...I don't care.

I mean, if I finish a job and they ask me for dinner,

and that happens often, I never go.

I don't want...

the individual to say to me,

"Harry, that picture of me in the bubble bath, please don't use it."

Bang goes my best picture because of my new best friend.

Who isn't my best friend! It's somebody I've photographed.

You know?

Never.

No matter how difficult somebody is,

at one time, the story will soften on you,

and you've got to be ready for this.

This is your road in. And it'll happen on every story.

There is a moment where you can take advantage, you can do your job.

Because that's all I'm talking about is being able to do your job.

That's what President Nixon said when he let me into San Clemente

after he got thrown out of office.

I said, "I want to thank you, Mr President, I know this isn't

"the best time in your life," and he said,

"Harry, you must allow professional people to do their job."

Nixon, Johnson, Reagan.

In fact I've photographed every American president since Eisenhower.

-I'm showing off now.

-That's good, I like that.

-I'm showing off to everybody!

I can see why Harry continued to be such a success

when photojournalism changed through the '70s and '80s.

He's a scrapper. Even now, aged 81, he's still got his edge.

The cult of celebrity marked a new era.

But the demise of LIFE.

Since 1936, LIFE had held America's hand through its greatest decades,

witnessing its first steps as a superpower

and the great blossoming that followed.

LIFE's most powerful voices, its photographers,

had championed America's greatest achievements.

But certainly weren't afraid to reflect its darker,

more painful divisions, too.

But the window on the world the men from LIFE created had splintered.

TV was king now.

And people's desire to create their own window on the world had begun.

So, in December 1972, the magazine closed.

And many its photographers hung up their cameras for good.

When I came here I wondered what it took to be "the man from LIFE".

Meeting the guys I have, I realise that I could never have been one.

I'm just not brave enough.

What I discovered is they're all incredible human beings first,

and photographers second.

Luckily for us, they chose the camera to tell us who they were,

and how they saw their world.

So, here I've got the last issue, and the first issue of LIFE,

and I guess it's kind of fitting that for the last issue of LIFE

they decided not to put a photograph on the cover.

It's all text.

In a way, it kind of like...

it sums up the fact that it was over

for the photographic magazine

that had been so successful from the 30s onwards.

-# That's life

-That's life

# That's what all the people say

# You're riding high in April, shot down in May... #

All of those fantastic photographs that showed us a window

into what America was like, it's rise and development,

we wouldn't have them. And that's why LIFE's amazing.

-# ..I said, that's life

-That's life... #

LIFE had a place in American homes, hearts and minds

that I just hadn't understood before I came here.

I don't think there's ever been a magazine that has had such a strong bond with its readers.

And what a role LIFE played.

Sometimes guardian, sometimes magician

and always, I think, a kind of teacher.

Whatever LIFE set out to say, its language was always photography.

And its lesson?

To teach America how to be American.

Yee-ha!

-# ..That's life

-That's life

# And I can't deny it

# Many times I thought of cutting out but my heart won't buy it

# But if there's nothin' shaken come this here July

# I'm gonna roll myself up

# In a big ball

# A-a-a-nd die

# My, my. #

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