THE QUEST FOR NOVELTY
By Piri Halasz
Paul Schutzer. Crowd for "I have a dream" speech by Martin Luther King. August 28, 1963. © Time Inc.
This fall, the International Center of Photography staged "Looking at Life," a show of over 200 photographs taken for Life magazine during its 36-year span of publication as a weekly, between 1936 and 1972.
Both Time and Life were published by Time Inc., and somebody recently asked me whether I was up against "a lot of politics" when I worked for Time (in the 50s and 60s). Yes and no. Time’s audience was largely Republican, since it was targeted toward the college-educated, and most college-educated people were in managerial or professional occupations, which in those days were preponderantly Republican. Thus the "front of the book" sections of the magazine (national events, world affairs, and business news) had to be slanted in a Republican direction.
Initially, I found this grating, coming as I did from a liberal Democratic background. I got used to it in business and world news (where the magazine often had convincing background information that I wouldn’t have known about otherwise). I never got used to Time’s national politics, but fortunately I never worked in that section, and, after I escaped to the Art page, in the "back of the book," I had practically nothing to do with politics. In today’s art scene, politics and art go together like yin and yang, but in the 60s political art shows were comparatively rare. Most artists were more concerned with their work as art, whether it was abstract, figurative, conceptual or anything else.
Time allowed me to see how slanted in an opposite direction were the more liberal publications, like Newsweek. Part of leaving Time was rediscovering how slanted it was, but I never forgot that liberal publications could also be slanted. I find that, generally, people who sympathize with a publication don’t think of it as slanted, and do find slanted those publications they don’t agree with, so if you heard somebody this fall complaining that the New York Times was too liberal, that person was probably thinking about voting for Bush. Although the editorials in the Times tend to favor Democrats, and its cultural and society coverage are as P. C. as can be, it did give Bush at least equal space during the campaign, to say nothing of four years of front-page coverage since the year 2000. The paper also carries opposed opinions on its Op-Ed page: liberal columnists (Bob Herbert, Paul Krugman), but also conservative ones (David Brooks, William Safire).
Virtually all the writers on Time were Democrats. Those in front-of-the-book sections tended to have less self-respect than those in back of the book, where the apolitical subjects included not only art, but also music, showbiz, medicine, science and sports. Back of the book was a happier place to write, but from all I have heard, Life was even happier. Maybe one reason was that Life was targeted toward high school graduates. College-educated people read it too, but it was open to the less educated because it had so many pictures, and you didn’t have to be able to read that well to get something out of it. Perhaps because the country had a preponderance of Democrats in the less educated occupations, Life was more circumspect in its Republicanism than was Time.
"Looking at Life" showed how Life covered news stories, from Depression-era dams on through three wars. There were some cultural personalities, like Kim Novak and Ernest Hemingway, and a fine picture of the crowd listening to Martin Luther King, Jr., deliver his "I have a dream" speech before the Washington Monument. Most of the big name photographers were in the show: Margaret Bourke-White, Robert Capa, Gordon Parks, and many others, plus famous pictures by lesser-known photographers: Rita Hayworth in her sexy nightgown, Vietnamese children fleeing napalm, and so on. Yet news photography was only part of what made Life rewarding.
At this show, I saw no fashion stories, no Jackson Pollock, no "Life Goes to a Party," no movie or play synopses, little medicine, and whatever happened to "Speaking of Pictures…. "? This feature displayed the most bizarre photographs the magazine could find, from scientific phenomena to Dal�. The exhibition should have been called, "Looking through Life" instead of "Looking at Life." Instead of presenting the magazine as a whole, it tried to use it as a lens through which viewers could believe they were learning thirty-six years of history in an hour. The flaw in that concept is that news is one thing and reality is another. Just listen to Max Frankel, former executive editor of the Times: "My only verity is that news must be new. News is not a rendering of reality, only a quest for novelty."
© Copyright Piri Halasz 2004. This article is excerpted and adapted from Ms. Halasz’s online column, From the Mayor’s Doorstep, http://piri.home.mindspring.com
