How Did Norman Rockwell's Magazine Influenced America?

The first issue of Henry Luce’s photographic magazine Life was published on November 23, 1936. The cover photo featured the Fort Peck Dam which was photographed by Margaret Bourke-White. It was America’s first all-photographic news magazine, and it dominated the market for over 40 years. The periodical experienced many lives over the years, mesmerizing millions of readers before ultimately being shut down in 2007.

Similar to today’s The New Yorker, Life actually began as a weekly humor publication in the early 20th century. It featured short cartoons, comical bits, and artistic stories by some of the greatest writers, editors, illustrators and cartoonists of the era. Perhaps one of the most infamous was Norman Rockwell. His illustration,

One could experience the world, simply by picking up a magazine. Prior to its commencement, there was nothing like it in the US. Photos used in newspapers were often posed and stagnant. Luce and his team used the recently developed, and awesomely portable, 35mm camera to travel the world, taking photographs to bring back their experiences to the American public via their magazine. This was unlike anything the readers had been exposed to before, often creating an emotional response from the super vivid photographs which lined the pages. Life was an immediate success. At its pinnacle, it boasted a circulation of 8 million. The popularity of Life was heavily dependent upon the photographs used to tell the stories. Unfortunately, as television became the norm for society’s means of connection to the rest of the world, Life was unable to keep its audience and advertisers, and discontinued weekly circulation in 1972. It would only be published as an occasional “special” until 1978 when it began to be published monthly up through 2000. The magazine rebounded in 2004, when it resumed weekly publication as an insert in US newspapers. Despite the combined circulation once again reaching the millions, this fizzled out in

The periodical included a photo-essay inside, and shed light on Franklin D. Roosevelt’s massive New Deal project. Bourke-White’s cover “became the defining image of the magazine that helped define a style of photojournalism and set the tone for the other great LIFE photographers who followed her” (100photos.time.com).

An unsuspecting photographer for the magazine was astronaut Neil Armstrong. He snapped a photo of fellow astronaut Buzz Aldrin on the surface of the moon during the Apollo 11 space mission in 1969, and his photo was featured on the cover of a Life magazine special edition. Armstrong’s reflection can be seen in the Aldrin’s helmet, thus capturing both the photographer and the subject simultaneously. It is worth noting that their walk on the moon did not seem real until Life published their pics some two weeks