FYI November 23, 2019

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On This Day

1936 – Life magazine is reborn as a photo magazine and enjoys instant success.
Life was an American magazine published weekly until 1972, as an intermittent “special” until 1978, and as a monthly from 1978 until 2000. During its golden age from 1936 to 1972, Life was a wide-ranging weekly general interest magazine known for the quality of its photography.

Originally, Life was a humor magazine with limited circulation. Founded in 1883, it was developed as being in a similar vein to British magazine Punch. This form of the magazine lasted until November 1936. Henry Luce, the owner of Time, bought the magazine in 1936 solely so that he could acquire the rights to its name, and launched a major weekly news magazine with a strong emphasis on photojournalism. Luce purchased the rights to the name from the publishers of the first Life, but sold its subscription list and features to another magazine with no editorial continuity between the two publications.

Life was published for 53 years as a general-interest light entertainment magazine, heavy on illustrations, jokes, and social commentary. It featured some of the greatest writers, editors, illustrators, and cartoonists of its time: Charles Dana Gibson, Norman Rockwell and Jacob Hartman Jr. Gibson became the editor and owner of the magazine after John Ames Mitchell died in 1918. During its later years, the magazine offered brief capsule reviews (similar to those in The New Yorker) of plays and movies currently running in New York City, but with the innovative touch of a colored typographic bullet resembling a traffic light, appended to each review: green for a positive review, red for a negative one, and amber for mixed notices.

Life was the first all-photographic American news magazine, and it dominated the market for several decades. The magazine sold more than 13.5 million copies a week at one point. Possibly the best-known photograph published in the magazine was Alfred Eisenstaedt’s photograph of a nurse in a sailor’s arms, taken on August 14, 1945, as they celebrated Victory over Japan Day in New York City. The magazine’s role in the history of photojournalism is considered its most important contribution to publishing. Life’s profile was such that the memoirs of President Harry S. Truman, Sir Winston Churchill, and General Douglas MacArthur were all serialized in its pages.

After 2000, Time Inc. continued to use the Life brand for special and commemorative issues. Life returned to regularly scheduled issues when it became a weekly newspaper supplement from 2004 to 2007.[1] The website life.com, originally one of the channels on Time Inc.’s Pathfinder service, was for a time in the late 2000s managed as a joint venture with Getty Images under the name See Your World, LLC.[2] On January 30, 2012, the LIFE.com URL became a photo channel on Time.com.[clarification needed][1][3]

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Born On This Day

1868 – Mary Brewster Hazelton, American painter (d. 1953)
Mary Brewster Hazelton (November 23, 1868 – September 13, 1953) was an American portrait painter. She attended the School of the Museum of Fine Arts, Boston, where she was later an instructor. Among her other achievements, Hazelton was the first woman to win an award open to both men and women in the United States when she won the Hallgarten Prize from the National Academy of Design in 1896. Her portrait paintings are in the collections of the Massachusetts State House, Harvard University, Peabody Essex Museum, and Wellesley Historical Society. The professional organizations that Hazelton was affiliated with included the Wellesley Society of Artists, of which she was a founding member, and The Guild of Boston Artists, of which she was a charter member. She lived her adult life with her sisters in the Hazelton family home in Wellesley, Massachusetts.

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