March 2013 - Page 2 of 2

Photographer Spotlight: Andreas Feininger

November 3, 2020March 12, 2013 by

If one had to choose a single photographer whose work would serve as a visual biography of New York City in its postwar Golden Age when Gotham became, in a sense, the capital of the world, the name Andreas Feininger would have to be in the mix. Paris-born, raised in Germany and, for a time, a cabinet-maker and architect trained in the Bauhaus, Feininger’s pictures of New York in the 1940s and ’50s helped define, for all time, not merely how a great 20th century city looked, but how it imagined itself and its place in the world. With its traffic-jammed streets, gritty waterfronts, iconic bridges and inimitable skyline, the city assumed the character of a vast, vibrant landscape.

Individual New Yorkers, meanwhile, were often an afterthought: it was form, pattern and, perhaps above all else, scale that Feininger sought. Human beings might have built this thrilling, sprawling, purposeful urban panorama, but their presence in Feininger’s pictures was not necessary; their handiwork would suffice. (In fact, in his single most famous portrait of a person, his 1955 photo of the young photographer Dennis Stock, Feininger obscures or, more accurately, replaces the human face with the clean, mechanistic contours of a camera.)

Of course, no one who worked on staff for LIFE as Feininger did for almost two decades—and 340 assignments—from 1943 until 1962, could be defined by a single topic.

Fascinated from the time he was a young boy in Germany by the natural world, Feininger made beautiful pictures of the skeletons and bones of animals, snakes and birds, investing them with an austere power that the creatures perhaps lacked when alive and covered with flesh, fur, feathers or scales. His 1956 picture of Niagara Falls in winter, with two small human forms silhouetted against a scene, might have been lifted from the last Ice Age, while one of his most famous and most frequently reproduced photographs—Route 66 in 1947 Arizona—somehow manages to reference, in a single frame, the allure of the open road, the confluence of the man-made and natural worlds and the myth of the inexhaustible American West.

The author of more than 30 books including at least one acknowledged classic, the autobiography Andreas Feininger: Photographer (1966) Feininger’s photographs were shown in solo and group shows in places as diverse as the Museum of Natural History, the International Center of Photography, MoMa, the Whitney, the Metropolitan, the Smithsonian and in smaller galleries and exhibitions around the world. A retrospective of his six-decade career, featuring 80 of his own favorite black-and-white pictures from 1928 through 1988, toured Europe in the late 1990s.

Andreas Feininger died in Manhattan in February 1999, at the age of 92.

Photographer Dennis Stock held a camera in front of his face, 1955.

Andreas Feininger/Life Pictures/Shutterstock

A crescent moon rises between Manhattan skyscrapers, 1946.

Andreas Feininger/Life Pictures/Shutterstock

Crowds filled Coney Island’s beaches on the Fourth of July, Brooklyn, New York, 1949.

Andreas Feininger/Life Pictures/Shutterstock

This slinky-like light pattern in the blackness of a moonlit sky was produced by a time-exposure of the light-tipped rotor blades of a helicopter as it took off, 1949.

Andreas Feininger/Life Pictures/Shutterstock

Air Force training, 1944.

Andreas Feininger/Life Pictures/Shutterstock

Training for chemical warfare, Maryland, 1944.

Andreas Feininger/Life Pictures/Shutterstock

Route 66 in Arizona, 1947.

Andreas Feininger/Life Pictures/Shutterstock

This view of midtown Manhattan, looking straight down 42nd Street, was taken with the aid of a 40-inch Dallmeyer telephoto lens two miles away, from New Jersey, 1946.

Andreas Feininger/Life Pictures/Shutterstock

Sculptor Ruth Vodicka altered the shoulder of her statue of William Tell, 1956.

Andreas Feininger/Life Pictures/Shutterstock

Studying black widow spiders, 1943.

Andreas Feininger/Life Pictures/Shutterstock

A macro close-up of a millipede, 1950.

Andreas Feininger/Life Pictures/Shutterstock

A forest of wells, rigs and derricks crowded the Signal Hill oil fields in Long Beach, Calif., 1944.

Andreas Feininger/Life Pictures/Shutterstock

Pouring ingots at an Illinois steel plant, 1944.

Andreas Feininger/Life Pictures/Shutterstock

A laboratory scene showed how television works, with the image of a girl being focused through a lens onto a sensitive plate as an electron beam (its path shown by glowing gases) scanned it, 1944.

Andreas Feininger/Life Pictures/Shutterstock

This image of a skeleton of a four-foot-long gaboon viper showed its 160 pairs of movable ribs, 1952.

Andreas Feininger/Life Pictures/Shutterstock

Skeletal structure of a bird, 1951.

Andreas Feininger/Life Pictures/Shutterstock

Niagara Falls in winter, 1956.

Andreas Feininger/Life Pictures/Shutterstock

The Statue of Liberty during a World War II blackout, 1942.

Andreas Feininger/Life Pictures/Shutterstock

Doctor’s head mirror, 1955.

Andreas Feininger/Life Pictures/Shutterstock

The view from a lodge at Lake Louise, looking up at Victoria Glacier, Canada, 1946.

Andreas Feininger/Life Pictures/Shutterstock

‘Spanish Village’: W. Eugene Smith’s Landmark Photo Essay

January 30, 2022March 10, 2013 by

Originally published in the April 9, 1951, issue of LIFE magazine, W. Eugene Smith‘s photo essay, “Spanish Village,” has been lauded for more than six decades as the most moving photographic portrait ever made of daily life in rural Spain during the rule of dictator Francisco Franco. But, as the years have passed, the most chilling image from the piece the closed, hard faces of three members of Franco’s feared Guardia Civil has been exalted to a point where the essays’ other masterful, evocative pictures have been largely forgotten.

For countless people around the world, including photography buffs who really ought to know better, Smith’s Guardia Civil photograph is the “Spanish Village” essay.

Here, LIFE.com presents “Spanish Village” in its entirety. Even as the faces in the essay’s most famous picture evince the cruelty and arrogance often assumed by small men granted great power over others, other photographs illuminate the timeless rhythms of a small, isolated Spanish town of the last century, about which LIFE wrote: “It lives in ancient poverty and faith.”

In the 1951 article that accompanied Smith’s pictures, the magazine told its readers:

The village of Deleitosa, a place of about 2,300 peasant people, sits on the high, dry, western Spanish tableland called Estramadura, about halfway between Madrid and the border of Portugal. Its name means “delightful,” which it no longer is, and its origins are obscure, though they may go back a thousand years to Spain’s Moorish period. In any event it is very old and LIFE photographer Eugene Smith, wandering off the main road into the village, found that its ways had advanced little since medieval times.

Many Deleitosans have never seen a railroad because the nearest one is 25 miles away. Mail comes in by burro. The nearest telephone is 12 miles away in another town. Deleitosa’s water system still consists of the sort of aqueducts and open wells from which villagers have drawn water for centuries . . . and the streets smell strongly of the villagers’ donkeys and pigs.

[A] small movie theater, which shows some American films, sits among the sprinkling of little shops near the main square. But the village scene is dominated now as always by the high, brown structure of the 16th century church, the center of society in Catholic Deleitosa. And the lives of the villagers are dominated as always by the bare and brutal problems of subsistence. For Deleitosa, barren of history, unfavored by nature, reduced by wars, lives in poverty a poverty shared by nearly all and relieved only by the seasonal work of the soil, and the faith that sustains most Deleitosans from the hour of First Communion until the simple funeral that marks one’s end.

Spanish Village, LIFE magazine

W. Eugene Smith Time & Life Pictures/Shutterstock

Spanish Village, LIFE magaz

W. Eugene Smith Time & Life Pictures/Shutterstock

Bigotry in the USA: Photos From a Ku Klux Klan Initiation

November 2, 2020March 5, 2013 by

When it comes to extremist groups in America, the longest-lived and most readily identifiable remains the Ku Klux Klan, which has been operating at varying degrees of influence and strength for close to 150 years. Hundreds of Klan groups are actively working and recruiting in the U.S. The KKK’s fortunes as a cultural and political force have waxed and waned over the decades, with Klan membership peaking in the 1920s, during the era of the “Second Klan.” (The First Klan, in the post-Civil War South, lasted from 1865 to 1874; the Second Klan from 1915 until about 1944; and the Third from roughly the end of WWII until today.) The Klan claimed literally millions of members at the height of the Second Klan era.

In May 1946, LIFE magazine ran a series of remarkable pictures from a Klan initiation in Georgia, at the start of the Third Klan era. Titled “The Ku Klux Klan Tries a Comeback,” the article noted that the KKK pledged initiates “in a mystic pageant on Georgia’s Stone Mountain.” The language that accompanied photographer Ed Clark’s pictures, meanwhile, made clear that, as newsworthy as the story of this particular initiation might have been, LIFE’s editors would have considered the figures in their white robes and hoods to be rather laughable if their rhetoric and arcane, pseudo-mystic shenanigans weren’t so unsettling.

On the evening of May 9 at 8 p.m. a mob of fully grown men solemnly paraded up to a wide plateau of Stone Mountain outside Atlanta, Ga., and got down on their knees on the ground before 100 white-sheeted and hooded Atlantans. In the eerie light of a half-moon and a fiery cross they stumbled in lockstep up to a great stone altar and knelt there in the dirt while the “Grand Dragon” went through the mumbo jumbo of initiating them into the Ku Klux Klan. Then one new member was selected from the mob and ceremoniously “knighted” into the organization in behalf of all the rest of his fellow bigots.
This was the first big public initiation into the Klan since the end of World War II. It was put on at a carefully calculated time. The anti-Negro, anti-Catholic, anti-Semitic, anti-foreign, anti-union, anti-democratic Ku Klux Klan was coming out of wartime hiding just at the time when the CIO and the A.F. of L. were starting simultaneous campaigns to organize the South. . . . But it is doubtful that the Klan can become as frighteningly strong as it was in 1919. One indication of the Klan’s impotence was its lack of effect on Negroes, who were once frightened and cowed by the white-robed members. More than 24,000 Negroes have already registered for next July’s primaries in the Atlanta vicinity alone, where the Stone Mountain ritual was held.

As mentioned in one of the captions in this gallery, the Stone Mountain ceremony was put off several times during the preceding year because of wartime sheet shortages. Or at least that’s what LIFE reported at the time.

The magazine also made a point of characterizing the garb and actions of members at Klan meetings (images 10 through 15) as both creepy and pathetic. “Childish ritual and secretiveness,” the magazine noted, “have always been the great attractions for the kind of people who make good Klansmen.”

A Ku Klux Klan initiation ritual in Georgia, May 1946.

Ed Clark The LIFE Picture Collection/Shutterstock

The Grand Dragon of the Fulton County, Ga., Ku Klux Klan, an Atlanta doctor named Samuel Green, was surrounded by his assistants, May 1946.

Ed Clark The LIFE Picture Collection/Shutterstock

A Ku Klux Klan initiation ritual in Georgia, May 1946.

Ed Clark The LIFE Picture Collection/Shutterstock

New Klan members marched in lock step up to the Klan’s big altar on Stone Mountain in Georgia, 1946. The Klan exultingly announced they had initiated 600 new members in one night; observers’ best guesses were lower, between 150 and 200.

Ed Clark The LIFE Picture Collection/Shutterstock

Klan initiates (including some Atlanta policemen) knelt before the local Grand Dragon during a ritual in Georgia, 1946.

Ed Clark The LIFE Picture Collection/Shutterstock

White-sheeted Ku Klux Klan members stood by a burning cross, May 1946. This Stone Mountain, Ga., ceremony was put off many times, Klansmen allegedly said, because of wartime sheet shortages during WWII.

Ed Clark The LIFE Picture Collection/Shutterstock

Klan initiates (including some Atlanta policemen) stood before a burning cross during a ritual in Georgia, 1946.

Ed Clark The LIFE Picture Collection/Shutterstock

A Ku Klux Klan member demonstrated ritualistic aspects of a KKK meeting, Georgia, May 1946.

Ed Clark The LIFE Picture Collection/Shutterstock

The scene at a Ku Klux Klan initiation ritual in Georgia, May 1946.

Ed Clark The LIFE Picture Collection/Shutterstock

Klan members with KKK regalia, Georgia, May 1946.

Ed Clark The LIFE Picture Collection/Shutterstock

Certified Statement for Annual Registration of a Corporation for the Knights of the Ku Klux Klan, Inc., Fulton County, Ga., 1946.

Ed Clark The LIFE Picture Collection/Shutterstock

The Grand Dragon of the Fulton County, Ga., Ku Klux Klan, Dr. Samuel Green, May 1946.

Ed Clark The LIFE Picture Collection/Shutterstock

‘Drama of Life Before Birth’: Lennart Nilsson’s Landmark 1965 Photo Essay

December 6, 2022March 4, 2013 by

In the five decades since Lennart Nilsson’s portrait of an 18-week-old human fetus appeared on the cover of the April 30, 1965, issue of LIFE along with other, equally jaw-dropping pictures across multiple pages inside the magazine the debate about when life begins and who, ultimately, wields control of a woman’s body, both before and after birth, has only intensified. Religious, ethical, legal and medical arguments swirl around the issues of conception, contraception and abortion, and few political “hot button” issues are more radioactive than that of (put in the simplest and, perhaps, the most incendiary possible terms) the “right to choose” versus a “right to life.”

In 1965, however, the central question gripping most everyone who saw Nilsson’s pictures was the far more prosaic, and readily answerable, “How on earth did he do that?”

As LIFE told its readers when Nilsson’s pictures first appeared in the magazine’s pages:

“Ten years ago, a Swedish photographer named Lennart Nilsson told us that he was going to photograph in color the stages of human reproduction from fertilization to just before birth. It was impossible for us not to express a degree of skepticism about his chances of success, but this was lost on Nilsson. He simply said, ‘When I’ve finished the story, I’ll bring it to you.’ Lennart kept his promise. He flew into New York from Stockholm and brought us the strangely beautiful and scientifically unique color essay in this issue.”

What most people don’t recall or, more likely, never knew about Nilsson’s achievement is that, in fact, many of the embryos pictured in the photo essay “had been surgically removed,” as LIFE told its readers, “for a variety of medical reasons.”

In other words, while Nilsson (and Karl Storz in Germany and Jungners Optiska in Stockholm, who manufactured special macro-lenses and wide-angled special optics to Nilsson’s specs) revolutionized photography with mind-expanding devices and techniques for in utero photography, it’s worth recalling that not all of the embryos or fetuses seen in that groundbreaking 1965 LIFE article lived very long beyond the moment that Nilsson made their portraits. Doomed to a mortal end, they gained a kind of immortality through a photographer’s inspired vision and tenacious pursuit of what so many, for so long, deemed the impossible.

Of the pictures themselves, and the years and years spent designing, experimenting with and ultimately putting to use the radical equipment that allowed the world to see what it had never before witnessed, Nilsson once told an interviewer (in a revealing Q&A published on his own site):

The first job I did for [LIFE] on an exclusive basis was when Dag Hammarskjöld was elected UN Secretary General in 1953. I traveled to New York with him and photographed the newly installed Secretary General in his office in the 38th floor in the UN Building. I had my first embryo pictures along with me on that trip. “Unbelievable!” they said at LIFE. I thought so, too! But I didn’t know anything about the development of the fetus and had to learn from scratch. But they were incredibly enthusiastic at LIFE and twelve years later, in 1965, they published their big story on human reproduction.

Today, so many years after Nilsson’s at-once exalting and humbling pictures of “the drama of life before birth” first mesmerized and astounded millions of people all over the globe, the photos he made and those he continues to make, in his 90s remain among the most thrilling amalgams of art and science the world has ever seen.

[Visit LennartNilsson.com to see more of Nilsson’s astonishing photography, across a variety of subjects]

Ben Cosgrove is the Editor of LIFE.com

The Drama of Life 1965

LIFE Magazine

LIFE at the Vatican: Unearthing History Beneath St. Peter’s

January 17, 2020March 1, 2013 by

The walled, pint-sized city-state known as the Vatican physically takes up around 100 acres in the center of Rome, but occupies a measureless space in the lives of more than a billion practicing Catholics around the globe. Here, LIFE.com looks back to a time when the church was actively unearthing its own secrets . . . literally.

In 1950, LIFE reported on a years-long effort undertaken beneath the staggeringly ornate public realms of the Vatican, as teams of workers meticulously excavated the myriad tombs and other long-sealed, centuries-old chambers far underground. Nat Farbman’s color and black and white images in this gallery most of which never ran in LIFE, were touted on the cover of the March 27, 1950, issue of the magazine as “exclusive pictures” for the story titled “The Search for the Bones of St. Peter.”

Deep in the earth below the great basilica of St. Peter’s in Rome [LIFE wrote] the clink of pickaxes and the scrape of shovels in the hands of workmen have been echoing dimly for 10 years. In the utmost secrecy, they have penetrated into a pagan cemetery buried for 16 centuries. Architects feared they might disturb the foundations on which rests the world’s largest church. But the workmen, with careful hands, pushed forward finally to the area where, according to a basic tenet of the Catholic Church, the bones of St. Peter were buried about A.D. 66.

The Church has always held that Peter was buried in a pagan cemetery on Vatican Hill. Now, for the first time, there is archaeological evidence to support this: the newly discovered tombs, which LIFE shows [in these exclusive pictures].

The greatest secret of all—whether the relics of the Chief Apostle himself were actually found —s one which the Vatican reserves for itself, although there have been rumors that the discovery of the relics will be announced at an appropriate time during the Holy Year.

In the end, LIFE’s editors expressed their appreciation for “the privilege of guiding LIFE’s readers through these chambers where in the dust of antiquity can be traced the humble yet transcendent beginnings of the Christian faith.”

[MORE: Buy the LIFE book, Pope Francis: The Vicar of Christ, From Saint Peter to Today.]

NOTE: In December 1950 Pope Pius XII announced that bones discovered during the excavation could not conclusively be said to be Peter’s. Two decades later, in 1968, Pope Paul VI announced that other bones unearthed beneath the basilica—discovered in a marble-lined repository, covered with a gold and purple cloth and belonging to a man around 5′ 6″ tall who had likely died between the ages of 65 and 70—were, in the judgment of “the talented and prudent people” in charge of the dig, indeed St. Peter’s.

To this day, that claim has as many doubters as adherents.

Liz Ronk edited this gallery for LIFE.com. Follow her on Twitter at @LizabethRonk.

In a clutter of bones and artifacts the foreman of a team of Vatican workmen examined an ancient archway, St. Peter’s, Rome, 1950.

Nat Farbman The LIFE Picture Collection/Shutterstock

The interior of St. Peter’s basilica, with markers indicating the location of the excavation beneath the floor, 1950.

Nat Farbman The LIFE Picture Collection/Shutterstock

The tomb of the Caetennii (17 x 18 feet) was one of the richest and most lavishly decorated of all those excavated beneath St. Peter’s.

Nat Farbman The LIFE Picture Collection/Shutterstock

The Tomb of the Egizio featured elaborate sarcophagi sculpted with scenes of Bacchic rites. While most of the findings here were purely pagan, there were also Christian designs—for example, of a palm leaf and a dove.

Nat Farbman The LIFE Picture Collection/Shutterstock

Scene during the excavation beneath St. Peter’s in Rome, 1950.

Nat Farbman The LIFE Picture Collection/Shutterstock

The hunt of the Amazons was portrayed on a polychrome mosaic decorating the facade of the tomb of the Marci.

Nat Farbman The LIFE Picture Collection/Shutterstock

Scene during the excavation beneath St. Peter’s in Rome, 1950.

Nat Farbman The LIFE Picture Collection/Shutterstock

A workman cleaned an inscription during the excavation beneath St. Peter’s in Rome, 1950.

Nat Farbman The LIFE Picture Collection/Shutterstock

Pope Pius XI, whose desire to be buried below St. Peter’s nave led to the historic excavations, lay in his stone sarcophagus in renovated upper grottoes.

Nat Farbman The LIFE Picture Collection/Shutterstock

The oldest burial chamber found during the excavation beneath St. Peter’s in Rome, 1950.

Nat Farbman The LIFE Picture Collection/Shutterstock

Scene during the excavation beneath St. Peter’s in Rome, 1950.

Nat Farbman The LIFE Picture Collection/Shutterstock

Workmen examined underneath the floor of the Basilico.

Nat Farbman The LIFE Picture Collection/Shutterstock

Workers gauged damage from water seepage during the excavation beneath St. Peter’s in Rome, 1950.

Nat Farbman The LIFE Picture Collection/Shutterstock

Workmen gauged damage from water seepage during the excavation beneath St. Peter’s in Rome, 1950.

Nat Farbman The LIFE Picture Collection/Shutterstock

The oldest burial chamber found during the excavation beneath St. Peter’s in Rome, 1950.

Nat Farbman The LIFE Picture Collection/Shutterstock

A double row of burial chambers beneath St. Peter’s, 1950.

Nat Farbman The LIFE Picture Collection/Shutterstock

An inscription revealed during the excavation beneath St. Peter’s in Rome, 1950.

Nat Farbman The LIFE Picture Collection/Shutterstock

An early Christian mosaic, possibly the earliest known, decorated the ceiling and walls of a mausoleum close to area where St. Peter is supposed to have been buried, Rome, 1950.

Nat Farbman The LIFE Picture Collection/Shutterstock

Rich polychrome stucco work in the southwest corner of the Tomb of the Caetennii showed how resplendently it was decorated.

Nat Farbman The LIFE Picture Collection/Shutterstock

Classic sculpture adorned the Marci sarcophagus of Q. Marcius Hermes and his wife.

Nat Farbman The LIFE Picture Collection/Shutterstock

Scene during the excavation beneath St. Peter’s in Rome, 1950.

Nat Farbman The LIFE Picture Collection/Shutterstock

The foreman of work crew posed during the excavation beneath St. Peter’s in Rome, 1950.

Nat Farbman The LIFE Picture Collection/Shutterstock

The tomb of Pope Boniface VIII, beneath the Vatican, photographed in 1950.

Nat Farbman The LIFE Picture Collection/Shutterstock

Scene during the excavation beneath St. Peter’s in Rome, 1950.

Nat Farbman The LIFE Picture Collection/Shutterstock

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