With the great historical crossroads of Crimea and, indeed, all of Ukraine still dominating world headlines, LIFE.com takes a look back at another, long-ago conflict in the same area through a singular lens: namely, that of the very earliest war photography.
The Crimean War of the 1850s, after all, was arguably where the genre was born, with British photographers like Roger Fenton (1819 – 1869) and James Robertson (1813 – 1888), the Italian-British Felice Beato (1832 – 1909) and the Austro-Hungarian Carol Szathmari (1812 – 1887) making what most historians consider the very first photographs of a major military conflict. Their pictures might lack the often-brutal drama of modern war photography, but they nevertheless serve as compelling documentation of the look and, in a sense, the logistics of mid-19th century warfare. Within a few years, Mathew Brady, Alexander Gardner and others would document the American Civil War more thoroughly and graphically than Fenton, Robertson, Beato or any others managed in Crimea — a clear indication of how rapidly photography took hold as a critical method of reportage.
Incidentally, some readers might recall Errol Morris’ epic three-part Opinionator column in the New York Times several years ago, when the filmmaker and essayist delved deep into two particular Roger Fenton photos from the Crimean War. If you’re not familiar with it, read the whole thing. It’s astonishing. Here’s one of the Fenton photos Morris examined — with his customarily obsessive, wry and deeply intelligent eye.
Crimean War c. 1855
Mansell Collection The LIFE Picture Collection/Shutterstock
Crimean War c. 1855
Mansell Collection The LIFE Picture Collection/Shutterstock
Crimean War c. 1855
Mansell Collection The LIFE Picture Collection/Shutterstock
Crimean War c. 1855
Mansell Collection The LIFE Picture Collection/Shutterstock
Crimean War c. 1855
Mansell Collection The LIFE Picture Collection/Shutterstock
Crimean War c. 1855
Mansell Collection The LIFE Picture Collection/Shutterstock
Crimean War c. 1855
Mansell Collection The LIFE Picture Collection/Shutterstock
Crimean War c. 1855
Mansell Collection The LIFE Picture Collection/Shutterstock
Crimean War c. 1855
Mansell Collection The LIFE Picture Collection/Shutterstock
Along with Arthur Miller’s Death of a Salesman, Eugene O’Neill’s Long Day’s Journey Into Night and a few other notable modern works, Tennessee Williams’ 1947 masterpiece, A Streetcar Named Desire, helped shape the look and feel of American drama for decades to come. But nothing that occurred during the play’s original Broadway run eclipsed the emergence of a young Marlon Brando as a major creative force and a star to be reckoned with. Decades after the original Broadway premiere on Dec. 3, 1947, LIFE.com presents photos — some of which never ran in the magazine — taken during rehearsals by photographer Eliot Elisofon.
Directed by Elia Kazan and starring Brando, Jessica Tandy, Kim Hunter and Karl Malden, the 1947 production remains a touchstone in American drama, winning both the Pulitzer Prize and the New York Drama Critics’ Circle award for the year’s best play, as well as a Best Actress Tony for Tandy for her seminal performance as the unstable, alcoholic, melodramatic Southern belle, Blanche DuBois. Despite all the accolades it earned, however, the 24-year Brando’s galvanizing turn as Stanley Kowalski — in both the play and in Kazan’s 1951 film adaptation — was what really seared the production into the pop-culture consciousness.
Gritty, sensual, violent and bleak, Williams’ great play remains one of a handful of utterly indispensable 20th-century American dramatic works, while the sensual ferocity of Brando’s Stanley can still shock, seven decades after he first unleashed the character on a rapt theatergoing public.
A Streetcar Named Desire 1947
Kim Hunter (left), Marlon Brando, Karl Malden and others in rehearsal for the original production of ‘A Streetcar Named Desire.’ (Eliot Elisofon / The LIFE Picture Collection)
Jessica Tandy as Blanche Dubois in Tennessee Williams’ “A Streetcar Named Desire,” 1947.
Eliot Elisofon /The LIFE Picture Collection/Shutterstock
Marlon Brando and Kim Hunter in “A Streetcar Named Desire,” 1947.
Eliot Elisofon / The LIFE Picture Collection/Shutterstock
A Streetcar Named Desire 1947
Eliot Elisofon The LIFE Picture Collection/Shutterstock
A Streetcar Named Desire 1947
Eliot Elisofon The LIFE Picture Collection/Shutterstock
A Streetcar Named Desire 1947
Eliot Elisofon The LIFE Picture Collection/Shutterstock
A Streetcar Named Desire 1947
Eliot Elisofon The LIFE Picture Collection/Shutterstock
A Streetcar Named Desire 1947
Eliot Elisofon The LIFE Picture Collection/Shutterstock
Tennessee Williams on the set of Streetcar Named Desire
Eliot Elisofon The LIFE Picture Collection/Shutterstock
“The Secret Life of Walter Mitty,” James Thurber’s classic 1939 short story, is a tribute to the sometimes unsettling power of the human imagination. It’s also very, very funny.
The most recent movie adaptation of the Mitty story, from 2013, starred Ben Stiller in the titular role as the archetypal nebbish who retreats into an intensely vivid fantasy world in times of stress. (The first film version of Mitty, starring Danny Kaye, was released in 1947.) In this rendition of the tale, Stiller plays a photo editor at LIFE magazine—still publishing, thanks to the magic of the movies—and much of the film is set in the meticulously recreated offices of the storied weekly. In those offices, meanwhile, hang poster-sized versions of LIFE magazine covers through the years.
The covers are stirring and iconic—and, for the most part, they’re fake.
Or rather, the majority of the LIFE covers one sees in The Secret Life of Walter Mitty were never covers at all. The pictures on the covers in this gallery, for example—the launch of Apollo 11; Jayne Mansfield luxuriating in a swimming pool; a theater audience watching the first-ever 3-D feature-length film—are, indisputably, classic LIFE images. But none of them ever graced the cover of LIFE magazine.
“When we were selecting photos for the LIFE covers in Walter Mitty,” said Jeff Mann, the production designer on the film, “we focused on pictures that would serve the story we were telling, but that would also capture the diversity of what LIFE covered in its prime. We worked really, really hard to select photos that were novel, naïve in the best possible way and that featured significant twentieth-century people, places and events.”
In the end, Mann said, he and his team and Stiller, who is a photography aficionado, felt that the photos they chose to use as covers, from the literally millions of pictures in LIFE’s archive, had to somehow “convey the influence of LIFE magazine, while at the same time helping to move our story along. It was a fabulous problem, and one we had a lot of fun working to solve.”
Here, then, are a number of LIFE covers that never were—including several that, in light of how wonderful they look—perhaps should have been covers, after all.
LIFE magazine cover created for the movie, The Secret Life of Walter Mitty.
If there’s one thing humans like to do, it’s label ourselves and one another. Sometimes those labels, applied to vast numbers of people, are obviously laudatory (The Greatest Generation). Sometimes they’re pitying (The Lost Generation). Sometimes they’re duly withering (The Me Generation). And sometimes, at least in the moment, they’re just plain accurate.
In June 1954, LIFE magazine published an article titled “The Luckiest Generation” that, revisited decades later, feels like an almost perfect snapshot of a certain segment of American society at a particular moment in the nation’s history. We’ll let LIFE set the scene:
The morning traffic and parking problems became so critical at the Carlsbad, N.M., high school that school authorities in 1953 were finally forced to a solution: they set aside a special parking area for students only. In Carlsbad, as everywhere else, teenagers are not only driving new cars to school but in many cases are buying them out of their own earnings. These are the children who at birth were called “Depression babies.” They have grown up to become, materially at least, America’s luckiest generation.
Young people 16 to 20 are the beneficiaries of the very economic collapse that brought chaos almost a generation ago. The Depression tumbled the nation’s birth rate to an all-time low in 1933, and today’s teenage group is proportionately a smaller part of the total population than in more than 70 years. Since there are fewer of them, each in the most prosperous time in U.S. history gets a bigger piece of the nation’s economic pie than any previous generation ever got. This means they can almost have their pick of the jobs that are around. . . . To them working has a double attraction: the pay is good and, since their parents are earning more too, they are often able to keep the money for themselves.
A few things to point out here. First, and most disheartening, is the racial makeup of the “teenage group” that LIFE focused on, at least pictorially, in that 1954 article: there are no people of color.
Second, the nature of the boon of the improbable and unprecedented good fortune that befell these kids is not that they’re spoiled rotten, or that every possible creature comfort has been handed to them. Instead, it’s that they have the opportunity to work at virtually any job they choose. “They are often able to keep the money” that they earn.
So, yes, they were lucky and compared to countless generations of youth who came before, all over the world, white working- and middle-class teens in 1950s America were, for the most part, incredibly lucky. But unlike the entitled creatures that most of us would count as the “luckiest” (and the most obnoxious) among us these days, the teens profiled in LIFE in 1954 don’t look or feel especially coddled.
They look secure. They look confident. They look, in some elemental way, independent. They’re learning, day by day, what it means to make one’s way in the world.
In that sense, maybe they were the luckiest generation, after all.
Liz Ronk edited this gallery for LIFE.com Follow her on Twitter at @LizabethRonk.
In an aura of fun and well-being, students danced at weekly Sock Hops in a Carlsbad high school gyn. The music was provided by a 12-piece student band.
Nina Leen The LIFE Picture Collection/Shutterstock
Cars of Carlsbad High students in their parking lot.
Nina Leen The LIFE Picture Collection/Shutterstock
An electrician, Jack Harris, 16, still in school, picked up good pay doing part-time repair jobs.
Nina Leen The LIFE Picture Collection/Shutterstock
A young sales girl holding up a blouse to a store customer.
Nina Leen The LIFE Picture Collection/Shutterstock
A young investor, David Lenske, 17, having bought four shares of A.T.&T., talked with a banker.
Nina Leen The LIFE Picture Collection/Shutterstock
The Luckiest Generation: 1950s Teenagers
Nina Leen The LIFE Picture Collection/Shutterstock
The Luckiest Generation
Nina Leen The LIFE Picture Collection/Shutterstock
The prosperous pay-off of after-school jobs brought Mike Sweeney and Harold Riley (right) with Pat Marsh (left) and Nita Wheeler, all 17, to Carlsbad’s Red Barn restaurant, a favorite party spot.
Nina Leen The LIFE Picture Collection/Shutterstock
Young couples at a formal dance dreamily swaying on the crowded floor of a ballroom lit by a chandelier.
Nina Leen The LIFE Picture Collection/Shutterstock
The Luckiest Generation
Nina Leen The LIFE Picture Collection/Shutterstock
The Luckiest Generation
Nina Leen The LIFE Picture Collection/Shutterstock
The Luckiest Generation
Nina Leen The LIFE Picture Collection/Shutterstock
Pay in trade was taken by Margaret High, 17, who worked in a music store and spent her salary on records.
Nina Leen The LIFE Picture Collection/Shutterstock
Rada Alexander, 19, a bookkeeper, earned $200 a month in a job she got with an auto firm after graduation.
Nina Leen The LIFE Picture Collection/Shutterstock
Jere Reid Jr., 17, who bred chinchillas, held one valued at $3,000.
Nina Leen The LIFE Picture Collection/Shutterstock
Sonny Thayer, 19, packed for a hunting trip.
Nina Leen The LIFE Picture Collection/Shutterstock
Of the three Kennedy brothers John, Robert and Edward who ascended to the national political stage in the 1950s and ’60s, it was arguably the middle brother, Bobby, who best embodied the enormous contradictions at play within that famed American family.
There was, for example, RFK’s fraught relationship with liberals and with American liberalism in general. As the author and historian Sean Wilentz once wrote while reviewing a largely unflattering biography of Kennedy in the New York Times:
Robert F. Kennedy always irked liberals; and they always irked him. . . . Kennedy’s association with the reckless Sen. Joseph McCarthy in the 1950s forever tainted his reputation in some reform circles. As his brother’s presidential campaign manager in 1960, and thereafter as attorney general, he struck many liberals as ruthless in the pursuit of power and reluctant in the pursuit of principle, especially regarding civil rights. Kennedy, for his part, regarded his liberal critics as hopeless, sanctimonious losers who put purity above political realism, and who seemed to think that sure-fire defeat was inherently noble.
That Bobby Kennedy was, like his brothers and many of his other relatives, past and present, a titanically driven individual is hardly news. There’s a reason, after all, that he’s still despised today, five decades after his death, by some liberals and most conservatives: he did not fit into a neat, ideological box and then as now neither side knew what to do with a man who refused to act and speak according to their expectations and their rules.
Then there was his relationship with Lyndon Johnson a man who, according to virtually everyone who knew both men, hated Bobby Kennedy with an intensity matched only by RFK’s loathing for his brother’s successor as president.
But Kennedy also had an intellectual and in public, at least an emotional poise that makes most present-day American politicians seem glib and trifling by comparison. (Is there a sitting U.S. senator or representative whom one can picture quoting Herodotus or Sophocles, from memory, as Kennedy so often did?)
Of course, like his brothers especially John Robert Kennedy was also able to immediately and powerfully connect with crowds in a way that most politicians can only envy, and there were certainly people who saw greatness in him and in his future.
“He is one of the half-dozen men in the country today qualified for top political leadership,” one of Lyndon Johnson’s advisers told LIFE writer Robert Ajemian. “He really cares about right and wrong. He cares about people.”
Here, LIFE.com shares photos most of which never ran in LIFE magazine of Kennedy and his extended and immediate family in 1964. The pictures, by LIFE’s George Silk, capture a man who, as Robert Ajemian wrote in the magazine’s July 3, 1964, issue, “had shouldered massive burdens” in the six months since his brother John was gunned down in Dallas the previous November.
A major preoccupation of Bob Kennedy’s in the past six months [Ajemian wrote] has been his family and now it includes his brother’s children, Caroline, who is 6, and John, who is 3. Jackie Kennedy brings them out almost every day to their uncle’s home, Hickory Hill, five miles outside Washington. Bob and [his wife] Ethel spend as much time with them as with their own brood of eight. “They think of it as their own home,” says Jackie Kennedy. “Anything that comes up involving a father, like father’s day at school, I always mention Bobby’s name. Caroline shows him her report cards.”
But even surrounded by so many loved ones, and so busy with speeches and appearances around the country, the rawness of the loss of his older brother was, it seems, never far away. After a speech in Pittsburgh, a reporter asked Kennedy, “What do you miss most about your brother?”
“Kennedy looked startled,” Ajemian reported, “and stared at the reporter as he sought the exact answer. His face softened and he said, ‘Just that he’s not here.'”
Four months after the LIFE cover story, Robert F. Kennedy was elected as the Democratic U.S. Senator from New York. He served until June 6, 1968, when he was assassinated by a gunman named Sirhan Sirhan, while campaigning in Los Angeles for his party’s presidential nomination. Robert Kennedy was 42, four years younger than John Kennedy was when he was killed.
Robert Kennedy at home in 1964
George Silk The LIFE Picture Collection/Shutterstock
Robert Kennedy at home in 1964
George Silk The LIFE Picture Collection/Shutterstock
Robert Kennedy at home in 1964
George Silk The LIFE Picture Collection/Shutterstock
Robert Kennedy at home in 1964
George Silk The LIFE Picture Collection/Shutterstock
Robert Kennedy at home in 1964
George Silk The LIFE Picture Collection/Shutterstock
ROBERT KENNEDYRobert Kennedy at home in 1964
George Silk The LIFE Picture Collection/Shutterstock
Robert Kennedy at home in 1964
George Silk The LIFE Picture Collection/Shutterstock
Robert Kennedy at home in 1964
George Silk The LIFE Picture Collection/Shutterstock
Robert Kennedy at home in 1964
George Silk The LIFE Picture Collection/Shutterstock
Robert Kennedy at home in 1964
George Silk The LIFE Picture Collection/Shutterstock
Robert Kennedy at home in 1964
George Silk The LIFE Picture Collection/Shutterstock
Robert Kennedy at home in 1964
George Silk The LIFE Picture Collection/Shutterstock
Robert Kennedy at home in 1964
George Silk The LIFE Picture Collection/Shutterstock
Robert Kennedy at home in 1964
George Silk The LIFE Picture Collection/Shutterstock
Robert Kennedy at home in 1964
George Silk The LIFE Picture Collection/Shutterstock
Robert Kennedy at home in 1964
George Silk The LIFE Picture Collection/Shutterstock
Robert Kennedy at home in 1964
George Silk The LIFE Picture Collection/Shutterstock
Robert Kennedy at home in 1964
George Silk The LIFE Picture Collection/Shutterstock
Robert Kennedy at home in 1964
George Silk The LIFE Picture Collection/Shutterstock
Around Thanksgiving in 1954, LIFE published an odd and endearing article, the latest in a string of curiosities the magazine had shared with its readers over the course of two decades. Now, as another Thanksgiving bears down upon us, we thought we’d revisit that long-ago article—and the pictures that accompanied it—as a holiday gift, of sorts, to today’s readers.
Titled “Gaily Garbed Gobblers,” the piece focused on a “Texas farmwoman’s snug halters [designed to] support her turkeys’ sagging crops and boost their market value.” For the uninitiated, a “crop” is a portion of the alimentary tract—usually found in birds, but also in some animals and even insects—where food can be stored prior to digestion.
As LIFE vividly explained the situation in the magazine’s Nov. 22, 1954, issue:
Pecking away in the barnyard, turkeys fill up their crops with food. . . . But occasionally a bird’s crop grows so enlarged it retains food indefinitely, swells out and sags like a goiter. This defect, called “pendulous crop” and possibly an inherited tendency, detracts from the market value of the bird. Discovering pendulous birds on her turkey farm, Mrs. Wyatt McLaughlin of Lockney, Tex., tried massage and surgery without success. Then she turned to well-established principles of the lingerie trade. Sewing together halters, she fitted them to the birds, found they uplifted the crops gently but firmly, reducing the sag and allowing grain to pass along more easily.
To omnivores, locavores, vegetarians and vegans everywhere: Happy Thanksgiving, and whatever we all choose to eat, here’s hoping that none of us feels overly pendulous afterward.
