The appearance of Life magazine’s first issue in November 1936 set off an explosion in American visual culture. With unanticipated eagerness viewers snapped up copies of this new, sight-centered magazine that promised to show them the world, photograph by photograph. Audiences delighted in the new prospects the magazine opened to them, as its images granted voyeuristic access to a spectrum of modern life, from the mundane to the marvelous. Once established, the magazine remained a spark plug of American visual experience for more than a quarter century, serving as a self-proclaimed “Show-Book of the World” until the cessation of its weekly publication in 1972. Today, Life still retains its status as visual icon, with issues appearing sporadically in supermarket checkout aisles to record and remind us of the most potent images and instances of American culture.

Given the strong emergence of visual-culture studies as a method of art-historical and interdisciplinary inquiry during the last two decades, one would expect a proliferation of studies addressing Life’s impact in America. This has not been the case. While commemorative collections (mostly produced in-house) of the magazine’s touchstone photographs are numerous, relatively few scholarly works have probed the formative role played by the magazine itself in shaping the ways that midcentury, middle-class Americans viewed, understood, and engaged the world around them. In the majority of instances when Life has received critical attention, the publication has been approached obliquely either as one of many artifacts in the history of modern mass culture and its visual aesthetic, or as a window for inquiry into broader cultural topics such as ethnicity, race, class, and gender. In other words, Life as a medium rather than a message. Given the incredible scope of history, imagery, and subject matter covered by the magazine, as well as the complexities surrounding its editorial ideologies and public reception, it is especially surprising that few scholars have attempted to “view” Life as a whole—and to draw together its multiple storylines into a single treatment.

Edited by Erika Doss, the anthology Looking at Life Magazine aims to fill this critical gap in American visual studies by focusing squarely on Life itself, “its visual style, its popular reception, and its important place in twentieth-century cultural history” (19). To frame the project intellectually, Doss turns in her introduction (as do several authors in their chapters) to the declaration of purpose written by Life’s creator and publisher, media mogul Henry Luce. As Luce proclaimed in the magazine’s 1936 prospectus, Life would energize that part of the American sensorium based wholly on sight. The magazine, he wrote, would enable its readers “[to] see life; to see the world; to eyewitness great events … to see and to take pleasure in seeing; to see and be instructed; thus to see, and to be shown, is now the will and new expectancy of half mankind” (2). Taking Luce’s “ambitious, even arrogant editorial vision” (2) as a starting point, Doss and the anthology’s other contributors look to the magazine itself, parsing diverse aspects of its conception, production, and dissemination—from camera angles to reader demographics—in order to reveal the myriad intricacies and contradictions engendered by a project of such overwhelming visual and cultural proportions. In doing so, they also seek to illuminate the magazine’s constitutive role in the invention and promulgation of a modern, self-consciously American way of perceiving the world.

As Doss notes in her preface, the anthology grew out of a four-day interdisciplinary conference on Life that took place at the University of Colorado at Boulder, with each of the book’s chapters originating as presented papers. While such conference-driven anthologies are certainly commonplace in academic publishing, this point of origin has proven particularly appropriate to the goal of the “Looking at Life” project. Made up of a range of scholars from diverse disciplines and methodological backgrounds, the conference allowed for the scholarly circumspection and inclusiveness needed to address a subject as broad and varied as Life. This spirit of exploration and free play continues in the book, as the thirteen authors employ not only methods of visual analysis, but also those of history, journalism and mass communications, American studies, literary criticism, sociology, and the amalgams formed thereof. As we shall see, the divergent yet complementary nature of the individual essays provides the anthology’s most innovative scholarship by asking the reader to see Life as an entity of multiple and simultaneous dimensions: as an object of visual delectation, a historical document, a material object, an ideological conduit, and a site of reception and contestation (to name a few). For this reviewer, the most interesting moments usually took place between chapters while reflecting on the differences among the authors’ approaches and evidence. 

The effectiveness of Looking at Life Magazine as a site for synthetic analysis derives from two characteristics: its clear conceptualization of the magazine’s visual and cultural significance, and its balanced presentation of different subjects and approaches that, when drawn together by the reader, work synergistically to create new avenues of thought. As editor, Doss accomplishes the former in her introduction, which provides an overarching history of the magazine’s development and reception and, at the same time, identifies the conceptual issues and cultural intrigues faced by those who seek to study it. Using Luce’s statement as a framework, she balances two approaches to the magazine: one based on the editorial and ideological program of the magazine itself, the other on the magazine’s reception and interpretation. Juxtaposing editorial statements made by Luce and others with the words of readers culled from letters to the editor, Doss composes a compelling picture of the magazine’s impact on American culture. In the process, she offers a particularly effective critique of Life’s inability to recognize the ambiguities of the photographic image, the hybridity of their own readership, and, by extension, American culture as a whole. Casting Life as a magazine devoted to the promotion of a homogenous, consumerist, and middle-class image of American life, Doss delights in exposing such disjunctions between the magazine’s editorial program and its reader reception, thereby complicating processes of vision and interpretation that the magazine considered transparent and seamless. Perhaps the best example of this approach is her consideration of photography itself. While Life’s editors viewed photographs as objects quickly and easily understood, Doss deftly employs readers’ responses to demonstrate the falsity of this belief and to highlight the magazine’s seeming lack of appreciation for the individual agency of its own readers.

If the goal of the introduction is to encourage readers to look past the slick gloss of the magazine and ask arresting questions about its images and ideas, the chapters that follow demonstrate the benefits of such an enterprise. Best described as case studies, each of the thirteen essays focuses on a single theme related to the magazine’s construction or reception. The first two texts explore Life’s status as America’s first illustrated photographic magazine and its formative role in the construction of an American mass media, and its audience. Terry Smith’s “Life-Style Modernity: Making Modern America” looks at the invention of the magazine’s visual and ideological profile in the mid-1930s. Conversely, James Baughman’s “Who Read Life? The Circulation of America’s Favorite Magazine” examines the demographics of Life’s readership in order to understand who the magazine did, and did not, reach.

Having established these two poles of interpretation (maker and reader), the remaining essays attack the magazine from a variety of angles, using pinpoint analyses of specific themes and subjects to explore the complicated biases and operations of the magazine and to demonstrate its impact on American culture. Listed in order of appearance: Kelly Ann Long’s “Friend or Foe: Wartime Images of the Chinese” concerns Life’s picturing of American attitudes toward the Chinese in the 1930s; Brett Gary’s “The Pitiless Spotlight of Publicity: Life and the World War II–Era Exposure of American Extremists” examines the magazine’s positioning of political difference; Peter Bacon Hale’s “Imagining the Atomic Bomb: Life and the Atom” explores the magazine’s development of an iconography for the atomic age; Roland Marchand considers the impact of Life’s visual practice on corporate style in “Life Comes to the Corporate Headquarters”; David Morgan addresses the creation of a normative vision of American religion in “The Image of Religion in Life, 1936–1953”; Wendy Kozol addresses representations of race and segregation in “Gazing at Race in the Pages of Life: Picturing Segregation through Theory and History,” as does Doss later in her study of Life’s first African American photographer, “Visualizing Black America: Gordon Parks at Life, 1948–1971”; John Ibson charts a radical shift in representations of male relationships in “Masculinity under Fire: Life’s Presentation of Camaraderie and Homoeroticism before, during, and after the Second World War”; the theme of sexuality in question is picked up by Rickie Solinger in “The Smutty Side of Life: Picturing Babes and Icons of Gender Difference in the Early 1950s”; Neil Harris charts the voyeuristic potential of the magazine as a means of opening new spaces to visual penetration in his study of the magazine’s socialite photography in “The Life of the Party”; and John Gennari closes the essays by considering Life’s failure to retain its cultural resonance as a mouthpiece for “everyday” American values during the 1960s in “Bridging the Two Americas: Life Looks at the 1960s.”

As this litany of titles suggests, the authors share a number of predilections (not the least of which is a certain glee in making puns from the magazine’s ubiquitous title). These convergences are most notable at the level of subject matter, where questions of race, class, and gender predominate. Such single-mindedness proves to be both an advantage and a limitation. On the positive side, such similarity in theme throws into high relief the diverse methodologies of the authors and provides a valuable opportunity to understand the new questions that arise from even the slightest shift in viewpoint. Baughman’s demographic essay is a particularly lucid example of this point. His straightforward study of reader demographics—which establishes Life’s readership as comfortably white and upper middle class—underlines the ways in which the magazine’s editorial vision of modern America not only failed to match the hybrid quality of American culture, but also highlighted the ambiguities embedded in the magazine’s visual program.

More problematic, however, are the potentially reductive effects of the authors’ tight focus on questions of social ideology and cultural articulation, questions that mask other fruitful avenues of investigation. Ironically, for a book whose title prominently features the idea of looking, processes of visual structure and viewer interpretation are (with a few exceptions) taken for granted. While Doss’s introduction rightly calls for a deep questioning of the photographic medium and the implications of editorial juxtaposition, her challenge is often only partially met. While photographs are read dualistically—with and against the grain—only a limited number of authors explore the full potential of visual ambiguity and seek to perceive Life’s imagery as part of multiple, simultaneous signifying systems. A particular gap is the lack of an essay addressing the magazine’s visual genesis in relation to concepts of twentieth-century montage and to relationships between text and image. One could think of the practices of the artistic avant-garde as one model, yet just as easily conceive of the Sears catalogue as another.

On the whole, however, such considerations pale in comparison to the anthology’s daring and interdisciplinary approach, and its importance as the first comprehensive treatment of Life and its impact on American visual culture. By Looking at Life (forgive my own wordplay), readers will gain a new appreciation for the conjunction of image and culture, one that recognizes the complicated and constitutive role played by the visual in constructing the basic frameworks of American identity. A book that can be read topically or as a whole, Doss’s text will likely become a staple for scholars and teachers in an array of disciplines, from art history and visual culture to communications and from sociology to cultural history.