Weekend Pleasures | 04/11/2009 7:00 am
LIFE Magazine Photo Site Now Live in Beta
The long-awaited gallery of priceless LIFE magazine photos from today and yesterday debuts.
Grab a cozy chair, pour a nice cup of tea and settle in for what we promise will be a delightful tour of, say, seven million or so of the best photographs you will ever see. That’s because, at long last, all of those astonishing LIFE magazine photographs that we all grew up with and dreamed about and fretted over and were inspired by are now available for free, endless ogling online at the click of a mouse.
This week, Time Inc. released the beta version of the long-awaited Life.com.
Featuring both rarely seen photos (some dating from the 1850s) to iconic images we’re all familiar with (including possibly the most famous LIFE image of them all, the Alfred Eisenstaedt photo of a sailor and nurse kissing in Times Square on V-J Day, August 14, 1945), the site bowed this week and immediately became a destination on the Web.
It’s more than just a time capsule (but that alone would make it a hit). The site also features the day’s news in photos, with more than 3,000 new images being added daily. It features utterly addictive photo games such as "Real or Fake?" and "Which Would You Rather See?"
The site’s most popular galleries (as of Friday, April 10):
Audrey Hepburn at Her Most Stunning
LIFE Exclusive: The Day MLK Died
LIFE’s Best Marilyn Monroe Pictures
Enjoy, darlings, enjoy!
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5 Reader Comments (so far…) Sign In or Register to comment
THIS is faboo!! I went through the Audrey Hepburn pix and they are so great! Gosh I love her movies!!
I cannot wait to find more pics.
I had to raise my eyebrows though at the 3000 new photos added everyday! That’s A LOT!! Wow!
Fascinating.
I first searched for an early Elvis Presley photo … to see if Life had published a full body picture of the rock and roll star…..inasmuch as when first appearing on television, Elvis was filmed only from the waist upward. No, Life did not have a photo. They had some wonderful snapshots of Elvis in the Army and, of course, the wedding photo.
The Beatles photographs from the 1960s almost made me cry….and then laugh.
The photographs of World War II ….at the concentration camps with the GIs who liberated the survivors, were newsworthy as the time and are now facts and proof of historical events too horrible to believe happened, but they did. The looks on the faces of the GIs who are found in the background of many of these photographs, tell a story of their own.
I also looked at the Audry Hepburn photos. The little black dress ….universally applauded. Wonderful.
For every award won by the Life photographers, it was deserved.