Learning from LIFE

By Kathy Hendricks

I learned a lot from LIFE magazine. It was one of 11 publications – three daily newspapers and a variety of periodicals – that were part of my parents’ regular subscriptions. Each time it arrived I snatched it off of the table where my mother set out the mail and leafed through the pages of photographs and accompanying articles. The magazine introduced me to the Beatles prior to their visit to the U.S. in 1964 and illustrated NASA flights into space (including a photo of my cousin, Jack Swigert, who was aboard Apollo XIII), the election of U.S. presidents, and the lives of various celebrities. The magazine also afforded a look into disturbing events around the nation and the world, including the violence directed towards civil rights activists and the frightening reality of nuclear war during the Cuban missal crisis. Sheltered as I was in my safe and secure Colorado home, LIFE expanded my worldview through stark photographic images and introduced me to the value of good journalism.

This makes current efforts to shield children and young people from disturbing aspects of our nation’s history all the more lamentable. Whitewashing history as a way to spare the feelings of a certain segment of the population not only does them a great disservice, but also curtails efforts to grow more compassionate and expansive as a society. While there is a need to shelter children from graphic images of violence, it needn’t mean eliminating the more distressing aspects of our history. As the original motto of LIFE stated, “Where there is Life, there is hope.”

Response

by Barbara Anne Radtke

Kathy, our family, too, had a subscription to LIFE, which I also leafed through regularly. It strikes me now that our generation was on the cusp of the transition from the supremacy of the printed word to the power of the image. In 1964, Marshall McLuhan proclaimed “the medium is the message.” Hashtags and soundbites notwithstanding, the dominant medium has become the image.

Maybe you readers are nodding, thinking of the adage, “A picture is worth a thousand words.” Many of those words, however, often are trying to contextualize a fact or an opinion by sharing the point of view that shapes its telling. It is easy to forget that an image, especially a photo or a video, also needs a lens of interpretation.The angle of the shot, color or black/white, the brightness or shadow, the cropping of a still or creation of a video clip all require interpretation.One only needs to see one image that has been “photoshopped” or one edited video to raise questions of legitimate interpretation: What is true? What is authentic? Much of the struggle about what is taught in History and Social Studies classes seems to me a loss of opportunity to teach how to detect and discuss perspective and lenses of interpretation.Instead, it appears that, more and more, events that could be occasions for such opportunity are eliminated in the curriculum.