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Life defined a certain style of journalism, and also defined an era: whether it was through searing black and white images of grief and destruction—in the closing stages of World War II, in Korea, or in Vietnam — or whether it was through iconic portraiture of the most fetishised figures of the time. John F. Kennedy, Marilyn Monroe, Ernest Hemingway and Sophia Loren not only graced its pages but helped cement their public personas by doing so. It closed for the first time back in 1972and for a second time in 2000 and, once again, lived on in intermittent specials until 2004. Now it is shutting up shop for a third, and perhaps final, time. And so Life as we know it is coming to an end—the last issue will appear on April 20. It will live on largely as a photo archive on the Internet—where the plan is to keep the magazine’s most celebrated shots freely available to the public. "While consumers responded enthusiastically to Life," the company said in a statement, "with the decline in the newspaper business and the outlook for advertising growth in the newspaper supplement category, the response was not strong enough to warrant further investment in Life as a weekly newspaper supplement." Back in the 1930s, when the magazine entrepreneur Henry Luce bought out an unrelated humour magazine called Life and refashioned it as a cutting-edge showcase for the world’s best news photography, it was itself an embodiment of the most sophisticated communications medium of the time. It was an instant success, selling 380,000 copies in its first week and increasing that to more than a million within the first month. The emphasis was always on the photos, the text frequently reduced to little more than glorified captions. And so the great event of the time were recorded: the Spanish Civil War, the rise of Hitler and Mussolini, and World War II. By the 1940s, Life was established as a voice of arch conservatism on the home front - it suggested Detroit’s auto workers’ unions were tantamount to a fifth column for Adolf Hitler - and fine reporting from the fighting overseas, much of it carried out by women like Margaret Bourke-White, Mary Welth and Peggy Durdin. Into the 1950s, Life enjoyed the most prestigious of reputations and expanded its literary pedigree as well as its photography. Ernest Hemingway published The Old Man and The Sea within its pages, as well as an extended piece of reportage on Spanish bull-fighting that later became The Dangerous Summer. Then came network television, and nothing was ever quite the same. Life joined the paparazzo throng to snap Taylor and Burton, Loren and Ekberg, and the other sirens of the age. It also enjoyed much of its familiar prestige during the height of the Vietnam conflict, when photographers like Larry Burrows and Henri Huet brought home searing images of the conflict (and both ended up losing their lives in southeast Asia). By the early 1970s, Luce had relinquished control of the magazine and its relevance ebbed away with startling speed. Life missed out on the Watergate scandal during its first closure, and missed September 11 during its second. Anyone living in America for the past decade could have been forgiven for thinking it had long since vanished altogether. Thanks to the Internet, its glory days will live on. The mourners for what was left of its print incarnation, though, will be few.— By arrangement with The Independent
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