Back to the Future: Life.com Goes Live

Life magazine published as a weekly from 1936 to 1972. From the early '80s until 2000 if was published as a weekly. Now it is back, in a new form, on the web. Life.com went live today, after about three years of planning and development. The new site features about 7 million images from the Life archive, many never seen before, along with contemporary photos from Getty Images, which is a partner in the new venture. (Getty also brought its considerable technological resources to the project, which is one reason the site is so fast and easy to use.) For me, this is a fantastic resource for exploring the history of the greatest photo magazine of all. You can search the archive in a number of ways: searching for a particular celebrity (Marilyn Monroe, for instance, seen above in a a famous 1953 portrait by Alfred Eisenstaedt), or for sports images.
It's great to see Life get another chance at life. CEO Andy Blau and editor Bill Shapiro have really put together a splendid site--they tell me it's the biggest photography website on the Internet, which seems pretty accurate, considering the archival depth of Life.com. Here's some insider info: American Photo will be featuring a portfolio of some unknown treasures from the Life.com collection in its July/August issue. --David Schonauer