Page 110 – LIFE

Winter Olympics Flashback: Innsbruck, 1964

August 11, 2021February 1, 2014 by

Much has changed about the Olympics since 1964. Only 38 countries participated back then, compared to 92 at the 2018 in South Korea. The country that was the big medal winner in the 1964 Games, the USSR, has long since been broken up. Snowboarding and other more modern sports that highlight today’s Games had yet to be added to the competition.

And yet — some elemental things about the Olympics remain the same. Here, in photos made by LIFE’s Ralph Crane, George Silk and Paul Schutzer, we see the same intensity in the athlete’s faces, the same striving for excellence, that we see every four years in both the summer and winter Olympiads. We see the same spirit of togetherness that seems to win out—however briefly—over the constant drumbeat of nationalism. In short, we see many of the same familiar, comforting scenes that greet us every time the Olympics, however modernized, roll around. And maybe that’s why, in the end, we like the Games so much: because in the midst of all the drama about who will win what event, and by what margin, so much about the Games remains the same.

A ski jumper soared at the 1964 Winter Olympics

Ralph Crane/Life Pictures/Shutterstock

At the opening ceremonies for the Innsbruck Games, before 55,000 onlookers, athletes took the Olympic oath in the arena below the ski jump.

Ralph Crane/Life Pictures/Shutterstock

Opening ceremonies at the 1964 Winter Olympics, Innsbruck, Austria.

George Silk/Life Pictures/Shutterstock

Austrian alpine skier Josl Rieder lit the Olympic flame during the opening ceremonies of the 1964 Winter Olympics, Innsbruck, Austria.

Ralph Crane/Life Pictures/Shutterstock

A scene from the 1964 Winter Olympics, Innsbruck, Austria.

George Silk/Life Pictures/Shutterstock

A parking lot at the 1964 Winter Olympics, Innsbruck, Austria.

Ralph Crane/Life Pictures/Shutterstock

Figure skaters at the 1964 Winter Olympics, Innsbruck, Austria.

Ralph Crane/Life Pictures/Shutterstock

The 1964 Winter Olympics at Innsbruck, Austria.

Ralph Crane/Life Pictures/Shutterstock

1964 Winter Olympics, Innsbruck, Austria.

Ralph Crane/Life Pictures/Shutterstock

Happy fans and autograph-seekers at the 1964 Winter Olympics in Innsbruck, Austria.

Paul Schutzer/Life Pictures/Shutterstock

Medal ceremony, 1964 Winter Olympics, Innsbruck, Austria.

Ralph Crane/Life Pictures/Shutterstock

1964 Winter Olympics at Innsbruck, Austria.

Ralph Crane/Life Pictures/Shutterstock

A team photo of American skiers at the 1964 Innsbruck Winter Olympics, including medalists Jean Saubert (front row, center), Jimmie Heuga (front, far left) and Billy Kidd (front, far right).

George Silk/Life Pictures/Shutterstock

Antarctica’s Brutal Beauty: Portraits from the Bottom of the World

January 6, 2021January 31, 2014 by

In 1964, photographer Michael Rougier accompanied an expedition to the bottom of the world, where researchers planned to retrace the steps of Sir Ernest Shackleton’s legendary (and ill-fated) World War I-era Antarctic expedition. By the time LIFE magazine published his pictures in May 1965, the focus of the story had narrowed considerably — namely, Rougier’s photos appeared in an article about American and Russian scientists studying the navigational prowess of Adélie penguins. Along the way, he made countless pictures of the charming creatures and their cousins —Emperor penguins, for example—in their brutal, gorgeous natural habitat. Not incidentally, he also almost lost his life.

Just another assignment for a photojournalist whose talent was matched only by his versatility.

Born in England in June 1925, Rougier shot for LIFE for a quarter century, covering the Korean War, the Boy Scouts, drug-addled Japanese teens, the 1956 Hungarian revolution, horse racing and myriad other subjects. The pictures he made in Antarctica in 1964, meanwhile, remain among his most impressive: it’s hard to think of another photographer who, in black and white, could so neatly capture both the forbidding beauty of the great southern continent and the endearing quirkiness of its most famous residents.

At one point during the assignment, however, things went terribly wrong for Rougier, as he lost his footing and went sliding—for close to half a mile, out of control—down the side of a glacier. As his daughter Karen recently told LIFE.com, her dad managed to save himself. Barely.

“As a last gasp,” Karen Rougier says, “he threw his pick out to grab the ice, and that’s what kept him from sliding right off the edge of the glacier.”

Rougier was badly hurt in the accident, but after recovering he went on to complete many more assignments, for LIFE and other publications. Michael Rougier passed away in January 2012. A small peak near where he almost lost his life, east of Antarctica’s LaPrade Valley, was named Rougier Hill in tribute to him.

Liz Ronk edited this gallery for LIFE.com. Follow her on Twitter at @LizabethRonk.

Antarctica, 1964

Michael Rougier The LIFE Picture Collection/Shutterstock

Antarctica, 1964.

Michael Rougier The LIFE Picture Collection/Shutterstock

Original caption: “Scientists, helped by Navy personnel, carry boxed penguins to a Navy transport to be taken to a distant release point.”

Michael Rougier The LIFE Picture Collection/Shutterstock

Antarctica, 1964.

Michael Rougier The LIFE Picture Collection/Shutterstock

Manly Men: Classic American Tough Guys, Seen Through LIFE’s Lens

August 11, 2021January 28, 2014 by

Once again, football season is upon us, and once again, the occasion brings with it all the marketing mayhem, fan frenzy and trash-talking that sports are so often heir to. Pro football is unique among American sports due to its sheer, outsized spectacle. It’s louder than baseball, brasher than basketball, and more routinely violent than the phenomenally physical sport of NHL hockey and the high-speed lunacy of NASCAR. In fact, of all the major sports in North America, football is arguably the one that brings out whatever vestiges of machismo might be lurking in even the most seemingly mild of fans.

Football, after all, is for manly men. But there are many types of toughness. Mental toughness (Jackie Robinson); quiet toughness (Gregory Peck, Gary Cooper); gritty toughness (a weary, determined American Marine); crazy, spasmodic toughness (Cagney’s sociopath, Cody Jarrett, in White Heat); run-right-over-you toughness (Jim Brown); and on and on.

Here, LIFE.com offers a look back at some of the iconic faces and personalities that, in their own time and in their own chosen pursuit, were tough enough to answer that age-old question: Who’s the man?

John Garfield 1938

Alfred Eisenstaedt Time & Life Pictures/Shutterstock

Marine on Saipan 1944

W. Eugene Smith Time & Life Pictures/Shutterstock

Jimmy Stewart 1945

Peter Stackpole Time & Life Pictures/Shutterstock

Kirk Douglas 1949

Allan Grant Time & Life Pictures/Shutterstock

C.H. Long 1949

Leonard McCombe Time & Life Pictures/Shutterstock

Gary Cooper 1949

Peter Stackpole Time & Life Pictures/Shutterstock

James Cagney 1949

Allan Grant Time & Life Pictures/Shutterstock

Marlon Brando 1949

Ed Clark Time & Life Pictures/Shutterstock

Jackie Robinson 1950

J.R. Eyerman Time & Life Pictures/Shutterstock

Gregory Peck 1950

W. Eugene Smith Time & Life Pictures/Shutterstock

Humphrey Bogart 1951

Eliot Elisofon Time & Life Pictures/Shutterstock

Rocky Marciano 1951

Eliot Elisofon Time & Life Pictures/Shutterstock

Ernest Hemingway 1952

Alfred Eisenstaedt Time & Life Pictures/Shutterstock

Spencer Tracy 1955

J.R. Eyerman Time & Life Pictures/Shutterstock

Mickey Mantle 1956

Ralph Morse Time & Life Pictures/Shutterstock

Mercury Astronauts 1959

Ralph Morse Time & Life Pictures/Shutterstock

Burt Lancaster 1959

Grey Villet Time & Life Pictures/Shutterstock

Frank Sinatra 1961

Leonard McCombe Time & Life Pictures/Shutterstock

Steve McQueen 1963

John Dominis Time & Life Pictures/Shutterstock

Muhammad Ali 1966

Bob Gomel Time & Life Pictures/Shutterstock

John Wayne 1969

John Dominis Time & Life Pictures/Shutterstock

Jim Brown 1969

Henry Groskinsky Time & Life Pictures/Shutterstock

Johnny Cash 1969

MIchael Rougier Time & Life Pictures/Shutterstock

Jack Nicholson relaxing at home in Los Angeles, 1969.

Arthur Schatz/Life Pictures/Shutterstock

Clint Eastwood 1971

Bill Eppridge Time & Life Pictures/Shutterstock

Jackson Pollock: Early Photos of the Action Painter at Work

April 18, 2023January 27, 2014 by

Is he the greatest living painter in the United States?

That was the direct, provocative question asked in an August 1949 LIFE magazine article that helped cement Jackson Pollock’s reputation. It was a question Pollock spent much of the rest of his life struggling to answer while desperately hoping to show the skeptics why LIFE was right to even ask such a monumental question in the first place.

As the single most recognizable practitioner of Abstract Expressionism—the movement that put America and, specifically, post-World War II New York at the epicenter of painting’s avant-garde—Pollock was a genuine art star. But he soon abandoned the radical “drip” technique that had earned him both fame and, among some art critics, vilification and spent the last few years of his life battling the twin demons of depression and alcoholism.

Here, LIFE presents outtakes from photographer Martha Holmes’ 1949 shoot with Pollock images that offer a unique portrait of the artist’s home life with wife and fellow painter Lee Krasner on eastern Long Island, and the singular working method that made him an art-world icon.

With a down payment loaned to them by art dealer Peggy Guggenheim, Pollock and Krasner bought land in the hamlet of Springs, New York, and moved into the house that would be Pollock’s residence for the last decade of his life. Pollock converted a small nearby barn into a studio, where he was to create many of his most famous works. As his fame grew, the little town of Springs — part of East Hampton—attracted other major artists and writers, including Willem de Kooning, Kurt Vonnegut, Nora Ephron, Philip Roth and Joseph Heller.

Despite moving out of the city to live on a farm near the ocean, it’s hard to say that nature was an inspiration for Pollock’s paintings, which were so abstract that their only apparent source was the artist’s subconscious. Still, the natural world did find its way into his paintings in the form of sand and other materials that the artist routinely applied to his canvas, along with his paints, while the titles of some work—like his gargantuan Autumn Rhythm (1950)—reflect a sensibility attuned to the seasons.

Pollock’s work was often referred to as “action painting,” and the dance-like performance in which he engaged while making a painting was integral to the aesthetic result. Instead of using an easel, he’d stretch a canvas on the floor of his barn and scamper around all four sides as he painted. Rather than using brushes, he used sticks to flick and drip paint, or he poured it straight from the can, favoring household enamels over traditional oils.

Today, a painting from Pollock’s “drip period” can fetch north of $100 million at auction.

After he became famous and successful, Pollock bought his own open-air carriage, a 1950 Oldsmobile 88 convertible. This was the vehicle he was driving on August 11, 1956, when, less than a mile from his house, he drove off the road and flipped the car, killing himself and a passenger, Edith Metzger, and injuring his mistress, Ruth Kligman.

Krasner, a talented abstract painter in her own right, had put her career on hold during decade with Pollock in the Long Island house in order to support her husband’s career. After his death, she began painting in the barn that had been his studio. By the time she died in 1984, at age 76, she was finally recognized for her own work, and not merely as “Mrs. Jackson Pollock.” Today, the farmhouse and barn studio comprise a museum devoted to the study of the married painters’ intertwined working lives.

Liz Ronk edited this gallery for LIFE.com. Follow her on Twitter @lizabethronk.

Jackson Pollock worked in his Long Island studio, 1949.

Martha Holmes/Life Pictures/Shutterstock

Jackson Pollock and Lee Krasner, Long Island, April 1949.

Martha Holmes/Life Pictures/Shutterstock

Jackson Pollock and neighbor, 1949.

Martha Holmes/Life Pictures/Shutterstock

At Daniel Miller’s general store in Springs, New York, Lee Krasner and Jackson Pollock talked with Tino Nivola, a new arrival at the artist colony that began to sprout around the Pollocks’ Long Island village in the late 1940s.

Martha Holmes/Life Pictures/Shutterstock

Jackson Pollock, Long Island, 1949.

Martha Holmes/Life Pictures/Shutterstock

Jackson Pollock worked in his Long Island studio, 1949.

Martha Holmes/Life Pictures/Shutterstock

Jackson Pollock admired the watercolors of neighbor Mary Monteverdi, a self-taught artist inspired to take up painting after seeing Pollock’s work.

Martha Holmes/Life Pictures/Shutterstock

Grocer Daniel Miller (left) visited Pollock and Krasner at their Long Island farmhouse, 1949.

Martha Holmes/Life Pictures/Shutterstock

Neighbor Nathaniel Edgar Talmadge (age 84) and his horse Rowdy Kate (age 21) stopped by for a chat with Jackson Pollock and Lee Krasner in April 1949.

Martha Holmes/Life Pictures/Shutterstock

Jackson Pollock dried dishes with Lee Krasner in the kitchen of their farmhouse, 1949.

Martha Holmes/Life Pictures/Shutterstock

The Apollo 1 Launchpad Fire: Remembering Grissom, White and Chaffee

January 18, 2020January 26, 2014 by

Men and women have been rocketing into space from the Earth’s surface for the past half-century—long enough that much of the general public now views space missions as relatively safe, rote endeavors.

But the business of space exploration is not, and has never been, safe. Here, LIFE.com recalls one of the worst disasters in NASA’s history—and its first public tragedy—when astronauts Gus Grissom, Ed White and Roger Chaffee died in a fire inside their command module on a Cape Canaveral launchpad on Jan. 27, 1967. As TIME’s Jeffrey Kluger (the author of Apollo 13) once wrote, when commemorating the three astronauts:

Test pilots can sense straightaway if they’re working with a good vehicle or a bad one, and the Apollo 1 crew . . . knew almost immediately that they’d been assigned to a stinker. By late 1966, the last of the sturdy, two-man Gemini spacecraft had flown, and NASA was rolling out the three-man Apollo ships that would, at last, carry men to the moon. The spacecraft were sweet-looking machines, but in test-runs on the pad, they were a mess. The electrical system fritzed, the communications died, repairs and upgrades were late in coming. . . . Most worrisome, however, was NASA’s insistence on continuing to use 100% pure oxygen in its atmospheric systems an explosively flammable gas that had worked fine so far in the Mercury and Gemini ships but that could burn like gasoline in the presence of so much as an errant spark . . . Early one Friday evening, when the Apollo 1 astronauts were locked down in the spacecraft for a practice session out on the pad, just such a spark got loose from a frayed wire next to Grissom’s seat. In less than a minute, all three men were dead. For a while, it seemed, the Apollo program would perish too.

The program, of course, survived, and less than three years after the 1967 launchpad fire, Neil Armstrong, Buzz Aldrin and Michael Collins flew Apollo 11 to the moon and back—leaving human footprints on the lunar surface—in what some consider the signature triumph of the 20th century.

Liz Ronk edited this gallery for LIFE.com. Follow her on Twitter at @LizabethRonk.

American astronauts Ed White, Roger Chaffee and Gus Grissom in the Apollo Mission Simulator, a replica of the capsule in which they died.

Ralph Morse The LIFE Picture Collection/Shutterstock

Readying for Apollo I tests, Cape Canaveral, Fla., 1966.

Ralph Morse The LIFE Picture Collection/Shutterstock

Apollo I astronauts (left to right) Roger Chaffee, Ed White and Gus Grissom, Fla.

Ralph Morse The LIFE Picture Collection/Shutterstock

Apollo 1 astronauts (left to right) Gus Grissom, Ed White and Roger Chaffee, photographed the week before the fatal fire at Pad 34, from which their mission was to have launched in February 1967.

Ralph Morse The LIFE Picture Collection/Shutterstock

Apollo 1 astronauts Roger Chaffee, Ed White and Gus Grissom, 1967.

Ralph Morse The LIFE Picture Collection/Shutterstock

Apollo 1 astronauts (front to back) Roger Chaffee, Ed White and Gus Grissom, Cape Kennedy, Fla.

Ralph Morse The LIFE Picture Collection/Shutterstock

Roger Chaffee with his wife Martha and their children, Sheryl and Stephen, in their Houston home, 1965.

Ralph Morse The LIFE Picture Collection/Shutterstock

Astronaut Ed White leapt off a truck before an attentive audience of his fellow astronauts during a training exercise, 1963.

Ralph Morse The LIFE Picture Collection/Shutterstock

In a husband-and-wife appearance before the press, Pat and Ed White (far left) and Pat and Jim McDivitt shared delight with the news that President Johnson had promoted the astronauts after the flight of Gemini 4 in 1965.

Francis Miller The LIFE Picture Collection/Shutterstock

NASA astronaut Ed White and his wife Pat at home.

Ralph Morse The LIFE Picture Collection/Shutterstock

During a family work-out on the horizontal bar, Bonnie Lynn and Eddie White competed against their father, astronaut Ed White.

Ralph Morse The LIFE Picture Collection/Shutterstock

Astronaut Ed White and family, Houston.

Ralph Morse The LIFE Picture Collection/Shutterstock

Astronaut Gus Grissom in his space suit.

Ralph Morse The LIFE Picture Collection/Shutterstock

Gus Grissom often found relief from the pressures of being an astronaut simply by going fishing. He cast for sea bass near Cape Kennedy.

Ralph Morse The LIFE Picture Collection/Shutterstock

Astronaut Gus Grissom with his sons.

Ralph Morse The LIFE Picture Collection/Shutterstock

Home a hero after his successful 1965 mission in Gemini 3, [Gus Grissom] greeted his parents who came from Mitchell, Ind. for the flight.

Ralph Morse The LIFE Picture Collection/Shutterstock

Gus Grissom at home with his son.

Ralph Morse The LIFE Picture Collection/Shutterstock

Gus Grissom with his wife Betty and their sons Scott and Mark.

Ralph Morse The LIFE Picture Collection/Shutterstock

In seclusion at a private home high in the Hollywood Hills, the prime crews for the first and second Apollo flights spent two days earlier this winter in an intensive but informal review of flight plans. Grouped around the table were Gus Grissom (far left), Ed White, Roger Chaffee (back showing), Rusty Schweickart (above), Jim McDivitt and Dave Scott (far right).

Ralph Morse The LIFE Picture Collection/Shutterstock

LIFE magazine, February 3, 1967

LIFE magazine, February 3, 1967.

The Leopard and the Baboon: Anatomy of a Classic (Staged) Photo

August 11, 2021January 22, 2014 by

A staff photographer for LIFE for more than 20 years, the late John Dominis photographed . . . well, everything, and he made some of the most memorable pictures to ever grace the pages of LIFE. Among his most famous shots, in a career filled with phenomenal work, is a hair-raising portrait of a leopard and a baboon, seen mere moments before the huge cat kills its terrified prey. It’s an explosive, unsettling and mesmerizing picture. And it was staged.

Or, more accurately, it was not quite the utterly impromptu scene encountered, fortuitously and unexpectedly that one might expect to find in a classic photograph, especially from a photojournalist of Dominis’ rightly celebrated bona fides. Instead, the picture was set up, in accordance with the practices of the time.

Another LIFE great, the photographer John Loengard, interviewed Dominis in October 1993, and quoted him discussing this very picture in the book, Life Photographers: What They Saw (Bulfinch Press, 1998):

I had photographed some animals before [Dominis noted], though I certainly wasn’t a cat expert. Pat Hunt, the head of LIFE’s Nature department, lined up a hunter in Botswana who was a hunter for zoos. He had caught a leopard, and he put the leopard in the back of the truck, and we went out into the desert. He would release the leopard, and most of the time the leopard would chase the baboons and they would run off and climb trees. I had photographed all this. But for some reason one baboon didn’t get off. It turned and faced the leopard, and the leopard killed it. We didn’t know that this was going to happen. I just turned on the camera motor, and I got this terrific shot of this confrontation.

What’s your feeling about injecting yourself into the natural order of things to get pictures?

There was a different feeling about that in the 1960s. We were always setting up pictures of some sort . . . But now there are many, many more competent photographers doing this stuff over long periods of time four or five years if a scientist is on a big study. They’re getting good stuff without helping the picture. But no one was working that way then. Scientists couldn’t handle the crude cameras that we had well enough to get good stuff.

I felt that my job was to get the pictures. I learned how to bait animals and do things from the experts in Africa. We shot a gazelle and put it in a tree and waited for a cat to come. I didn’t feel bad about it at all. It sounds terrible now, I know, and maybe my attitude would be different now. But it wasn’t then, and I don’t know what more to say about it. I know, I’ve been criticized a lot. But to me, I had to do what I did.

Does the fact that this extraordinary image is not, in today’s terms, a purely naturalistic feat of photojournalism somehow detract from its power? Is the leopard’s implacable strength any less formidable, or its lethal grace any less awe-inspiring? Is the photograph itself, technically and aesthetically, any less impressive when we learn that the circumstances under which it was made were even in part manufactured?

We don’t have the answers to these questions. But we feel they’re worth asking. We also take John Dominis’ word for it when he says that he made the picture in good faith, and not with the intention to somehow deceive, or put one over on the viewer. In the end, the harrowing, beautiful photograph he made has earned its longevity.

Leopard and Baboon, 1966

John Dominis TIme & Life Pictures/Shutterstock

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Winter Olympics Flashback: Innsbruck, 1964

Antarctica’s Brutal Beauty: Portraits from the Bottom of the World

Manly Men: Classic American Tough Guys, Seen Through LIFE’s Lens

Jackson Pollock: Early Photos of the Action Painter at Work

The Apollo 1 Launchpad Fire: Remembering Grissom, White and Chaffee

The Leopard and the Baboon: Anatomy of a Classic (Staged) Photo

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