Page 111 – LIFE

A Legendary Essay: Albert Schweitzer in Africa

January 30, 2022January 22, 2014 by

Albert Schweitzer—the Nobel Peace Prize laureate, theologian, musician and “medical missionary” who spent decades in West Africa—was one of the most recognized figures of the 20th century. To some, he was a well-meaning but ultimately patronizing European bent on enlightening the “Dark Continent” of Africa; to others he was a man whose tireless work with men, women and children suffering from leprosy, malaria, elephantiasis, whooping cough, venereal diseases and countless other vile illnesses elevated him to something close to sainthood.

The reality of Schweitzer’s life and work, meanwhile, was both more complicated and more deeply fascinating than either of those rather simplistic estimations of the man.

In November 1954, LIFE magazine published a feature story on Schweitzer, “A Man of Mercy,” with photographs made by the great W. Eugene Smith. Here, LIFE.com republishes Smith’s photos of Schweitzer, as a reminder of the man’s stature and a celebration of one photographer’s singular vision.

In that issue, LIFE wrote:

“No one knows me,” Albert Schweitzer has sad, “who has not known me in Africa.” In Norway last week, where he had come to acknowledge a Nobel Peace Prize, crowds jammed streets to cheer a great figure of our time. As they cheered they were convinced they knew him well: he is the humanitarian, warm and saintlike. In full manhood he had turned away from brilliant success as a preacher, writer and musician to bury himself as a missionary doctor on Africa.

All this was truth but admirers who have followed Dr. Schweitzer to French Equatorial Africa [specifically, Gabon Ed.] know a different man. There, amid primitive conditions, Europe’s saint is forced to become a remote, driving man who rules his hospital with patriarchal authority. For those seeking the gentle philosopher of the legend, he has a brief answer: “We are too busy fighting pain.” Then he turns back to the suffering and the work that make up the African world of Albert Schweitzer.”

The story behind the most enduring image of the entire photo essay in LIFE, meanwhile, illustrates something quite elemental not about Schweitzer, but (characteristically) about the prickly, occasionally bombastic master photographer who made the picture, W. Eugene Smith. The photograph—the first in this gallery—is beautiful, and telling: here is Dr. Schweitzer, deep inside Africa, overseeing the building of a hospital. It is a portrait that captures so many aspects of the man in one frame: his dedication, the power of his personality, his magnanimity, his “otherness” and at the very same time the rightness of his presence in a land thousands of miles from his birth.

There’s really only one problem with this portrait: it’s not true. Or rather, what truth it contains only survives to this day because Smith drastically manipulated the photograph, combining elements from two separate negatives in order to impart in one picture the narrative he was dead-set on conveying. The silhouetted saw handle and human hand in the lower right of the frame were not part of the larger picture when Smith made it; instead, he combined elements of two distinct images to create a third, now-classic shot of a man quite literally on a mission. (One story says the saw and the hand were added to cover a blurred patch on the larger picture; others who know Smith’s work argue that he simply wished to add a new graphic element and another layer of quiet drama to the whole.)

That this sort of manipulation contravened LIFE’s own photojournalistic guidelines mattered little then—Smith, after all, developed and printed his own work, refusing to allow others to handle his film, his negatives, anything at all—and, in all honesty, it matters even less now. The fact of the matter is, by the time LIFE sent him to Africa to chronicle Schweitzer’s work and his world, Smith was already a legend. He had made some of the most memorable photographs to emerge from World War II (and been wounded while in the Pacific). He had pioneered the photo essay form for LIFE with landmark work like “Country Doctor” (1948) and “Nurse Midwife” (1951). He was prickly, difficult, indefatigable and routinely produced work that most photographers would give their right eye to have made.

The sort of tinkering Smith engaged in with that one, iconic Schweitzer photograph might be frowned upon today. Any contemporary photojournalist who admitted to such behavior would probably be excoriated by his or her peers, as well as by the general public.

W. Eugene Smith, on the other hand, has largely escaped such censure for one reason, and one reason only: he was W. Eugene Smith, and for better or worse, when it comes to aesthetics and even, to some extent, when it comes to ethics genius has always played by, and been judged by, a different set of rules than those that govern the rest of us.

Albert Schweitzer supervised the building of a hospital in Gabon, West Africa, 1954.

W. Eugene Smith/Life Pictures/Shutterstock

A new mother was carried across a hospital village’s street from the delivery room to a ward. Her baby, after being washed and clothed, would be cared for at the mother’s bed.

W. Eugene Smith/Life Pictures/Shutterstock

A big-eyed baby was fed in the hospital nursery. Children whose parents were unable to care for them were kept as long as three years before being turned over to tribal relatives.

W. Eugene Smith/Life Pictures/Shutterstock

The doctor at work examined the post-operative patients on the upper floor of the Schweitzer-designed structure. The lower section, behind the waiting patients, was used for storage and emergency rooms.

W. Eugene Smith/Life Pictures/Shutterstock

Intent on his job, one of Dr. Schweitzer’s workers leaned his weight against a crowbar as men tried to roll a great rock out of the main street of the new village for lepers.

W. Eugene Smith/Life Pictures/Shutterstock

His umbrella, carried to work in the wet season, was stuck in the sand when Schweitzer went to another job.

W. Eugene Smith/Life Pictures/Shutterstock

His shoes for muddy rainy season weather were nearly 30 years old.

W. Eugene Smith/Life Pictures/Shutterstock

A portable railroad, lent by a nearby plantation owner, was set down in the main street of the leper village for a major project in earth moving.

W. Eugene Smith/Life Pictures/Shutterstock

Whites and blacks worked together pushing flatcars. The doctor’s ire rose when happy-go-lucky workers used carts as roller coasters.

W. Eugene Smith/Life Pictures/Shutterstock

Lepers in line opened mouths for medicine. One received pills, another water to wash the pills down.

W. Eugene Smith/Life Pictures/Shutterstock

Danish nurse Erna Spohrhannssen watched an African aid give sulphone derivatives for leprosy.

W. Eugene Smith/Life Pictures/Shutterstock

Nurse Spohrhanssen treated sores on leper’s feet.

W. Eugene Smith/Life Pictures/Shutterstock

Dying of old age, Eugenia Mwanyeno sat under heavy mosquito netting on a bed in the leper hospital, swaying back and forth with eyes closed, holding tight to last moments of life.

W. Eugene Smith/Life Pictures/Shutterstock

The mourners, daughter of Eugenia, Mama Helene (left), and granddaughter, Henrietta Yeno, were in despair by her bedside. Her granddaughter broke into sobbing chant when the coffin lid was closed; for the rest, mourners guarded grief in silence.

W. Eugene Smith/Life Pictures/Shutterstock

The funeral was attended by Dr. Schweitzer, walking hands clasped behind back, to the graveyard. Though he seldom went to funerals, he made this an exception because Eugenia had long been a familiar figure in the life of the settlement.

W. Eugene Smith/Life Pictures/Shutterstock

A branch of palm leaves to cover the coffin of Eugenia rested on the ground beside the grave-digging tools. Africans often wrap their dead in palm leaves.

W. Eugene Smith/Life Pictures/Shutterstock

A nurse stood at the side of the grave, holding her floral tribute.

W. Eugene Smith/Life Pictures/Shutterstock

Frugal habits marked Schweitzer’s life. He opened up used envelopes for manuscript paper and he punctured binding holes in them with old nails.

W. Eugene Smith/Life Pictures/Shutterstock

The fruit of his work hung on nails in Schweitzer’s study, out of reach of any wandering animals. He once lost half a chapter to a hungry antelope.

W. Eugene Smith/Life Pictures/Shutterstock

Albert Schweitzer in Africa, 1954.

W. Eugene Smith/Life Pictures/Shutterstock

Goats on the rooftops clattered about and often butted and wrestled each other for the best positions on the ridges. Schweitzer had imported a basic herd from Europe years earlier, and its playful descendants were allowed to run freely through the village streets and orchard.

W. Eugene Smith/Life Pictures/Shutterstock

David Douglas Duncan and the Korean War: A Defining Photo

June 29, 2022January 22, 2014 by

Missouri native David Douglas Duncan, a native of Kansas City, is known, primarily, as the signature photographer of the Korean War. In the pages of LIFE magazine and elsewhere, his pictures brought the brutality home to countless Americans who understandably, with memories of the just-finished World War II still fresh in their minds, might have wanted nothing more than to blot out the carnage being inflicted and endured in their name half a world away.

Duncan’s photographs from Korea conveyed a searing, inconvenient truth: namely, that war is still hell, and men, women and children still die horrible deaths, even when the war in question is labeled a “police action.” But Duncan knew war long before he made his harrowing images at Chosin Reservoir and in the rubble-strewn streets of downtown Seoul. He was there, too, in the Second World War, covering battles and suffering shrapnel wounds in the Pacific as a combat photographer with the Marine Corps. He was in Vietnam, a decade and a half after Korea, at Con Thien and Khe San.

The photograph that accompanies this story, made in Korea in 1950, is not only one of the greatest photos made during that “forgotten war,” but is one of the finest war pictures ever made by anyone, in any conflict. In his classic 1951 book, This Is War!, Duncan wrote of the stunned, resolute Marine captain trying to steady himself after an attack by North Korean troops, as ammunition ran dangerously low and reinforcements were nowhere in sight: “Ike Fenton, drenched and with the rain running in little droplets from his bearded chin, got the news. His tattered Baker Company Marines had only those few rounds in their belts remaining. If the Reds were to launch one more attack they would have to be stopped with bayonets and rifle butts.

In its straightforward, unblinking portrayal of the futility, madness, endurance and, at times, the simple nobility one witnesses in the midst of a firefight or a protracted, bloody campaign, Duncan’s picture of Capt. Ike Fenton has rarely been equaled, and never surpassed. Like so many of Duncan’s pictures from Korea, it is indelible.

Talking to Duncan about his Korea pictures, meanwhile, was bracing not merely for the sharpness of the man’s memories so many years later, but for the unexpected and unsolicited declarations of a craftsman congenitally prone to speaking his mind.

“The thing that comes back to me right away, right now, when looking at these pictures again,” Duncan told LIFE.com, “is that at no time did any Marine feel he had to look around to see what the South Koreans were doing behind him [during that war]. The Marines in Korea never feared ‘friendly fire’ or artillery coming from the South Koreans from their allies like they sometimes did later in Vietnam, fighting with the South Vietnamese. The Koreans could be trusted.”

In the years after Korea, Duncan photographed other conflicts all over the globe, but also proved himself a sensitive portraitist and a master of place. He published books on subjects ranging from his great friend, Pablo Picasso, to the Kremlin and the Middle East (The World of Allah, 1983). He published books on the sunflowers of France, Cartier-Bresson and an incredibly moving 100-page work on his beloved German Shepherd, Thor—a creature possessed of what Duncan characterizes as an “Olympian serenity.”

In 2003, he published his monumental and, at the same time, somehow intimate autobiography-in-images, Photo Nomad, featuring pictures and recollections from across seven decades. Every one of his many books is worth seeking out; but for anyone interested in photojournalism in the 20th century, Photo Nomad is indispensable.

Marine Capt. Francis “Ike” Fenton pondered his fate and the fate of his men after being told that his company was nearly out of ammunition, Korea, 1950.

David Douglas Duncan

Anne Frank’s Friends: Photos of the Girls Who Lived

January 18, 2020January 22, 2014 by

The narrative elements that form the framework of Anne’s Diary of a Young Girl are as prosaic and as grotesque as those that animate the darkest fairy tales.

A young girl, wise and compassionate, and her family go into hiding in Amsterdam during the Second World War, desperate to evade the Nazis who occupy their adopted country; the girl and those in hiding with her are eventually betrayed (by a person or persons still, to this day, unknown) and are sent to concentration camps; most of her former companions die—or rather, are murdered by Nazis and their willing proxies along with millions of other Jews and “undesirables” in the coming years; Anne Frank herself is only 15 years old when she dies at Bergen-Belsen in March 1945, one month before Allied troops liberate the camp.

These and other wrenching elements of Anne’s tale, imparted in the clear, unsentimental prose of her famous diary, are now part of the shared memory of disparate cultures all over the world.

Here, LIFE commemorates Anne’s unconquerable spirit and bears witness to the suffering unleashed by the Third Reich through a story that began with one seemingly incongruous photograph: a picture of children playing in a sandbox in Amsterdam in 1937.

LIFE magazine set the scene, and explained the significance of the sandbox photograph, in its October 12, 1959, issue:

The snapshot . . . adds a fascinating footnote to the Anne Frank legend. LIFE photographer Paul Schutzer found it when he was thumbing through a family album in the home of Maryland friends. “One familiar face caught my eye,” he recalls, “and I realized it was Anne Frank.”

His hostess, Mrs. Barbara Rodbell, who is in the snapshot, told him it had been taken by her mother in Amsterdam in 1937. She had heard from most of the other girls since the war and, with her help, Schutzer set out to track them down. One had died, like Anne, in a concentration camp—Barbara’s own sister, Susanne. On a 21,000-mile journey, Schutzer found the three others and recorded their lives 22 years after the snapshot.

Each of the women is now happily married and raising children. Meanwhile their childhood friend’s fame continues to grow. Her “Diary” has now sold 3.5 million copies. . . . [Note: Today that number has grown to more than 30 million copies. Ed.] Mrs. Rodbell, living now in contented obscurity, feels that, for most of the girls in the snapshot at least, a remark from one of Anne’s last entries has come true: “I think that it will all come out all right, this cruelty too will end and that peace and tranquility will return again.”

LIFE.com offers these photographs—many of which never ran in LIFE magazine—made by Paul Schutzer during his deeply personal trek into the past.

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

Left to right: Hanneli Goslar (a.k.a., “Lies Goosens” in early editions of the Diary), Anne Frank, Dolly Citroen, Hannah Toby, Barbara Ledermann and Susanne Ledermann (standing), Amsterdam, 1937.

Anne Frank Fonds/Anne Frank House via Shutterstock

The former Barbara Ledermann, she escaped from the Nazis in the Netherlands, lived with the underground, and met the man she would marry, Martin Rodbell, in the U.S. in 1947. Her parents and her sister, Susanne, died at Auschwitz.

Paul Schutzer/Life Pictures/Shutterstock

The former Barbara Ledermann, now Mrs. Martin Rodbell, in Maryland, 1958.

Paul Schutzer/Life Pictures/Shutterstock

The former Barbara Ledermann, now Mrs. Martin Rodbell, in Maryland, 1959.

Paul Schutzer/Life Pictures/Shutterstock

The former Barbara Ledermann, now Mrs. Martin Rodbell, with her family in Maryland, 1959.

Paul Schutzer/Life Pictures/Shutterstock

The former Barbara Ledermann, now Mrs. Martin Rodbell, 1959. “When she and her husband went to the Anne Frank movie,” LIFE wrote, “she stood debating whether to go in. Finally she decided not to. ‘I’ve seen too much human suffering already,’ she said.”

Paul Schutzer/Life Pictures/Shutterstock

Hannah, whose husband, Ronald Marsh, was a California law student. The former Hannah Toby, she was fourth from the left in the sandbox picture; it was in her back yard that the group picture was taken.

Paul Schutzer/Life Pictures/Shutterstock

Hannah Marsh and family, Los Angeles, 1959.

Paul Schutzer/Life Pictures/Shutterstock

Hannah Marsh and child, Los Angeles, 1959.

Paul Schutzer/Life Pictures/Shutterstock

The girl who was third from left in the sandbox photo, then Dolly Citroen, was shown with her husband, Shmuel Shoshan, and three of their four kids, on a picnic outside Jerusalem.

Paul Schutzer/Life Pictures/Shutterstock

The former Dolly Citroen, now married to Shmuel Shoshan, in Israel, 1959.

Paul Schutzer/Life Pictures/Shutterstock

The former Dolly Citroen with one of her four children, Israel, 1959.

Paul Schutzer/Life Pictures/Shutterstock

The former Dolly Citroen with her family, Israel, 1959.

Paul Schutzer/Life Pictures/Shutterstock

Hanneli Goslar (a.k.a., “Lies Goosens” in early editions of the Diary) was Anne’s closest friend in Amsterdam. Also taken by the Nazis, she met her old playmate at Bergen-Belsen in 1945, not long before Anne died. “She was in rags,” Hanneli told LIFE. “I saw her emaciated face in the darkness.”

Paul Schutzer/Life Pictures/Shutterstock

The former Hanneli Goslar, now married to Dr. Walter Pinchas, in Jerusalem with her family, 1959.

Paul Schutzer/Life Pictures/Shutterstock

Hanneli and Dolly, childhood friends of Anne Frank, with their children in Jerusalem, 1959.

Paul Schutzer/Life Pictures/Shutterstock

LIFE at Daytona: Motorcycle Madness on the Florida Sands

August 23, 2021January 21, 2014 by

For years, from its inception in 1937 until the early ’60s, the prestigious Daytona 200 motorcycle race wasn’t merely run at Daytona Beach. Along with other high-speed, high-risk clashes, the 200 was run on Daytona Beach.

In 1948, LIFE magazine covered the races, both amateur and pro, at Daytona (the Road Course opened in 1936) and reported, in its April 19 issue, that “for four days last month the resort city of Daytona Beach could hardly have been noisier or in more danger if it had been under bombardment.”

Here, seven decades later, LIFE.com opens a window on that long, loud weekend that thrilled racing fans; slightly scandalized one very popular weekly magazine’s editors; and, as if proof was needed that the young sport was still in the hands of rebels and scofflaws, saw two people killed and 30 more injured in the midst of all the high-octane fun.

The 1948 event, which attracted “375 helmeted daredevils and plenty of non-racing hell-raisers,” was marred not only by deaths and injuries but, as LIFE duly noted, by classic knuckleheadism. “Because the antics of an unruly minority reflect on the dignity of motorcycling,” the magazine observed, “the American Motorcycle Association may hire special police at future races. One duty will be to restrain sophomoric cyclists who amused themselves this year by tossing firecrackers into the crowd.”

Ultimately, as LIFE tersely reported, “155 motorcycles started, only 45 finished. Winning rider, Floyd Emde, averaged 84 mph, got $2,000.” What LIFE failed to mention is that Emde (who was inducted into the Motorcycle Hall of Fame in 1998) won by the sliver-thin margin of 12 seconds; 1948 was the first time a rider led the race from flag to flag; and it was the last time an Indian Motorcycle won the 200.

Daytona 200 weekend, 1948

Joseph Scherschel Time & Life Pictures/Shutterstock

Daytona 200 1948

Joseph Scherschel Time & Life Pictures/Shutterstock

Motorcycles in Daytona

Joseph Scherschel Time & Life Pictures/Shutterstock

Daytona Beach, Florida, March 1948.

Joseph Scherschel Time & Life Pictures/Shutterstock

Motorcycles Race in Florida 1948

Joseph Scherschel Time & Life Pictures/Shutterstock

Daytona 200, 1948

Joseph Scherschel Time & Life Pictures/Shutterstock

Daytona Beach, Florida, March 1948

Joseph Scherschel Time & Life Pictures/Shutterstock

Daytona 200 weekend, 1948

Joseph Scherschel Time & Life Pictures/Shutterstock

Daytona Beach, Florida, March 1948

Joseph Scherschel Time & Life Pictures/Shutterstock

Daytona 200 Motorcycle Race in Florida

Joseph Scherschel Time & Life Pictures/Shutterstock

Fans watching the races at Daytona

Joseph Scherschel Time & Life Pictures/Shutterstock

Daytona Beach, March 1948

Joseph Scherschel Time & Life Pictures/Shutterstock

A Racer Steers his motorcycle

Joseph Scherschel Time & Life Pictures/Shutterstock

Daytona 200 Weekend, 1948

Joseph Scherschel Time & Life Pictures/Shutterstock

Daytona 200 1948

Joseph Scherschel Time & Life Pictures/Shutterstock

Daytona 200 Winner Floyd Emde

Joseph Scherschel Time & Life Pictures/Shutterstock

Daytona Beach 1948

Joseph Scherschel Time & Life Pictures/Shutterstock

Motorcycle Club Daytona 200

Joseph Scherschel Time & Life Pictures/Shutterstock

Academy Awards: Film Stars With Their Oscars

April 19, 2021January 20, 2014 by

Being an Oscar winner is the ultimate in status, but the Oscar award is also physical thing in itself—one that that stands 13-and-a-half inches high, weighs eight-and-a-half pounds and presents a question to its owner. That question: what are you going to do with me?

The first and most obvious answer is to pose for pictures together. Every winner does that—though some hold the statuette professionally, while others cuddle with it as if it was a puppy. But what then? In these photos, Elizabeth Taylor takes hers to the party, Vivien Leigh places hers on the mantlepiece, Joan Fontaine sets hers up on a workdesk, and Jimmy Stewart totes his along to the family hardware store, where he casually sets it on a display case while he catches up with an old friend.

Even after the awards are handed out, the show goes on.

Vivien Leigh placed the Oscar she won for her role as Scarlett in Gone With The Wind on her mantlepiece at home, 1940.

Peter Stackpole/Life Pictures/Shutterstock

Luise Rainer, the first woman to win two Oscars, held her Best Actress award for her performance in The Great Ziegfeld during the 1937 Academy Awards ceremony.

Rex Hardy Jr./Life Pictures/Shutterstock

Joan Fontaine did the household bookkeeping next to the Oscar she won for her role in Hitchcok’s Suspicion, 1942.

Bob Landry/Life Pictures/Shutterstock

Elizabeth Taylor at a Hollywood party with the Oscar she won for her role in Butterfield, 1961.

Allan Grant/Life Pictures/Shutterstock

Grace Kelly with the Oscar she won for her role in The Country Girl, 1955. William Holden, her co-star in the movie, stood behind her.

George Silk/Life Pictures/Shutterstock

Audrey Hepburn with the Oscar she won for Roman Holiday, 1954.

Ralph Morse/Life Pictures/Shutterstock

Joanne Woodward smiled radiantly while holding her Best Actress Oscar for her role in Three Faces of Eve, 1958.

Ralph Crane/Life Pictures/Shutterstock

Best Supporting Actor and Supporting Actress winners Frank Sinatra and Donna Reed (both for From Here to Eternity) and their Oscars, 1954.

George Silk/Life Pictures/Shutterstock

Academy Awards: Classic Film Stars With Their Oscars

Walter Sanders—Time & Life Pictures/Shutterstock

Gloria Grahame with her Best Supporting Actress Oscar for The Bad and the Beautiful, 1953.

Loomis Dean/Life Pictures/Shutterstock

Marlon Brando (right) with his Oscar for On the Waterfront, 1955.

George Silk/Life Pictures/Shutterstock

Onstage presenters seen from the wings during the 1950 Academy Awards.

Ida Wyman/Life Pictures/Shutterstock

Jimmy Stewart, back from WWII, talked with the oldest employee of his family’s hardware store in Pennsylvania, George Little; nearby is a table of various mementos, including Stewart’s Best Actor Oscar for The Philadelphia Story.

Peter Stackpole/Life Pictures/Shutterstock

Joan Crawford with her Best Actress Oscar for Mildred Pierce, 1946.

Martha Holmes/Life Pictures/Shutterstock

See the LIFE Version of the Swimsuit Issue

August 5, 2021January 19, 2014 by

Every February, in the very depths of winter, Sports Illustrated unveils its storied swimsuit issue. And when that issue comes out, the media print, online, TV, radio, semaphore, you name it, takes notice. There are, one can state with a certain degree of confidence, several reasons for the attention that the swimsuit issue garners:

First: It seems the women are quite attractive.

Second: The bathing suits, while barely there, evidently appeal to a number of people perhaps even to women.

Third: The swimsuit issue has a surprisingly long history especially in the magazine world where, with a few notable exceptions, franchises come and go with dismaying rapidity.

Finally: There are the women. Wait . . . perhaps we mentioned that already?

Here, in tribute to SI’s swimsuit issue, and in recognition that in its own way LIFE magazine also took pains to chronicle youthful frolics in sand and surf, LIFE.com presents a series of photos made by Co Rentmeester in California in 1970.

There’s a certain innocence about these pictures that signals, right away, that they were made long, long ago. Sure, it’s California in the post-Manson, post-Altamont years, when the California Dream was souring and the airy promises of the Sixties were fading. But even the onslaught of hard drugs and pseudo-revolutionary nihilism that subsumed much of the counterculture in the early “70s could not entirely wipe away what had always drawn people to the Golden State. Namely, an uncomplicated joy in the pleasures of sunshine, sensuality and the illusion of eternal youth.

And if the California Dream really is just that: a dream? Well, honestly who cares?