Page 114 – LIFE

Teenage Wasteland: Portraits of Japanese Youth in Revolt, 1964

January 17, 2020October 19, 2013 by

The teenage years can be hard anywhere. That said, in very few societies is the idea of youth as fraught as it is in Japan, with its culture of conformity.

In 1964, LIFE photographer Michael Rougier and correspondent Robert Morse spent time documenting one Japanese generation’s age of revolt, and came away with an astonishingly intimate, frequently unsettling portrait of teenagers hurtling willfully toward oblivion.

In Rougier’s photos—pictures that seem to breathe both reckless energy and acute despair—we don’t merely glimpse kids pushing the boundaries of rebellion. Instead, this generation of lost boys and girls seem to be trying to tell us something something reproachful and perplexing about the world we’ve made.

The teens and other young adults portrayed in Rougier’s pictures, Morse noted in a 1964 LIFE special issue on Japan (where some of these images first appeared), are “part of a phenomenon long familiar in countries of the Western world: a rebellious younger generation, a bitter and poignant minority breaking from [its] country’s past.”

All through that past, a sense of connection with the old traditions and authority has kept Japanese children obedient and very close to the family. This sense still controls most of Japan’s youth, who besiege offices and factories for jobs and the universities for education and gives the whole country an electric vitality and urgency. But as its members run away from the family and authority, this generation in rebellion grows.

In notes that accompanied Rougier’s film when it was sent to LIFE’s, Morse delved even deeper into the lives, as he perceived them, of runaways, “pill-takers” and other profoundly disengaged Tokyo teens:

Nowhere in the world does youth seem to dominate a nation as they do in Japan. They are overwhelming and everywhere, surging, searching, experimenting, ambitious at some times, helpless and without hope at others. Isolated on a tight little island, they have not, except on the surface, become international like their counterparts in freewheeling Europe.

Seeing the well-scrubbed faces of the black uniformed male students and middy-bloused girls swarming through Tokyo, physical-fitness minded young men galloping through the Ginza, and the bright young things clamoring after a teen-age idol, it would seem to the casual observer that here is a country with a youth as wholesome and happy as a hot fudge sundae.

This is not true at all.

A large segment of Japanese young people are, deep down, desperately unhappy and lost. And they talk freely about their frustrations. Many have lost respect for their elders, always a keystone of Japanese life, and in some cases denounce the older people for “for having gotten us into a senseless war.”

Having sliced the ties that bind them to the home, in desperation they form their own miniature societies with rules of their own. The young people in these groups are are bound to one another not out of mutual affection in many cases the “lost ones” are incapable of affection but from the need to belong, to be part of something.

Both the article in LIFE and the story told in Morse’s ruminative and, in some ways, far more devastating notes make clear that this “lost generation” was not even remotely monolithic. While they might, to varying degrees, have shared a genuinely nihilistic outlook toward their own and their country’s future, the runaways, rock and roll fanatics (the “monkey-dance, Beatles set,” Morse calls them), pill-poppers, “motorcycle kids” and innumerable other subsets of Japan’s youth-driven subculture attest to the breadth and depth of teen disaffection to be found in 1964 Tokyo.

That Michael Rougier, meanwhile, was able to so compassionately portray not only that disaffection, but also captured moments of genuine fellowship and even a fleeting sort of joy among these desperately searching teens, attests to the man’s talent and his dedication to share the story of what he saw.

—Liz Ronk edited this photo gallery for LIFE.com.

Kako, languid from sleeping pills, was in a world of her own in a jazz shop in Tokyo.

Michael Rougier/Life Pictures/Shutterstock

Yoko, 17 years old, Tokyo, 1964.

Michael Rougier/Life Pictures/Shutterstock

Japanese youth, Tokyo, 1964.

Michael Rougier/Life Pictures/Shutterstock

The teen in the center was the 17-year-old leader of a crew of jazz fans. He was known only by his nickname, “Naron,” a popular sleeping pill brand.

Michael Rougier/Life Pictures/Shutterstock

Japanese youth, Tokyo, 1964.

Michael Rougier/Life Pictures/Shutterstock

Yoko, 17 years old, Tokyo, 1964.

Michael Rougier/Life Pictures/Shutterstock

Japanese youth, Tokyo, 1964.

Michael Rougier/Life Pictures/Shutterstock

Yoko, 17 years old, Tokyo, 1964.

Michael Rougier/Life Pictures/Shutterstock

These motorcycle kids were one of numerous subsets of teen subcultures in Tokyo, 1964.

Michael Rougier/Life Pictures/Shutterstock

Listening to jazz, Tokyo, 1964.

Michael Rougier/Life Pictures/Shutterstock

Japanese youth, Tokyo, 1964.

Michael Rougier/Life Pictures/Shutterstock

Lost in the music, Tokyo, 1964.

Michael Rougier—Time & Life Pictures/Shutterstock

These fans rocked to the Tokyo Beatles.

Michael Rougier/Life Pictures/Shutterstock

Fans danced to the Tokyo Beatles, 1964.

Michael Rougier/Life Pictures/Shutterstock

Rocking out with the Tokyo Beatles, 1964.

Michael Rougier/Life Pictures/Shutterstock

A fan (right) and a “Tokyo Beatle,” 1964.

Michael Rougier/Life Pictures/Shutterstock

Fans screamed for the Tokyo Beatles, 1964.

Michael Rougier/Life Pictures/Shutterstock

The Tokyo Beatles backstage, 1964.

Michael Rougier/Life Pictures/Shutterstock

Japanese youth, Tokyo, 1964.

Michael Rougier/Life Pictures/Shutterstock

Japanese youth, Tokyo, 1964.

MMichael Rougier/Life Pictures/Shutterstock

Yoko often ended her long nights sprawled on a futon in a friend’s room.

Michael Rougier/Life Pictures/Shutterstock

“Naron” (at left, stretching) and friends at dawn after an all-night party at the beach.

Michael Rougier/Life Pictures/Shutterstock

Japanese youth, Tokyo, 1964.

Naron” (at left, stretching) and friends at dawn after an all-night party at the beach.

Japanese youth, Tokyo, 1964.

Michael Rougier/Life Pictures/Shutterstock

“Naron” and an unidentified girl at dawn after an all-night beach party, Tokyo, 1964.

Michael Rougier/Life Pictures/Shutterstock

Sometimes Yoko went down to the port in Yokohama to watch the ships sail off to the places she only wished she cold go.

Michael Rougier/Life Pictures/Shutterstock

Japanese youth, Tokyo, 1964.

JFK on the Campaign Trail, 1960: A President in the Making

January 3, 2020October 14, 2013 by

In stark, revealing contrast to the glamorous, effortless Kennedy of popular myth, John F. Kennedy on the stump was a tough, savvy campaigner. Well aware that much of the country distrusted almost everything about him—his Massachusetts-liberal politics, his Boston accent, his Roman Catholicism—he set about winning over skeptics by employing the very gifts that generated such suspicion in those who knew little about him. He charmed. He cajoled. At times (in back-room negotiations with other pols) he browbeat and he bullied.

Buy the LIFE book, The Day Kennedy Died.

And on November 8, 1960, John Kennedy was elected president of the United States, defeating Richard Nixon in one of the closest national elections of the 20th century. At 43, Kennedy was (and remains) the youngest person elected to the office, and it was largely this quality in the man and his family—an engaging, youthful dynamism—that captured the imagination of millions across the country and, ultimately, the world.

As Kennedy and his team ran a heady, propulsive campaign unlike any America had seen, LIFE’s best photographers (Paul Schutzer, Alfred Eisenstaedt, George Silk and others) were there, chronicling the grind of never-ending public appearances and the quieter moments JFK spent with advisers, with Jackie and rarest of all alone, with his own thoughts.

Here, LIFE.com presents photographs—none of which ran in LIFE magazine—chronicling an enigmatic, intensely ambitious man making history.

John F. Kennedy discussed strategy during his presidential campaign, 1960.

Paul Schutzer/Life Pictures/Shutterstock

Scene from John F. Kennedy’s 1960 presidential campaign.

Hank Walker/Life Pictures/Shutterstock

John F. Kennedy, West Virginia, 1960

Hank Walker/Life Pictures/Shutterstock

JFK fans, 1960

Paul Schutzer/Life Pictures/Shutterstock

John F. Kennedy and Jackie Kennedy, 1960.

Paul Schutzer/Life Pictures/Shutterstock

John F. Kennedy spoke in West Virginia during his 1960 presidential campaign.

Hank Walker/Life Pictures/Shutterstock

John F. Kennedy’s 1960 presidential campaign.

Paul Schutzer/Life Pictures/Shutterstock

A JFK and LBJ supporter in Mount Clemens, Michigan, October 1960.

Paul Schutzer/Life Pictures/Shutterstock

John F. Kennedy and unidentified boy, 1960.

Paul Schutzer/Life Pictures/Shutterstock

John F. Kennedy spoke in Grand Prairie, Texas, September, 1960

Paul Schutzer/Life Pictures/Shutterstock

John F. Kennedy campaign, 1960.

Walter Sanders/Life Pictures/Shutterstock

John F. Kennedy campaign, 1960.

Paul Schutzer/Life Pictures/Shutterstock

John F. Kennedy campaign, 1960

Paul Schutzer/Life Pictures/Shutterstock

Richard Nixon, telephone booth, 1960

Paul Schutzer/Life Pictures/Shutterstock

John F. Kennedy, 1960

Paul Schutzer/Life Pictures/Shutterstock

John F. Kennedy campaign, Texas, 1960.

Paul Schutzer/Life Pictures/Shutterstock

John F. Kennedy braved an autumn chill while campaigning in an open car at night in Illinois, 1960.

Paul Schutzer/Life Pictures/Shutterstock

Jackie Kennedy, 1960.

Alfred Eisenstaedt/Life Pictures/Shutterstock

John and Jackie Kennedy, Massachusetts, 1960.

Paul Schutzer/Life Pictures/Shutterstock

John F. Kennedy during his campaign for president, 1960.

Paul Schutzer/Life Pictures/Shutterstock

On a drive through Illinois, Paul Schutzer turned his camera on his colleagues in the press, 1960.

Paul Schutzer/Life Pictures/Shutterstock

John F. Kennedy on the stump, October, 1960.

Paul Schutzer/Life Pictures/Shutterstock

John F. Kennedy gazes out on New York Harbor from a ferry, October 1960.

Paul Schutzer Time & Life Pictures/Shutterstock

John F. Kennedy, 1960

Stan Wayman/Life Pictures/Shutterstock

John F. Kennedy campaign, 1960

Paul Schutzer/Life Pictures/Shutterstock

John F. Kennedy, 1960 campaign

Walter Sanders/Life Pictures/Shutterstock

The day after an election in which he bested Nixon, president-elect Kennedy gave a brief victory speech at the Hyannis Armory, Nov. 1960.

George Silk/Life Pictures/Shutterstock

Behind the Picture: The Liberation of Buchenwald, April 1945

September 28, 2022October 10, 2013 by

[Note: This gallery contains graphic images.]

Some photographs are so much of their time that, as years pass, they acquire an air of genuine authority about an event, a person, a place and even, perhaps, an air of inevitability. This is what it was like, these pictures seem to say. This is what happened. This is the moment. This is what we remember.

Of the many indispensable photos made during the Second World War, Margaret Bourke-White’s portrait of survivors at Buchenwald in April 1945 “staring out at their Allied rescuers,” as LIFE magazine put it, “like so many living corpses” remains among the most haunting. The faces of the men, young and old, staring from behind the wire, “barely able to believe that they would be delivered from a Nazi camp where the only deliverance had been death,” attest with an awful eloquence to the depths of human depravity and, perhaps even more powerfully, to the measureless lineaments of human endurance.

What few people recall about Bourke-White’s survivors-at-the-wire image, however, is that it did not even appear in LIFE until 15 years after it was made, when it was published alongside other photographic touchstones in the magazine’s Dec. 26, 1960, special double-issue, “25 Years of LIFE.”

Pictures from Buchenwald, Bergen-Belsen and other camps that LIFE did publish made when Bourke-White and her colleagues accompanied Gen. George Patton’s Third Army on its storied march through a collapsing Germany in the spring of 1945 were among the very first to document for a largely disbelieving public, in America and around the world, the wholly murderous nature of the camps. (At the end of this gallery, see how the original story on the liberation of the camps appeared in the May 7, 1945, issue of LIFE, when the magazine published a series of brutal photographs by Bourke-White, William Vandivert and other LIFE staffers.)

Here, so many decades after the liberation of Buchenwald, LIFE.com presents a series of Bourke-White photographs most of which never ran in LIFE magazine from that notorious camp located a mere five miles outside the ancient, picturesque town of Weimar, Germany.

Her justifiably iconic picture of men at the Buchenwald fence suggests the horrors made manifest by the Nazi push for a “final solution”: the other Bourke-White photographs here, on the other hand, do not suggest, or hint at, the Third Reich’s horrors. Instead, they force the Holocaust’s nightmares into the unblinking light.

In Dear Fatherland, Rest Quietly her devastating 1946 memoir, subtitled “A Report on the Collapse of Hitler’s ‘Thousand Years'” Bourke-White recalls the ghastly landscape that confronted the Allied troops who liberated Buchenwald, and her own tortured response to what she, the Allied troops and her fellow journalists witnessed and recorded there:

There was an air of unreality about that April day in Weimar, a feeling to which I found myself stubbornly clinging. I kept telling myself that I would believe the indescribably horrible sight in the courtyard before me only when I had a chance to look at my own photographs. Using the camera was almost a relief; it interposed a slight barrier between myself and the white horror in front of me.

This whiteness had the fragile translucence of snow, and I wished that under the bright April sun which shone from a clean blue sky it would all simply melt away. I longed for it to disappear, because while it was there I was reminded that men actually had done this thing men with arms and legs and eyes and hearts not so very unlike our own. And it made me ashamed to be a member of the human race.

The several hundred other spectators who filed through the Buchenwald courtyard on that sunny April afternoon were equally unwilling to admit association with the human beings who had perpetrated these horrors. But their reluctance had a certain tinge of self-interest; for these were the citizens of Weimar, eager to plead their ignorance of the outrages.

In one of the signal moments of his long career and, indeed, of the entire war, an enraged General Patton refused to recognize that the Weimar citizens’ ignorance might be genuine or, if it was genuine, that it was somehow, in any moral sense, pardonable. He ordered the townspeople to bear witness to what their countrymen had done, and what they themselves had allowed to be done, in their name.

Margaret Bourke-White’s pictures of these terribly ordinary men and women appalled, frightened, ashamed amid the endless evidence of the terrors their compatriots had unleashed remain among the most unsettling she, or any photographer, ever made. Long before the political theorist Hannah Arendt introduced her notion of the “banality of evil” to the world in her 1963 book, Eichmann in Jerusalem, Margaret Bourke-White had already captured its face, for all time, in her photographs of “good Germans” forced to confront their own complicity in a barbarous age.

—story by Ben Cosgrove

Behind the Picture: The Liberation of Buchenwald, April 1945

Margaret Bourke-White/Life Picture Collection/Shutterstock

Behind the Picture: The Liberation of Buchenwald, April 1945

LIFE Magazine

LIFE With Picasso: Genius at Work and at Play, 1948-1967

June 7, 2023October 9, 2013 by

There’s a reason or rather, there are innumerable reasons, in the form of paintings, sculptures, drawings, murals, pottery pieces and more why Pablo Picasso is the most famous artist of the past 100 years. For well over seven decades, right up until his death in 1973 at the age of 91, he created thousands of works, many of them instantly recognizable masterpieces, in a dizzying array of media and in seemingly countless styles that he himself either pioneered or perfected.

Of course, scores of towering 20th-century artists (Matisse, O’Keeffe, de Kooning, Chagall and on and on) enjoyed prolific, long-lived careers. But Picasso really is the face of 20th century art, the archetypal, self-reinventing creative force whose most renowned works Old Guitarist (1903), the gorgeous harlequin paintings of his Rose Period, Les Demoiselles d’Avignon (1907), Guernica (1937) became defining, totemic emblems of the eras in which they were made.

Here, LIFE.com celebrates the Modernist master’s career with a series of pictures by photographer Gjon Mili made over roughly two decades in the middle part of the last century. Mili, a daring technical innovator himself, first visited Picasso at Vallauris, in the South of France, in 1949. When the photographer showed the artist some pictures he’d made of ice skaters with tiny lights affixed to their skates, leaping in the dark, the Spanish genius was intrigued and lent his own special twist to a series of portraits made with the same general technique. (See slides 10, 11 and 12.)

“Picasso” LIFE magazine reported at the time, “gave Mili 15 minutes to try one experiment. He was so fascinated by the result that he posed for five sessions, projecting 30 drawings of centaurs, bulls, Greek profiles and his signature. Mili took his photographs in a darkened room, using two cameras, one for side view, another for front view. By leaving the shutters open, he caught the light streaks swirling through space.”

Mili would revisit Picasso again through the years, each time encountering yet another side of the man while also documenting the artwork that seemed to pour forth in an unending torrent from Picasso’s tireless imagination.

In 1967, for example, Mili returned to the South of France, where Picasso was living, in Mougins, with his second wife, Jacqueline Roque. Inside the artist’s workshop, he found a few small metal monkeys that Picasso had fashioned, seemingly on a whim (see slide #8). LIFE described Picasso’s technique in creating these wonderful, playful sculptures: “He made paper cut-outs, then had the patterns transferred to sheet metal which he folded into animals with lively personalities, turning his paper-thin material into surprisingly substantial works of art.”

Meeting Picasso could be an overwhelming experience, as LIFE’s managing editor George P. Hunt wrote in a 1968 special issue of the magazine devoted entirely to the artist:

To see Picasso for the first time is to see, under that bald brow and pate, two extraordinary deep-brown eyes. They are strangely big for the face. And they change as you watch him talk and listen, so noticeably changing with the reflections of what passes through his mind, perhaps racing back into experience to enrich the present. They brood. They make mischief, they are friendly, offended, hostile, arrogant, bored, then suddenly interested. Mostly, during our visit, they laughed.

Like so many other artists, however, Picasso was hardly a saint. His long-time muse, Françoise Gilot (pictured in this gallery in slides 14 and 16), left Picasso in 1953, and in 1964 she wrote a tell-all memoir of their time together. With its less-than-flattering tales of his incessant affairs and titanic insecurities, her book so angered Picasso that he spitefully refused to see their children, Claude and Paloma, ever again. (By 1970, Gilot had married another world-famous genius: American virologist Jonas Salk, developer of the polio vaccine.)

While hardly providing an exhaustive portrait of one of the West’s seminal creative figures, the pictures in this gallery nevertheless offer an inkling of Picasso’s protean genius, and an intimate look at some of the places where that genius bore such singularly influential, and beautiful, fruit.

Pablo Picasso, Vallauris, France, 1949.

Gjon Mili/Life Picture Colleciton/Shutterstock

Interior of Picasso’s workshop at Notre-Dame-de-Vie, Mougins, France, 1967.

Gjon Mili/Life Picture Collection/Shutterstock

Picasso’s workbench with notes, Mougins, France, 1967.

Gjon Mili/Life Picture Collection/Shutterstock

Pablo Picasso in a room displaying his pottery work, Vallauris, France, 1949.

Gjon Mili/Life Picture Collection/Shutterstock

‘Woman With Baby Carriage,’ Picasso’s workshop at Notre-Dame-de-Vie, Mougins, France, 1967.

Gjon Mili/Life Picture Collection/Shutterstock

Picasso’s workshop at Notre-Dame-de-Vie, Mougins, France, 1967.

Gjon Mili/Life Picture Collection/Shutterstock

Pablo Picasso, Vallauris, France, 1949.

Gjon Mili/Life Picture Collection/Shutterstock

Pablo Picasso draws with light, 1949.

Gjon Mili/Life Picture Collection/Shutterstock

Bronze replicas of Picasso’s elongated wood statuettes sit on a table in his Mougins workshop; out the window, a sculpture of a dog (1967).

Gjon Mili/Life Picture Collection/Shutterstock

Françoise Gilot, Picasso’s mistress, with their young son, Claude. She holds drawings of the boy by Picasso. Vallauris, France, 1949.

Gjon Mili/Life Picture Collection/Shutterstock

Pablo Picasso, Notre-Dame-de-Vie, Mougins, France, 1967.

Gjon Mili/Life Picture Collection/Shutterstock

Picasso’s one-time muse, the artist Françoise Gilot, poses with a red gladiola, France, 1949.

Gjon Mili/Life Picture Collection/Shutterstock

Inside Picasso’s home in Mougins, flowers and paintings surround two portraits taken by LIFE photographer David Douglas Duncan—one of the artist (left) and one of his wife, Jacqueline Roque (1927 – 1986), and their dog.

Gjon Mili/Life Picture Collection/Shutterstock

Pablo Picasso, Côte d’Azur, 1949.

Gjon Mili/Life Picture Collection/Shutterstock

Pablo Picasso’s authorization for Gjon Mili to photograph his artworks, 1967.

Gjon Mili/Life Picture Collection/Shutterstock

Pablo Picasso in minotaur mask, Côte d’Azur, 1949.

Gjon Mili/Life Picture Collection/Shutterstock

Double-exposure portrait of Pablo Picasso in his studio, Vallauris, France, 1949.

Gjon Mili/Life Picture Collection/Shutterstock

Rail Romance: Riding the Orient Express

March 13, 2023October 7, 2013 by

That the train known for decades as the Orient Express still operates today often comes as a surprise to people who might have assumed that, like old-school luxury cruises and leisurely dirigible flights across the Atlantic, this vestige of a vastly different time must have vanished years ago. But the Venice Simplon-Orient-Express, as it is officially known, continues to run along many of the same routes that made it so famous so many decades ago, visiting places as far-flung as London, Paris, Venice, Rome, Budapest, Dresden, Prague, Innsbruck and (of course) Istanbul.

Here, LIFE recalls the Orient Express of the last century through photographs made by Jack Birns in 1950—wonderfully evocative, atmospheric pictures from a time when phrases like “the Iron Curtain” and “communist Bulgaria” were not only encountered in history books, but in newspaper headlines and in daily conversation.

A September 1950 issue of LIFE, in which some of the photos in this gallery first appeared, described the Orient Express of the middle part of the last century thus:

To mystery lovers there is no more romantic train in the world than the Orient Express, which runs between Paris and Eastern Europe. The white-haired lady spy of Alfred Hitchcock’s The Lady Vanishes rode the Orient Express, and the crime of Agatha Christie’s Murder in the Calais Coach took place on it. Legend has built the train into a vehicle for skullduggery. But there is, in fact, good basis for its reputation. Only last February, on the Orient Express near Salzburg, Austria, Eugene Karpe, the U.S. naval attaché friend of [prominent American businessman later jailed for espionage in Hungary] Robert Vogeler, fell or was pushed to his death under mysterious circumstances.

The Istanbul train is called the Simplon-Orient because it uses the Simplon Tunnel to pass through the Alps. Americans cannot go all the way as they cannot get visas for Communist Bulgaria, and luxury accommodations are now more limited than in the 1930s. But . . . the trip is still a fascinating ride through a secretive world of diplomats and refugees. It also provides a look at fringes of the Iron Curtain which can be had no other way.

The Simplon-Orient Express alongside Lake Geneva, near historic Chillon Castle.

Jack Birns/Life Pictures/Shutterstock

Aboard the Simplon-Orient Express, 1950.

Jack Birns/Life Pictures/Shutterstock

Simplon-Orient Express, 1950.

Jack Birns/Life Pictures/Shutterstock

Train station along the route of the Simplon-Orient Express, 1950.

Jack Birns/Life Pictures/Shutterstock

In Milan, a man handed a diplomatic packet through window.

Jack Birns/Life Pictures/Shutterstock

Aboard the Simplon-Orient Express, 1950.

Jack Birns/Life Pictures/Shutterstock

A train station along the route of the Simplon-Orient Express, 1950.

Jack Birns/Life Pictures/Shutterstock

A Yugoslav inspector made a passport check as the train neared the Bulgarian border.

Jack Birns/Life Pictures/Shutterstock

Aboard the Simplon-Orient Express, 1950.

Jack Birns/Life Pictures/Shutterstock

A train station along the route of the Simplon-Orient Express, 1950.

Jack Birns/Life Pictures/Shutterstock

A rail employee at a station along the route of the Simplon-Orient Express, 1950.

Jack Birns/Life Pictures/Shutterstock

Simplon-Orient Express, 1950.

Jack Birns/Life Pictures/Shutterstock

At Sukovo, in east Yugoslavia, a young Serb held a dog at the station.

Jack Birns/Life Pictures/Shutterstock

Greek soldiers boarded boxcars at Svilengrad to guard the train against Communist marauders who would sneak across the border from Bulgaria to join Red guerillas in Greece.

Jack Birns/Life Pictures/Shutterstock

Simplon-Orient Express, 1950.

Jack Birns/Life Pictures/Shutterstock

A train station along the route of the Simplon-Orient Express, 1950.

Jack Birns/Life Pictures/Shutterstock

Aboard the Simplon-Orient Express, 1950.

Jack Birns/Life Pictures/Shutterstock

A train station along the route of the Simplon-Orient Express, 1950.

Jack Birns/Life Pictures/Shutterstock

Aboard the Simplon-Orient Express, 1950.

Jack Birns/Life Pictures/Shutterstock

Poster for the Simplon-Orient Express, 1950.

Jack Birns/Life Pictures/Shutterstock

‘Two Lives Lost to Heroin’: A Harrowing, Early Portrait of Addicts

January 17, 2020October 3, 2013 by

‘We are animals in a world no one knows’

In February 1965, LIFE magazine published an extraordinary photo essay on two New York City heroin addicts, John and Karen. Photographed by Bill Eppridge, the pictures and the accompanying article, reported and written by LIFE associate editor James Mills were part of a two-part series on narcotics in the United States. A sensitive, clear-eyed and harrowing chronicle of, as LIFE phrased it, “two lives lost to heroin,” Eppridge’s pictures shocked the magazine’s readers and brought the sordid, grim reality of addiction into countless American living rooms.

To this day, Eppridge’s photo essay remains among the most admired and, for some, among the most controversial that LIFE ever published. His pictures and Mills’ reporting, meanwhile, formed the basis for the 1971 movie, Panic in Needle Park, which starred Al Pacino and Kitty Winn as addicts whose lives spin inexorably out of control.

Here, LIFE.com presents Eppridge’s “Needle Park” photo essay in its entirety, as it appeared in LIFE a portrait of two young people who have become, as they themselves put it, “animals in a world no one knows.”

[See more of Bill Eppridge’s work.]

Karen and John were the main subjects of a LIFE story on heroin addiction. Here Karen had her arms around John and his brother, Bro— also an addict—as they lay on a hotel bed.

Bill Eppridge The LIFE Picture Collection/Shutterstock