Page 116 – LIFE

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

Needle Park, LIFE magazine, Feb. 26, 1965

James Dean in the Rain: The Iconic Photo of Hollywood’s Most Enigmatic Star

August 11, 2021September 29, 2013 by

While he was never Hollywood’s most iconic figure Marilyn Monroe, Humphrey Bogart, James Cagney, Bette Davis and a half-dozen other actors and actresses can stake a more legitimate claim to that title no legend of the silver screen, male or female, was ever as engagingly enigmatic as James Dean. When he died on September 30, 1955, at just 24 years old, Dean had starred in only three films (two of which hadn’t even been released yet). But in those three movies East of Eden, Rebel Without a Cause and Giant he crafted a legacy as a sensitive, tortured outsider that has influenced generations of actors, musicians and artists around the globe.

Here, LIFE.com revisits a photograph that captures the essence of Dean’s enduring appeal. The picture, shot by Dennis Stock in early 1955, shows Dean walking alone in an eerily empty Times Square. It’s a lousy day. Wearing a long, wool coat, hunched against the chill, a cigarette loosely clamped in his lips, the actor is seen in mid-stride, stalking through the bleak Manhattan rain. At first glance, it might be a portrait of isolation, or even downright despair.

And yet . . . something in Dean’s expression lends a kind of quiet, mischievous elation to the scene. That he was not yet a star, much less a legend, when the photo was made is beside the point. In this picture, at this moment in his life, the Indiana native is a young, talented, blithely rebellious spirit in the big city, pursuing a dream.

He’s alive. He has his whole life ahead of him. Nothing can stop him.

James Dean, NYC, 1955

Dennis Stock Magnum

LIFE in WWII: Rare and Classic Photos From North Africa, 1943

January 17, 2020September 28, 2013 by

Some World War II battlefields have been immortalized in histories, memoirs, novels and films that the names alone can conjure stark and stirring images for even the most casual history buff.

But how many of us recognize names like Sidi Bou Zid? El Guettar? Seden? Wadi Akarit? To a lesser or greater degree, these and other battles with now long-forgotten names also helped to determine the course and the outcome of the Second World War. That they were fought not in Europe or in the Pacific, but instead in the deserts and towns of North Africa, might come as something of a shock to people who never knew in the first place that Allied and Axis troops fought and fought for years in Libya, Tunisia, Algeria and other countries along the northern rim of the African continent.

Here, LIFE.com presents a series of photos—many of which never ran in LIFE magazine—made in Tunisia by photographer Eliot Elisofon in 1943, as the campaign was nearing its end. The number of dead, wounded and missing in North Africa didn’t come close to the millions lost in Europe and the Pacific during the war but neither side got off easy. Close to 100,000 troops were killed, the grim total split almost evenly between the Allies (British, American and Free French, for the most part) and Axis powers (Italian, German and Vichy French). Among the Allies, the British were the hardest hit, with more than 200,000 men killed, wounded, captured or missing.

In May 1943, LIFE noted to its readers:

The Allies’ final push caught the Germans completely off base. Thousands of German officers and soldiers were obliviously promenading the streets of Tunis when four British armored cars rolled into the city on May 7. When LIFE’s correspondent Will Lang entered Tunis’ Majestic Hotel to register for a room, German officers were still drinking at the bar.

Allied pressure never relaxed. Audacious columns streamed to the coast from all directions, cutting the enemy into hundreds of hopeless, helpless units. The disintegration was complete. German motorized elements simply decorated their vehicles with white flags and drove into the Allied lines. Gasped one British general: “These last three days have been fantastic, unbelievable. The Germans may have witnessed scenes of wholesale surrender like this, but we never have.”

After North Africa, Allied eyes in the Western hemisphere were trained on Europe: by July 1943 American, British and Canadian troops had landed in Sicily and had begun the long, brutal push toward Mussolini’s Rome, Nazi-held Paris and ultimately, two years later, Berlin.

A tank-artillery team stood on alert. Expers said this kind of unit—a 105mm. howitzer mounted on a half-track— was well-suited for ground warfare in Tunisia.

Eliot Elisofon/Life Pictures/Shutterstock

Camouflaged American artillery fired on German positions during Allied campaign in North Africa.

Eliot Elisofon/Life Pictures/Shutterstock

American forces in Tunisia, 1943.

Eliot Elisofon/Life Pictures/Shutterstock

Soldiers covered a two and a half ton truck with netting after arriving at an ammo dump near the front.

Eliot Elisofon/Life Pictures/Shutterstock

Douglas A-20 intruders in formation, about to bomb an enemy position in Tunisia during the Allied campaign in North Africa, 1943.

Eliot Elisofon/Life Pictures/Shutterstock

Photographs and clipped contact-sheet images (uncharacteristically glued to paper) from Tunisia, 1943, from the LIFE archives.

Eliot Elisofon/Life Pictures/Shutterstock

Desert scene, World War II, Tunisia, 1943.

Eliot Elisofon/Life Pictures/Shutterstock

Three soldiers took refuge during a bombing attack.

Eliot Elisofon/Life Pictures/Shutterstock

American soldiers charged into a wall of smoke during a raid on German positions at Sened in the North African campaign, Tunisia, 1943.

Eliot Elisofon/Life Pictures/Shutterstock

Bespattered with blood and oil after a strafing attack by nine Messerschmitts on first day of battle, a wounded half-track gunner vainly tried to swallow a sulfa tablet. The attending officer subsequently flushed it down his throat with water.

Eliot Elisofon/Life Pictures/Shutterstock

A wounded German soldier was captured during the Battle of Sened, Tunisia, 1943.

Eliot Elisofon/Life Pictures/Shutterstock

C-rations, Tunisia, 1943.

Eliot Elisofon/Life Pictures/Shutterstock

Photographs and clipped contact-sheet images (uncharacteristically glued to paper) from Tunisia.

Eliot Elisofon/Life Pictures/Shutterstock

George S. Patton, then a lieutenant general, in North Africa during WWII, 1943.

Eliot Elisofon/Life Pictures/Shutterstock

American troops, North Africa, 1943.

Eliot Elisofon/Life Pictures/Shutterstock

American soldiers in North Africa during the Allied Tunisia Campaign, 1943.

Eliot Elisofon/Life Pictures/Shutterstock

Photographs and clipped contact-sheet images (uncharacteristically glued to paper) from Tunisia.

Eliot Elisofon/Life Pictures/Shutterstock

A barbed wire enclosure held Axis prisoners taken during the Allied assault on German positions near Sened, Tunisia, 1943.

Eliot Elisofon/Life Pictures/Shutterstock

Italian prisoners playing cards, Tunisia, 1943.

Eliot Elisofon/Life Pictures/Shutterstock

These Axis prisoners were taken during the Allied assault on German positions near Sened, Tunisia, 1943.

Eliot Elisofon/Life Pictures/Shutterstock

A cactus-camouflaged half-track guarded an armored division command post in North Africa.

Eliot Elisofon/Life Pictures/Shutterstock

An American M3 tank was disabled in Tunisia, 1943.

Eliot Elisofon/Life Pictures/Shutterstock

Airplane wreckage in the desert, Tunisia, 1943.

Eliot Elisofon/Life Pictures/Shutterstock

A shelled building behind an Italian gun position, Tunisia, 1943.

Eliot Elisofon/Life Pictures/Shutterstock

German cemetery, Tunisia, 1943.

Eliot Elisofon/Life Pictures/Shutterstock

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