Gordon Parks was a master of contradictions. His fashion photography captured the beauty and opulence of the 1940s and ’50s elite with carefully orchestrated framing and composition. But Parks was also renowned for his stirring images of poverty and racial discrimination. Parks” ability to transition from the slums of Chicago’s South Side to the sets of French fashion shoots not only demonstrated his wide-ranging talent, but also his knack for convincing even the most private subjects to pose in front of his lens.
Parks’ diverse and expansive catalog of creative works included countless photo collections; popular films such as Shaft and The Super Cops; three memoirs and an autobiographical novel, The Learning Tree; several books of poetry; a ballet (Martin, dedicated to Martin Luther King, Jr.); and musical compositions. It feels like the work of several lifetimes, Metaphorically, Parks, who died in 2006 at age 93, did live multiple lives, climbing his way from a life of poverty to great success.
Parks, born on Nov. 30, 1912, in Fort Scott, Kan., the son of a tenant farmer, was the youngest of 15 brothers and sisters. He attended a segregated elementary school and was told by a teacher that he should let go of his dreams of higher education. When Parks was 14, his mother died and he was sent to Saint Paul, Minn., to live with family. Shortly thereafter, he found himself turned out on the streets, learning to survive on his own.
Parks worked odd jobs. He was a piano player in a Minnesota brothel, as well as a busboy and waiter. In 1938, after seeing images in a discarded magazine, he was inspired to take up photography. He bought a camera at a pawn shop, and within months his pictures were exhibited in Minneapolis. His success as a photographer blossomed from there.
After moving to Chicago, Parks began to produce society and fashion photographs, while also pursuing his passion of documenting the hard lives of impoverished African Americans. “I saw that the camera could be a weapon against poverty, against racism, against all sorts of social wrongs,” Parks told an interviewer in 1999. “I knew at that point I had to have a camera.” His most famous images from this time were from a series documenting Chicago’s black ghetto—a collection that earned him a fellowship with the Farm Security Administration and catapulted his career.
Parks’ talent eventually led him to New York City, where, despite the racial prejudice of the time, he was hired by Vogue’s Alexander Liberman to shoot a collection of evening gowns. He continued to freelance for Vogue for several years, developing a distinctive style that was realistic, romantic and full of movement. In 1948, Parks was hired as the first African-American staff photographer and writer for LIFE, where he produced works on subjects ranging from fashion and sports to poverty and racial discrimination. He remained at the magazine for 23 years, becoming one of the title’s most popular and influential photographers.
French fashion model Simone Bodin posed at a tannery, in a leather suit printed in small neat design, 1956.
Gordon Parks The LIFE Picture Collection/Shutterstock
A model wore a nursemaid’s kerchief by Lilly Dache that had a stiff coronet and strings that went under her hair to tie through a loop at its back.
Gordon Parks The LIFE Picture Collection/Shutterstock
Models showed off ball gowns designed by Jacques Fath.
Gordon Parks The LIFE Picture Collection/Shutterstock
This sheath cocktail dress by Balenciaga was made from hundreds of scalloped bands of silk chiffon sewn on a straight slip, 1950.
Gordon Parks The LIFE Picture Collection/Shutterstock
This dress and hat were by Cuban designer Adolfo; the hat featured multi-colored rosettes made of ribbon, 1958.
Gordon Parks The LIFE Picture Collection/Shutterstock
A model wore a dusting cap of calico on a felt base which wrapped around her head like the scarf, 1952.
Gordon Parks The LIFE Picture Collection/Shutterstock
French fashion models, 1950.
Gordon Parks The LIFE Picture Collection/Shutterstock
Ladies modeled tie-on collars and matching barrel muffs made of natural fox skin, 1952.
Gordon Parks The LIFE Picture Collection/Shutterstock
A California designer created this sheath dress topped by ostrich feathers, 1959.
Gordon Parks The LIFE Picture Collection/Shutterstock
Cuban designer Ferreras created this evening dress with a yellow rose design, 1958.
Gordon Parks The LIFE Picture Collection/Shutterstock
In June 1961, LIFE magazine published a story that, at the time, was astonishing not only for its unflinching coverage of abject poverty, but for the tender and fierce way that photographer Gordon Parks chronicled lives crushed and twisted beneath that poverty’s relentless pressure.
That the story focused on poverty in Latin America and, through Parks’ lens, focused on poverty in one family in one favela, or shantytown, in Rio de Janeiro added a global as well as a deeply human dimension to a story that few American publications of the era could have envisioned, much less pursued.
The story that ran in LIFE, “Freedom’s Fearful Foe: Poverty,” was remarkable for a variety of reasons, not least of them Parks’ intimate portraits of the family of Jose and Nair da Silva and their eight children, ranging in age from 12 years to 17 months old. LIFE showed its readers a frightening, brutal world where the da Silva children and, by implication, countless others like them spent their days “penned in their shack [built of tin cans and broken orange crates] or roaming the foul pathways of the favela where the filth of the inhabitants is tossed out to rot.”
At the center of the story was the eldest da Silva son, 12-year-old Flavio; after his father was hurt and could not work, the burden of caring for the entire family landed on Flavio. His struggle to keep the family afloat, even while he himself was sick and getting sicker is tortuously clear in Park’s photos.
Here, LIFE.com republishes all of Park’s photos from “Freedom’s Fearful Foe,” while also offering a special appreciation of Parks by his friend, Barbara Baker Burrows (see below).
Parks himself was a remarkable, inspiring creative force a man whose protean talents were neatly summed up in the indispensable book, The Great LIFE Photographers:
Something mighty there is inside a man that takes him from being the youngest of 15 children raised in Kansas poverty, something that lets him clear the cruel hurdles implanted by a racist society, something that permits not merely survival but mastery of all that he embraced. A poet, and a pianist, a classical music composer, and one very at home with the blues . . . a journalist, a novelist and a man with enough life that even three autobiographies cannot contain the whole, a painter of oils and water colors, and a photographer of street gangs and Paris boulevards . . . It is not simply that he was the first black man to do all these things, but that any man was able to do all these things and do them well.
“The anguish which poverty inflicts,” LIFE observed in 1961, “is cruel and varied — statistics cannot convey its accumulated torments and degradations. But poverty always has a human face.” Throughout his life, Gordon Parks sought to put a human face on the grand currents of history, as well as on quieter, more intimate, and often more revelatory moments.
The Flavio story, in particular, always held a special resonance for Parks, as Barbara Baker Burrows explained to LIFE.com:
So often, late at night, his piano momentarily silent, Gordon’s already tranquil mood would turn reflective. It was perhaps not unexpected for a man of so many accomplishments who had reminisced in several books about the experiences of his life and the lessons he drew from them. Books and photographs and honors were everywhere, and through the sweet smoke of his pipe, the conversation would turn to Flavio.
He had spotted Flavio da Silva carrying water on his head, climbing the steep hills of one of Rio’s favelas to the shack where, for six days a week, while his mother worked, he cared for his brothers and sisters. Gordon had followed him home and his 1961 essay focused on the 12-year-old Brazilian boy to personalize the story of South America’s deplorable poverty.
In one bed, five of the da Silva’s eight children slept with their parents. In the favela, only one child in four attended any kind of school. And for Flavio, the day’s responsibilities began at dawn despite the bronchial asthma and malnutrition he suffered.
Gordon suspected tuberculosis. “I am not afraid of death,” Flavio told him. “But what will they do after?”
Gordon was careful to ensure that his own presence affected the story as little as possible. He wrestled with the temptation to take food to the struggling family; on occasion, so as not to offend them, he shared the dried beans, rice and stale bread they offered him. Some nights he slept on the floor of the family’s shack.
Although the children lived ten minutes from one of the world’s most famous beaches, they had never set foot on it.
It was one of those stories that truly reached LIFE’s readers, and contributions poured in. A hospital in Denver offered to treat Flavio, and he received two years of treatment from doctors there. In Rio, the family moved into a new house. But, so as not to make just one family rich, the money was used to benefit the whole favela, it bought a drainage system and much more. A decade later the last of it helped to set up a medical clinic.
Flavio survived, and Gordon would look back on their time together as “some of the most tender moments of my life.”
“You provided me with a message to give to the rest of the world,” he told Flavio, “one that I felt was perhaps the most important message I’ve ever delivered, about caring, about love, and about how one who is close to death has the courage to hold on and encourage other people to live.”
In 2000, for the last issue of the monthly LIFE, I was able to assign Gordon to photograph Flavio again, now over fifty and with a family of his own. Gordon had never stopped taking care of him; he felt that he had received as much from Flavio as he had given.
As I wrote at the time of his death: “Gordon had decades of accomplishment, but he was not finished.” The story of Flavio was just one story, albeit one with special meaning, in his life as a photographer, itself one career in a life of many. Often, his subjects had become a lifetime’s obligation, or as he put it: “I wound up being an objective reporter with a subjective heart.”
Barbara Baker Burrows has been associated with LIFE for more than 45 years, assigning and coordinating photography for major events from coverage of the Apollo space program to political conventions and the Olympics. Among the books she has edited are the New York Times best seller, One Nation, America Remembers September 11, 2001, photographic biographies (The American Journey of Barack Obama; Bob Dylan, Forever Young) and Titanic. Bobbi lives in Manhattan with her husband, Russell. They have two children, James and Sarah.
Original caption: “In the shadowy slum world into which she was born in Rio de Janeiro, 3-year old Isabel da Silva cries to herself after vainly seeking comfort from her exhausted father, Jose.”
Gordon Parks
Original caption: “Straining up hill, with Luzia, 6, and Isabel, 3, following, Nair da Silva balances three gallons of water on head.”
Gordon Parks
Original caption: “On filth-strewn paths Mario da Silva, 8, howls after being bitten by neighbor’s dog.”
Gordon Parks
Original caption: “Home for da Silva family is hillside jumble of squatters’ huts beneath Rio’s famous statue of Christ.”
Gordon Parks
Original caption: “The baby, Zacaria, 1, explores the path leading beneath the pilings which support shack.”
Gordon Parks
Original caption: “The family’s day begins at dawn. In the biggest room of the shack,6 by 10 feet, 12-year-old Flavio gets himself up. While the rest of the family sleep — the parents and five children in one bed, the other two in the crib — Flavio puts a tin can of water on the fire and throws in some coffee. Sometimes there is hard bread to put in it. For them all, including the baby, that is breakfast.”
Gordon Parks
Original caption: “In constant struggle to keep the shack in order, Flavio tries to arrange covers of family bed. There are no sheets or pillows.”
Gordon Parks
Original caption: “Pouring water into family’s cooking pot, Flavio starts meal for brothers and sisters. Flavio says, ‘Some day I want to live in a real house, on a real street, with pots and pans and a bed with sheets.'”
Gordon Parks
Original caption: “A boy burdened with a family’s cares.”
Gordon Parks
Original caption: “Dead neighbor of Da Silvas lies with vigil candles awaiting burial. Pillow for her head and linen sheets used for shrouds are amenities few favelados receive in life. When Gordon Parks asked one favelado about his six children, he replied, ‘There were nine. The other three are with God. He was good enough to take them.'”
Gordon Parks
Original caption: “Sick and exhausted from week’s care of the family, Flavio rests on Sunday when his mother is free to look after brothers and sisters. ‘I am not afraid of death,’ he explained earnestly to Parks. ‘But what will they do after?'”
Gordon Parks
Original caption: “At Copacabana Beach where Gordon Parks took them, Mario and Flavio play in sand. The beach is only 10 minutes from their home but neither had ever visited it.”
Gordon Parks
Original caption: “In the favela, Parks carries baby Zacarias up the hill to the shack to be cleaned up.”
Queen Elizabeth II has been on the throne for so long that it can be a bit disconcerting to encounter photographs of her as a bride, or a newlywed. And Elizabeth has always appeared more distant and more removed from the sort of everyday pleasures and pains that define the lives of mere commoners.
But in November 1947, when she wed Prince Philip (born Prince Philip of Greece and Denmark), Elizabeth allowed the world to glimpse, briefly, another side a less severe and less purely ornamental side of her life. In photographs made that day, Elizabeth looks like brides all over the world have looked, from time immemorial: a bit nervous, a bit self-conscious, a bit overwhelmed … and happy.
Here, LIFE.com offers a series of photographs—including some that did not originally run in LIFE—made by magazine staffers like Nat Farbman and Frank Scherschel. In an article that ran in the Dec. 1, 1947, issue of LIFE, meanwhile, the magazine’s editors took pains to remind readers that, two years after the end of the Second World War, England and Europe while on the mend from war’s ravages were still, in some regards, reeling from the aftereffects of the conflict.
What’s also so clearly evident in the language of the piece (below) is the enduring respect the magazine’s editors had for what England had achieved when, for a good part of World War II, the island nation had, in essence, stood alone. The verbiage might be over-the-top but the sentiment is straight from the heart.
In the ninth winter of Britain’s austerity the skies cleared for a brief moment last week. Shining through came a fleeting, nostalgic glimpse of an ancient glory and a little pang of hope for better days to come. The Princess the heir to the British throne was taking a husband, and some of the old pomp and pageantry sang out in the land.
[Almost] all of Europe’s vanishing royalty crowded into Westminster Abbey, wearing finery and jewelery which somehow had survived all disaster. It seemed that all of London turned out to see a drama which, if somewhat anachronistic, was nonetheless inspiring. The people crowded along Whitehall to see the procession…. At the Abbey they cheered the arrival of six kings, seven queens and numerous princes and princesses. Over loudspeakers they heard Princess Elizabeth say her vows. For hours they milled around the Palace hoping to see the newlyweds make an appearance on the balcony. Then, feeling somehow as happy as if it had been their own wedding day, they went home, with the quiet reassurance of goodness, tranquility and survival that the British throne means to Britain’s people.
Princess Elizabeth and Prince Philip on the balcony of Buckingham Palace after their wedding, Nov. 20, 1947.
William Sumits / LIFE Picture Collection
Original caption: “Traditional British reserve is cast aside by these revelers who dance in streets while others stake out claims for vantage points.”
Frank Scherschel / LIFE Picture Collection
Original caption: “Choir boys who came by bus form a line outside Westminster Abbey.”
Frank Scherschel / LIFE Picture Collection
Original caption: “Beefeaters adjust their uniforms.”
Frank Scherschel / LIFE Picture Collection
Original caption: “Immaculate gentlemen-at-arms carry their brightly plumed headgear.”
Frank Scherschel / LIFE Picture Collection
Original caption: “Premiere Jan Christian Smuts represents the Dominion of South Africa.”
Frank Scherschel / LIFE Picture Collection
Original caption: “Queen and King of Denmark arrive.”
Frank Scherschel / LIFE Picture Collection
Original caption: “The Countess Edwina, wife of Earl Mountbatten, is helped from her car.”
Frank Scherschel / LIFE Picture Collection
Original caption: “Servants from the King’s household don gloves before entering the abbey.”
Frank Scherschel / LIFE Picture Collection
Original caption: “An Ethiopian representative pauses before starting into the Abbey.”
Frank Scherschel / LIFE Picture Collection
Crowds try to get a glimpse of the royal wedding, London, Nov. 20, 1947.
Nat Farbman / LIFE Picture Collection
Exterior of Buckingham Palace on the night of royal wedding, Nov. 20, 1947.
Frank Scherschel / LIFE Picture Collection
Princess Elizabeth and Prince Philip leave Westminster Abbey after their wedding, Nov. 20, 1947.
Frank Scherschel / LIFE Picture Collection
The marraige of Elizabeth and Philip. Royals on the balcony of Buckingham Palace: (l. to r.) King George VI, Princess Margaret Rose, unidentified, Princess Elizabeth, Prince Philip, Queen Elizabeth and Queen Mother Mary after the wedding of Elizabeth and Philip, Nov. 20, 1947.
Nina Leen’s life, from early on, was one in which travel played a key role a life that, in retrospect, had something of a purposefully nomadic quality. Born in Russia (the date of her birth is unknown, as she adamantly refused to reveal or even discuss her age), Leen grew up in Europe. She studied painting in Berlin before emigrating to the United States in 1939. With her first camera, a Rolleiflex, she honed her photography skills, teaching herself how to take pictures and developing what would become her signature style by creating at-once intimate and stylized portraits of animals at New York’s Bronx Zoo.
In fact, the first pictures she published in LIFE were a series of photos of ancient, combative tortoises (included in this gallery) that she made at the Bronx Zoo and subsequently, at the urging of friends, submitted to the magazine. LIFE published the pictures in its April 1, 1940 issue, launching Leen’s relationship with the preeminent photography magazine of the age. (Interestingly, while she is often described as “one of the first women staff photographers at LIFE,” Nina Leen was never, in fact, officially on the staff of the magazine. Instead, she was a contract photographer who enjoyed an astonishingly long working affiliation with LIFE, one that lasted from the 1940s until the magazine ceased publishing as a weekly at the end of 1972.)
Leen produced a vast and varied body of work during the three decades she shot for LIFE, including more than 50 covers and countless reports and photo essays from around the world. But perhaps the single assignment that had the most lasting effect on her own life and work was actually one on which her colleague Leonard McCombe was the photographer. In 1949, McCombe was covering a story in Texas when he came across a dead dog and its cowering, flea-ridden and filthy but still very much alive puppy.
McCombe, unable to simply abandon the creature, shipped it off to the LIFE offices in New York, where Leen who was well-known for liking animals far more than she liked most humans adopted it. In very short order the dog, dubbed “Lucky,” became America’s pet. Nina brought Lucky with her everywhere, documenting the dog’s post-rescue adventures in follow-up articles, a book (and book tour) and even a short film.
A great animal lover whose pictures of dogs, cats, bats (she had a special affinity for and obsession with the furry flying mammals) and other creatures could, and eventually would, fill entire books, Nina Leen also had a way with those other wild things: teenagers. Her numerous essays on the fads, etiquette and attitudes of the American teen captured the younger generations of the ’40s and ’50s with a winning mix of bemusement and empathy. She was also one of the most prolific and accomplished fashion photographers LIFE ever had, covering Paris shows in the 1940s, for example, with a cool, discerning eye.
That she was not limited to photographing animals and hormonally addled youngsters, however, is evidenced by two of her most famous group portraits: one, a picture featuring four generations of an Ozark family (selected by Carl Sagan to fly aboard the Voyager space probe as part of a message, of sorts, to any extraterrestrial civilization who might intercept the spacecraft); the other a photo of “The Irascibles” a now-legendary group of artists including de Kooning, Pollock, Rothko and others who protested the Metropolitan Museum’s refusal to include Abstract Expressionist works in a major 1950 retrospective of American painting.
After LIFE folded (for the first time) in 1972, Nina Leen’s career hardly slowed. Throughout the 1970s she produced an average of two books a year, and published 15 in her lifetime, including a groundbreaking work on her beloved bats. Nina Leen died on January 1, 1995, at her home in New York City. A spokesperson for LIFE said that she was in her late 70s or early 80s but no one really knows for sure.
Liz Ronk edited this gallery for LIFE.com. Follow her on Twitter at @LizabethRonk.
Lucky from the movie, “The Lost Dog,” 1955.
Nina Leen/Life Pictures/Shutterstock
Tommy Tucker, a squirrel, was dried after a bath. He seemed to like being rubbed briskly. Although Tommy was neat about his own person, Mrs. Bullis, the woman who dressed him in clothes that she herself designed and made, had never been able to housebreak him, 1944.
Nina Leen/Life Pictures/Shutterstock
This photo, which appeared in a 1940 Letters to the Editor section of LIFE, was captioned, “She is dripping wet—and wiser.”
Nina Leen/Life Pictures/Shutterstock
The ‘monkey terrier’ came from Germany, where it was bred as a rat catcher. Bushy-faced with an underslung chin, the toy-sized dog had a fiery, excitable disposition, 1959.
Nina Leen/Life Pictures/Shutterstock
From the April 1, 1940, issue of LIFE: “Fighting turtles open their bills wide, lunge and dodge for minutes at a time. They do not snap their jaws until they clamp them tight in the final grip on other’s head.”
Nina Leen/Life Pictures/Shutterstock
As agile as frogs, vampire bats in the Cincinnati zoo hopped and leapt about their cage, 1968.
Nina Leen/Life Pictures/Shutterstock
Four generations of the Russells gathered for a portrait, 1948. The grandmother was 90 but still active. The portraits on wall at left were of old Mrs. Russell’s parents, at right those at her late husband.
Nina Leen/Life Pictures/Shutterstock
The group of artists that led the 1951 fight against the exclusion of abstract expressionism from a New York show included, from left, rear: Willem de Kooning, Adolph Gottlieb, Ad Reinhardt, Hedda Sterne; (next row) Richard Pousette-Dart, William Baziotes, Jimmy Ernst (with bow tie), Jackson Pollock (in striped jacket), James Brooks, Clyfford Still (leaning on knee), Robert Motherwell, Bradley Walker Tomlin; (in foreground) Theordoros Stamos (on bench), Barnett Newman (on stool), Mark Rothko (with glasses).”
Nina Leen/Life Pictures/Shutterstock
The famous “O’Neil sisters” (all 10 of them) with their mother, Boston, 1952.
Nina Leen/Life Pictures/Shutterstock
One of a series of pictures from the Dec. 11, 1944, issue of LIFE depicting a teenage girl on the phone.
Nina Leen/Life Pictures/Shutterstock
Teenagers listened to records in 1944.
Nina Leen/Life Pictures/Shutterstock
Teenagers at a party in 1947 in Tulsa, Oklahoma; LIFE reported that these kids “munch doughnuts and sip cokes whenever they are not dancing with serious faces to sentimental music.”
Nina Leen/Life Pictures/Shutterstock
Students dance at a Carlsbad, Calif., high school in 1954.
Nina Leen/Life Pictures/Shutterstock
A teenager sang on a street corner as part of a sub-deb social club initiation in 1945.
Nina Leen/Life Pictures/Shutterstock
Lauren Bacall at Gotham Hotel, New York, 1945.
Nina Leen/Life Pictures/Shutterstock
Tina Myers (later known as Tina Louise, of Gilligan’s Island fame) came out at a New York cotillion in 1953.
Nina Leen/Life Pictures/Shutterstock
French actress Barbara [Laage] wore this two-piece in 1946 with no fear of disaster, except in a rough surf, because it has been tied on with good strong knots.
Nina Leen/Life Pictures/Shutterstock
From a 1948 story about Eileen Ford’s modeling agency, this deodorant ad pose was presented as being beneath the talents of the agency’s models.
Nina Leen/Life Pictures/Shutterstock
From a 1945 story on “good grooming,” the original caption to this picture asserted that a “rosebud mouth is especially bad on round faces.”
Nina Leen/Life Pictures/Shutterstock
The cover shot of the Feb. 25, 1952, issue of LIFE. The coverline of the issue: “News in Gloves.”
Nina Leen/Life Pictures/Shutterstock
From a story in the August 23, 1943, issue of LIFE about “amateur vs. professional ways of achieving a summer coiffure.”
Nina Leen/Life Pictures/Shutterstock
From an April 20, 1942, LIFE story about proper skirt-hem lengths.
Nina Leen/Life Pictures/Shutterstock
In 1949, these two children of circus performers watched Miss Lola practice on a tightrope while an acrobat (on his back) balanced a contraption on his feet..
“If any Charter Subscriber is surprised by what turned out to be the first story in this first issue of LIFE,” the magazine’s editors wrote in the Nov. 23, 1936 issue, “he is not nearly so surprised as [we] were. Photographer Margaret Bourke-White had been dispatched to the Northwest to photograph the multimillion dollar projects of the Columbia River Basin. What the editors expected were construction pictures as only Bourke-White can take them. What the editors got was a human document of American frontier life which, to them at least, was a revelation.”
Thus the men and women behind what would become one of the longest-lived experiments—and one of the greatest success stories of 20th-century American publishing—introduced themselves, and their inaugural effort, to the world.
In her riveting 1963 autobiography, Portrait of Myself, Bourke-White recalls the heady experience working for LIFE on the debut issue, and on countless subsequent assignments for what would become one of the indispensable weeklies of the past 100 years:
A few weeks before the beginning, Harry Luce called me up to his office and assigned me to a wonderful story out in the Northwest. Luce was very active editorially in the early days of the magazine, and there was always that extra spark in the air. Harry’s idea was to photograph the enormous chain of dams in the Columbia River basin that was part of the New Deal program. I was to stop off at New Deal, a settlement near Billings, Montana, where I would photograph the construction of Fort Peck, the world’s largest earth-filled dam. Harry told me to watch out for something on a grand scale that might make a cover.
“Hurry back, Maggie,” he said, and off I went. I had never seen a place quite like the town of New Deal, the construction site of Fort Peck Dam. It was a pinpoint in the long, lonely stretches of northern Montana so primitive and so wild that the whole ramshackle town seemed to carry the flavor of the boisterous Gold Rush days. It was stuffed to the seams with construction men, engineers, welders, quack doctors, barmaids, fancy ladies and, as one of my photographs illustrated, the only idle bedsprings in New Deal were the broken ones. People lived in trailers, huts, coops anything they could find and at night they hung over the Bar X bar.
These were the days of LIFE’s youth, and things were very informal. I woke up each morning ready for any surprise the day might bring. I loved the swift pace of the LIFE assignments, the exhilaration of stepping over the threshold into a new land. Everything could be conquered. Nothing was too difficult. And if you had a stiff deadline to meet, all the better. You said yes to the challenge and shaped up the story accordingly, and found joy and a sense of accomplishment in so doing. The world was full of discoveries waiting to be made. I felt very fortunate that I had an outlet, such an exceptional outlet, perhaps the only one of this kind in the world at that time, through which I could share the things I saw and learned.
Long after Margaret Bourke-White’s remarkable photos from the Depression-era wilds of Montana graced the pages of that first issue of LIFE—one of her characteristically monumental “construction pictures” (as the editors put it) served as the cover image for that issue—LIFE.com presents the Fort Peck Dam feature in its entirety, along with a number of Bourke-White photos that did not appear in the original cover story.
Here is a portrait of a community brought together by circumstance, i.e., by FDR’s New Deal, in a barren place, in an unimaginably hard time, for the express purpose of building one of the chief engineering marvels of the age. (Fort Peck Dam is still, today, the highest of all the major dams along the great Missouri River.) Bourke-White’s photos, meanwhile, capture the vast scale of the audacious project and the far more intimate scope of the human capacity for finding joy or, at the very least, a kind of rough pleasure and fellowship wherever one can, whatever the odds.
So, while LIFE’s “charter subscribers” and its editors might have been surprised “by what turned out to be the first story” in the magazine’s history, in retrospect Bourke-White’s tale seems, with its heroic overtones, its astonishing photography and its focus on the human aspect of a superhuman effort, an apt introduction to LIFE’s mission and its method.
Workers on Montana’s Fort Peck Dam blew off steam at night, 1936.
Margaret Bourke-White / The LIFE Picture Collection
In Wheeler, near Fort Peck, Montana, Frank Breznik (left) was the law. He had previously been a traveling salesman in Atlantic City.
Margaret Bourke-White / The LIFE Picture Collection
Wheeler, Montana, was one of the six frontier towns around Fort Peck.
Margaret Bourke-White / The LIFE Picture Collection
The area’s latest hotspot was a town called New Deal.
Margaret Bourke-White / The LIFE Picture Collection
LIFE’s first issue declared, “The only idle bedsprings in New Deal are the broken ones.”
Margaret Bourke-White / The LIFE Picture Collection
Beneath a “No Beer Sold to Indians” sign, a woman tossed back a drink.
Margaret Bourke-White / The LIFE Picture Collection
Life in the cowless cow towns was not cheap for its day.
Margaret Bourke-White / The LIFE Picture Collection
Lt. Col. T. B. Larkin was the head of the dam project.
Margaret Bourke-White / The LIFE Picture Collection
Bar X, Montana, 1936.
Margaret Bourke-White / The LIFE Picture Collection
The only alcohol that could be sold legally was beer by the glass, but at Ruby’s Place and others like it, liquor was also sold at a back bar.
Margaret Bourke-White / The LIFE Picture Collection
One-fourth of the Missouri River would run through this steel “liner.”
Margaret Bourke-White / The LIFE Picture Collection
Major Clark Kittrell was the No. 2 man on the Fort Peck Dam project.
Margaret Bourke-White / The LIFE Picture Collection
Ed’s Place, Montana, 1936.
Margaret Bourke-White / The LIFE Picture Collection
Ruby, second from the left, was the founder of the town of Wheeler—and its richest woman. She had come to Montana with experience in the Klondike.
Margaret Bourke-White / The LIFE Picture Collection
Drinking at the bar Finis, Montana, 1936.
Margaret Bourke-White / The LIFE Picture Collection
Drinking at the bar Finis, Montana, 1936.
Margaret Bourke-White / The LIFE Picture Collection
Mrs. Nelson washed New Deal, Montana, without the aid of running water.
Margaret Bourke-White / The LIFE Picture Collection
One of the several frontier towns near the site of the Fort Peck Dam, Montana, 1936.
Margaret Bourke-White / The LIFE Picture Collection
Men and women in one of the several frontier towns near the site of the Fort Peck Dam, Montana, 1936.
Margaret Bourke-White / The LIFE Picture Collection
A bar in a town near the Fort Peck Dam, Montana, 1936.
Margaret Bourke-White / The LIFE Picture Collection
A bar in one of the several frontier towns near the site of the Fort Peck Dam, Montana, 1936.
Margaret Bourke-White / The LIFE Picture Collection
A bar in one of the several frontier towns near the site of the Fort Peck Dam, Montana, 1936.
Margaret Bourke-White / The LIFE Picture Collection
Workers in one of the several frontier towns near the site of the Fort Peck Dam, Montana, 1936.
Margaret Bourke-White / The LIFE Picture Collection
Wood was for sale in one of the several frontier towns near the site of the Fort Peck Dam, Montana, 1936.
Margaret Bourke-White / The LIFE Picture Collection
A beauty shop near the site of the Fort Peck Dam, Montana, 1936.
Margaret Bourke-White / The LIFE Picture Collection
One of the several frontier towns near the site of the Fort Peck Dam, Montana, 1936.
Margaret Bourke-White / The LIFE Picture Collection
Men worked on the construction of Fort Peck Dam, Montana, 1936.
Margaret Bourke-White / The LIFE Picture Collection
Construction of Fort Peck Dam, Montana, 1936.
Margaret Bourke-White / The LIFE Picture Collection
Construction of Fort Peck Dam, Montana, 1936.
Margaret Bourke-White / The LIFE Picture Collection
Construction of Fort Peck Dam, Montana, 1936.
Margaret Bourke-White / The LIFE Picture Collection
Construction of Fort Peck Dam, Montana, 1936.
Margaret Bourke-White / The LIFE Picture Collection
Construction of Fort Peck Dam, Montana, 1936.
Margaret Bourke-White / The LIFE Picture Collection
Construction of Fort Peck Dam, Montana, 1936.
Margaret Bourke-White / The LIFE Picture Collection
First LIFE cover November 23, 1936.
Margaret Bourke-White / The LIFE Picture Collection
One of the enduring cultural battles fought in the Unites States and in countless other countries, as well over the years involves the forces of “progress” arrayed against proponents of “tradition.” In this conflict, advocates of progress are generally seen as forward-thinking optimists or greed-driven destroyers of all that is good and noble in the culture, while traditionalists are characterized as either bastions of reason and good taste or hopelessly outdated relics who really ought to get out of the way and let the rest of us move ahead.
However one views the opposing sides, it’s unlikely that many people alive today would come down on the side of “progress” in respect to at least one particular American beauty that fell victim to modernization five long decades ago: New York’s original, magnificent Pennsylvania Station.
The splendid Beaux-Arts style terminus, which took up two city blocks in midtown Manhattan and featured a 15-story ceiling and a waiting room almost as long as a football field, was inspired by some of the greatest architecture of the ancient world. Designed by the celebrated firm of McKim, Mead & White (the folks responsible for countless landmark buildings around the country), Penn Station was conceived and constructed on a scale that felt and looked at-once heroic and deeply, comfortingly human.
But in the late-1950 and early 1960s, places like the pink-granite and marble Penn Station were under assault by an attitude that judged anything more than a few decades old to be utterly suspect, while anything new, modern or contemporary was seen as good, better, best. Here, LIFE.com offers a number photos many of which never ran in LIFE shot by Walker Evans for a 1963 feature decrying the national mania for “progress.”
In the July 5, 1963, issue of the magazine, in an article titled, forthrightly, “America’s Heritage of Great Architecture Is Doomed,” LIFE sounded the alarm to its readers:
Above the scurry and tumult of travelers, clocks tick away the final hours of a grand and historic monument. New York’s Pennsylvania Station is doomed. Its herculean columns, its vast canopies of concrete and steel will soon be blasted into rubble to make way for a monstrous complex sports arena [today’s Madison Square Garden — Ed.], bowling alley, hotel and office building. The disaster that has befallen Penn Station threatens thousands of other prized American buildings. From east to west, the wrecker’s ball and bulldozer are lords of the land. In the ruthless, if often well-intentioned, cause of progress, the nation’s heritage from colonial days onward is being ravaged indiscriminately for highways, parking lots, new structures of modernized mediocrity.
The fact that LIFE’s dire forecast has not entirely come to pass Grand Central Terminal, for example, won reprieve from destruction just a few years after the LIFE article appeared, in large part because of outraged resistance from the likes of Jacqueline Kennedy Onassis just goes to show that, every once in a while, reason and good taste can carry the day.
Graced by goddesses and eagles and crowned by a balustrade, Pennsylvania Station presents a serene and seemingly timeless facade to New York’s Seventh Avenue, 1963.
Walker Evans Time & Life Pictures/Shutterstock
Original caption: “Massive bases of the facade are shadowy retreats for pigeons.” (The granite columns were 70 feet high.)
![Tommy [Tucker, the squirrel] is dried after a bath. He seems to like being rubbed briskly. Although Tommy is neat about his own person, Mrs. Bullis [the woman who dressed him in clothes that she herself designed and made] has never been able to housebreak him.](https://static.life.com/wp-content/uploads/migrated/2014/10/nina-leen-photographer-spotlight-02-1024x813.jpg "Tommy Tucker, a squirrel, was dried after a bath. He seemed to like being rubbed briskly. Although Tommy was neat about his own person, Mrs. Bullis, the woman who dressed him in clothes that she herself designed and made, had never been able to housebreak him, 1944.")
![Caption from the Sept. 2, 1946, issue of LIFE: "[French actress] Barbara [Laage] wears suit with no fear of disaster, except in a rough surf because it has been tied on with good strong knots."](https://static.life.com/wp-content/uploads/migrated/2014/10/nina-leen-photographer-spotlight-17-809x1024.jpg "French actress Barbara [Laage] wore this two-piece in 1946 with no fear of disaster, except in a rough surf, because it has been tied on with good strong knots.")
