Thus did LIFE magazine kick off a lengthy article in its March 18, 1940, issue featuring photographs from a “test census” in Indiana’s St. Joseph and Marshall counties in the summer of 1939 the purpose of which, LIFE wrote, was “to see whether any of the new questions proposed for the 1940 census were too difficult or too objectionable to answer.”
“On April 1,” the March 1940 article explained, “an army of some 120,000 census takers will march forth to ring doorbells and ask questions [how old residents are, how much their house is worth, how far they got in school, how much family members earn at their jobs, etc.] about every home and human in the land. Though the census has been taken every 10 years since 1790, last week it was front-page news. In the Senate, in letters-to-the-editors and letters-to-Congressmen rose a chorus of outraged squawks led by Republican senator Charles W. Tobey of New Hampshire against ‘bureaucratic snooping’ represented by some of the 1940 questions, particularly those about income and mortgages. Indignant clubwomen threatened to overflow the jails, and the New York Legislature petitioned Congress to withdraw the questions. Sniffed President Roosevelt: ‘Politics!'”
“It is a significant comment,” LIFE told its readers, “on the current Republican-led rebellion against census ‘snoopery’ that only about one Indiana citizen in 50 objected at all to answering any of the questions, and these were brought around by a little persuasive explanation.”
A “test census” in South Bend, Indiana, summer 1939, ahead of the full, national census undertaken in spring 1940.
Hansel Mieth Time & Life Pictures/Shutterstock
A “test census” taker talks with a housewife on the porch of her home, South Bend, Indiana, 1939.
Hansel Mieth Time & Life Pictures/Shutterstock
“Test census” taker talks with South Bend, Ind., mayor Jesse I. Pavey and his family, 1939.
Hansel Mieth Time & Life Pictures/Shutterstock
Census taker Seymour Weiss (fourth from left) questions Mrs. George B. Townsend (center), Indiana, 1939.
Hansel Mieth Time & Life Pictures/Shutterstock
Grocery owner Oscar Banfi (center) talks with a “test census” taker, 1939.
Hansel Mieth Time & Life Pictures/Shutterstock
A “test census” in South Bend, Indiana, summer 1939, ahead of the full, national census undertaken in spring 1940.
Hansel Mieth Time & Life Pictures/Shutterstock
“Test census” taker talks with Mrs. Clarence Schultz and her children, Indiana, 1939.
Hansel Mieth Time & Life Pictures/Shutterstock
Test census in Indiana, 1939.
Hansel Mieth Time & Life Pictures/Shutterstock
Test census in Indiana, 1939.
Hansel Mieth Time & Life Pictures/Shutterstock
Test census in Indiana, 1939.
Hansel Mieth Time & Life Pictures/Shutterstock
“Test Census” taker talks with nurses Louise Bergland (left) and Evelyn McGuinness (center) at Epworth Hospital in South Bend, Indiana, 1939.
February 29 is one of those dates, like November 11, or Friday the 13th, or the summer solstice, that seems more freighted with possibilities, both good and bad, than other days of the year. And because the 29th day of the second month only comes around every four years—an attempt by humans to make up for the fact that a year is not, strictly speaking, comprised of 365 days, but 365 and a quarter days (it’s math, look it up)—Leap Day can sometimes feel like a gift. An extra day added to the calendar. A full 24 hours that we didn’t have last year and that we won’t have next year, in which we might do … anything.
Here, then, in celebration of Leap Day, and of the wonderful act of simply leaping about, LIFE.com respectfully offers a gallery of pictures that feel full of possibilities: images that, for the most part, try to approximate what Wordsworth might have been driving at when he wrote, more than 200 years ago, “My heart leaps up when I behold / A rainbow in the sky.”
Or, as House of Pain put it more succinctly, if less poetically in 1992: Jump around!
Happy Leap Day, everybody.
Liz Ronk edited this gallery for LIFE.com. Follow her on Twitter @lizabethronk.
Fred Astaire executes a seemingly effortless leap in the 1946 film, Blue Skies.
Bob Landry Time & Life Pictures/Shutterstock
Presidential candidate John F. Kennedy leaps from his car in 1960.
Paul Schutzer Time & Life Pictures/Shutterstock
Artist Jane Eakin sits on the shoulders of rope-skipping champion Gordon Hathaway in 1947.
Gjon Mili Time & Life Pictures/Shutterstock
Starlet June Preisser jumping in a pool, 1940
Peter Stackpole Time & Life Pictures/Shutterstock
Hugh O’Brian as Wyatt Earp, 1956
Allan Grant Time & Life Pictures/Shutterstock
Crewmen simulating escape from a plane jump, in their flight suits, into a swimming pool during training at McClellan Air Force base in California in 1954.
George Silk Time & Life Pictures/Shutterstock
Acrobat and actor Russ Tamblyn does a flip on the sidewalk while walking with Venetia Stevenson in 1955.
Allan Grant Time & Life Pictures/Shutterstock
Actress Christine Norden and jumping dog in 1948
Nat Farbman Time & Life Pictures/Shutterstock
A horse and rider sail gracefully toward a water tank in Atlantic City in 1953.
Peter Stackpole Time & Life Pictures/Shutterstock
A multiple exposure shot of a gymnast jumping on a trampoline in 1960.
J.R. Eyerman Time & Life Pictures/Shutterstock
Alice Marble, No. 1 American women’s tennis player, leaps over the net in 1939.
Gjon Mili Time & Life Pictures/Shutterstock
Walter Davis leads a dance class, 1952
John Dominis Time & Life Pictures/Shutterstock
Architect and designer Frank Gehry jumps on a desk—part of his line of cardboard furniture—in 1972.
Ralph Morse Time & Life Pictures/Shutterstock
Rudy the Dachshund shows off his bed-jumping form in 1946.
Frank Scherschel Time & Life Pictures/Shutterstock
A man jumps on a trampoline in California in 1960.
Ralph Crane Time & Life Pictures/Shutterstock
An SMU cheerleader takes to the air at a University of Texas football game in 1950.
Loomis Dean Time & Life Pictures/Shutterstock
Leon James and Willa Mae Ricker demonstrate how the Lindy Hop is meant to be danced in 1943
Gjon Mili Time & Life Pictures/Shutterstock
Tamara Toumanova executes a grand jeté for actor, singer, dancer and comedian Danny Kaye in 1945.
In late 1956, over the course of several months, LIFE published what the magazine described as “a series of major articles on the background of the crisis brought about by the school segregation decision [Brown v. Board of Education] of the Supreme Court. . . . Although the ground that is to be covered in the series is not wholly new to Americans, it is unfamiliar as a subject of moderate and unprejudiced consideration.”
The series, titled The Background of Segregation, explored that emotionally and politically charged issue. For one riveting segment of the monumental five-part series, “Voices of the White South,” LIFE dispatched the great photographer Margaret Bourke-White to Greenville, South Carolina, where she documented citizens from varying walks of life who unapologetically supported the legacy and the practice of open, legal segregation.
Here, in striking color photographs that, at times, convey an unsettling intimacy, Bourke-White’s work opens a window on an era that, for better and for worse, helped define 20th-century America. The “Voices of the White South” article, which won praise and awards when published, was extraordinary for, among other things, the utterly non-sensational methodology and tone of its reportage. While much of the national debate over desegregation was dominated in the mid-1950s by often (and often understandable) heated language and actions “Voices” was a measured take on the issue. Far from emphasizing its own pro-integrationist sensibility, LIFE allowed Southerners to discuss their own pro-segregationist views in their own words, at length and created a portrait of the South far more nuanced than the depiction usually found in the liberal “Yankee” press.
The article was not, in the end, an anti-segregationist screed, but instead an honest glimpse into the heart of a culture frightened of what the future might hold.
“Outside the South,” LIFE wrote, “the white Southerner who believes in segregation is sometimes pictured as a latter-day Simon Legree who now does with law what used to be done with a whip. If he no longer runs around wearing a bed sheet and setting fire to crosses, he doubtless belongs to a ‘Citizens Council,’ which Hodding Carter [then a prominent newspaper editor from Mississippi] has described as ‘the uptown Ku Klux Klan.’ There are Southerners who fit this picture, but there are many more who are thoughtful, pious gentlefolk and who are still in favor of segregation.”
LIFE’s Dick Stolley, who would go on to become the magazine’s managing editor and the founding Managing Editor of People, among many other roles, worked on the Background of Segregation series as an Atlanta-based correspondent for the magazine. He told LIFE.com that, considering how despised the magazine was across the South for its solidly pro-integration editorial stance, he was “astonished at the time, and I remain astonished today, that I was able to find five Southern whites who were willing to talk to LIFE about their reasons for so adamantly opposing integration.”
While the “Voices” article was striking not only for its powerful color photographs and the (largely) subdued tenor of its language—especially in light of the politically and emotionally explosive nature of the topic at hand—a few of the observations made in the piece, encountered six decades later, are beyond jarring. Some of them, in fact even when read with an awareness of the era in which they were written are nothing less than shocking to contemporary ears.
LIFE reminded its readers that ex-Governor Herman Talmadge of Georgia was only one of countless prominent Southerners “who feel that segregation must be preserved.” Talmadge, LIFE wrote, believed that “to destroy segregation would be to destroy the South. . . .”
[His] viewpoint is traditional and has, in the eyes of many white Southerners, the honor that attaches to a great past. “God advocates segregation,” Governor Talmadge maintains. “There are five different races and God created them all different. He did not intend them to be mixed or He would not have separated or segregated them. Certainly history shows that nations composed of a mongrel race lose their strength and become weak, lazy and indifferent. They become easy prey to outside nations. And isn’t that just exactly what the Communists want to happen to the United States?” This is a viewpoint that has been expressed by generations of southern political leaders and remains widely accepted in the rural South today.
In the “Voices” article, a 38-year-old white sharecropper in North Carolina summed up his support of segregation and his views on his black neighbors and fellow farmers this way:
“We’re working to own our farm. We want to hurry up and get someplace. But they just don’t work. They just don’t care. All they’re looking for is the end of the week when the landlord will shoot ’em a little money. [T]hey take a bath once a month, and their fields don’t look like they’s hardly tending them.” At the same time, according to LIFE, the sharecropper’s approval of segregation was “based as much, or more, on personal pride than notions of color. He would rather have a Negro living next door than he would a white ‘redneck’ or ‘peckerwood.’ In his view, ‘there’s nothing sorrier than a sorry white man.'”
The white sharecropper’s wife, LIFE wrote, “also approves of segregation and will not let her 9-year-old daughter play with an 8-year-old Negro neighbor. This is the reason she gives: ‘If our landlord came down here and saw her playing with a colored boy, he wouldn’t respect us. Only poor class whites do that. We’re trying to keep our self-respect and keep the highest level socially we can. We’re willing to work with the Negroes, but that’s as far as we’ll go.”
Another quote from the article that shares the sentiment and even the vocabulary of pronouncements that for decades have sent chills through men and women involved in the struggle for justice and equal rights came from Greenville’s white mayor, Kenneth Cass. “There is no race trouble here,” he told LIFE, “and there won’t be, unless an agitator comes in and stirs it up.”
One man quoted at some length in the “Voices” article was Ralph McGill, editor of the Atlanta Constitution newspaper. “‘There are those who insist that segregation protects the ‘integrity’ of both races,” McGill said. “There are others who believe, with deep sincerity, that Negroes are ‘better off’ under it. Conceivably this might be argued with some logic. It does not matter. The world . . . has moved on. Segregation by law no longer fits today’s world…. Segregation is on its way out, and he who tries to tell the people otherwise does them a great disservice. The problem of the future is how to live with the change.'” _________________________________________________________________________
—Liz Ronk edited this gallery for LIFE.com. Follow her on Twitter @lizabethronk.
An African-American maid prepared a white family’s supper in Greenville, South Carolina, 1956.
Margaret Bourke-White The LIFE Picture Collection/Shutterstock
Children played in a segregated neighborhood, Greenville, South Carolina, 1956.
Margaret Bourke-White The LIFE Picture Collection/Shutterstock
Young girls listened attentively in a sewing class, Greenville, South Carolina, 1956.
Margaret Bourke-White The LIFE Picture Collection/Shutterstock
Home inspection in a black neighborhood, Greenville, South Carolina, 1956.
Margaret Bourke-White The LIFE Picture Collection/Shutterstock
Generations passed the time on a porch in Greenville, South Carolina, 1956.
Margaret Bourke-White The LIFE Picture Collection/Shutterstock
Mayor Kenneth Cass conversed with a Greenville resident, 1956.
Margaret Bourke-White The LIFE Picture Collection/Shutterstock
Greenville, South Carolina’s mayor Kenneth Cass (in tie) visited a car wash, 1956.
Margaret Bourke-White The LIFE Picture Collection/Shutterstock
Greenville, South Carolina, 1956.
Margaret Bourke-White The LIFE Picture Collection/Shutterstock
Outside a roadhouse, South Carolina, 1956.
Margaret Bourke-White The LIFE Picture Collection/Shutterstock
Two black men were arrested for disorderly conduct in Greenville, South Carolina, 1956.
Margaret Bourke-White The LIFE Picture Collection/Shutterstock
Three women stood before a magistrate after a disturbance at a juke joint, South Carolina, 1956.
Margaret Bourke-White The LIFE Picture Collection/Shutterstock
A work crew comprised of inmates, Greenville, South Carolina, 1956.
Margaret Bourke-White The LIFE Picture Collection/Shutterstock
Inmates dug a drainage ditch in Greenville. The girl in the foreground lived nearby and came out to watch when she saw the gang start to work.
Margaret Bourke-White The LIFE Picture Collection/Shutterstock
Greenville mayor Kenneth Cass reviewed a map of proposed roads in an upper-income housing development, 1956. The development was privately built by African Americans, and the city fully cooperated with their plans.
Margaret Bourke-White The LIFE Picture Collection/Shutterstock
Segregated playground, Greenville, South Carolina, 1956.
Margaret Bourke-White The LIFE Picture Collection/Shutterstock
Segregated playground, Greenville, South Carolina, 1956.
Margaret Bourke-White The LIFE Picture Collection/Shutterstock
Segregated playground, Greenville, 1956.
Margaret Bourke-White The LIFE Picture Collection/Shutterstock
A night out at a juke joint in Greenville, South Carolina.
Margaret Bourke-White The LIFE Picture Collection/Shutterstock
A night out at a Greenville juke joint.
Margaret Bourke-White The LIFE Picture Collection/Shutterstock
Dancing in Greenville.
Margaret Bourke-White The LIFE Picture Collection/Shutterstock
A night out at a Greenville juke joint.
Margaret Bourke-White The LIFE Picture Collection/Shutterstock
For his groundbreaking 1948 LIFE magazine photo essay, “Country Doctor” — seen here, in its entirety, followed by several unpublished photographs from the shoot — photographer W. Eugene Smith spent 23 days in Kremmling, Colo., chronicling the day-to-day challenges faced by an indefatigable general practitioner named Dr. Ernest Ceriani.
Born on a sheep ranch in Wyoming, Dr. Ceriani attended Chicago’s Loyola School of Medicine but opted not to pursue a medical career in the big city. In 1946, after a stint in the Navy, he was recruited by the hospital in Kremmling, and he and wife Bernetha, who was born in Colorado, settled into the rural town. Dr. Ceriani was the sole physician for an area of about 400 square miles, inhabited by some 2,000 people.
Eugene Smith’s at-times almost unsettlingly intimate pictures illustrate in poignant detail the challenges faced by a modest, tireless rural physician—and gradually reveal the inner workings and the outer trappings of what is clearly a uniquely rewarding life.
“Country Doctor” was an instant classic when published, establishing Smith as a master of the commanding young art form of the photo essay, and solidifying his stature as one of the most passionate and influential photojournalists of the 20th century. In 1979, the W. Eugene Smith Memorial Fund was founded to support those working in the profoundly humanistic style of photography to which Smith dedicated his life and his art.
Dr. Ernest Ceriani made a house call on foot, Kremmling, Colo., 1948. The generalist was the lone physician serving a Rocky Mountain enclave that covered 400 square miles.
W. Eugene Smith/Life Pictures/Shutterstock
Ralph Pickering held his 5-week-old baby while waiting to be Dr. Ceriani’s first patient of the day. Pickering, a horseback guide to tourists coming to see the majestic Rocky Mountains, traveled from an outlying ranch to reach the doctor’s office.
W. Eugene Smith/Life Pictures/Shutterstock
Dr. Ceriani sat at the bedside of a patient as he assessed flu symptoms during a house call. When Smith began “Country Doctor,” he shot for a period of time with no film in his camera, to help Ceriani get used to his presence without wasting precious film.
W. Eugene Smith/Life Pictures/Shutterstock
In the backseat of a car, Dr. Ceriani administered a shot of morphine to a 60-year-old tourist from Chicago, seen here with her grandson, who was suffering from a mild heart disturbance.
W. Eugene Smith/Life Pictures/Shutterstock
Dr. Ceriani examined a feverish 4-year-old girl suffering from tonsillitis. Although most of his patients were children, Ceriani was initially inexperienced in pediatrics when he started his practice, and studied up on it whenever he had the chance.
W. Eugene Smith/Life Pictures/Shutterstock
Though he had no vacations and few days off, Dr. Ceriani did have use of a small hospital, which was equipped with an X-ray machine, an autoclave and an oxygen tent, among other medical necessities. Here, he explained an X-ray — he developed the film himself — to one of his rancher patients.
W. Eugene Smith/Life Pictures/Shutterstock
The doctor taped a patient who broke some ribs after a horse rolled over him. “His income for covering a dozen fields is less than a city doctor makes by specializing in just one,” LIFE’s editors noted, “but Ceriani is compensated by the affection of his patients and neighbors, by the high place he has earned in his community and by the fact that he is his own boss. For him, this is enough.”
W. Eugene Smith/Life Pictures/Shutterstock
Dr. Ceriani used a syringe to irrigate wax from an elderly man’s ear to improve his hearing.
W. Eugene Smith/Life Pictures/Shutterstock
Dr. Ceriani examined the stitches in the lacerated hand of a young patient.
W. Eugene Smith/Life Pictures/Shutterstock
Two friends transported Dr. Ceriani to Gore Canyon so he could enjoy a few hours of recreational fishing, a rare treat for the hard-working physician.
W. Eugene Smith/Life Pictures/Shutterstock
Dr. Ceriani fly-fished on the Colorado River.
W. Eugene Smith/Life Pictures/Shutterstock
Thirty minutes into his fishing excursion, Dr. Ceriani was called to an emergency: A young girl hasd been kicked in the head by a horse and was badly injured.
W. Eugene Smith/Life Pictures/Shutterstock
The child’s worried parents looked on as Dr. Ceriani, surrounded by nurses, examined their two-year-old daughter.
W. Eugene Smith/Life Pictures/Shutterstock
Dr. Ceriani had stitched the girl’s wound to minimize scarring, but he then had to find a way to tell the parents that her eye could not be saved and they needed to take her a specialist in Denver to have it removed.
W. Eugene Smith/Life Pictures/Shutterstock
The doctor helped a rancher carry his son into the hospital. The inebriated young man dislocated his elbow when he was thrown from a bronco at a rodeo.
W. Eugene Smith/Life Pictures/Shutterstock
The injured elbow required a painful reset.
W. Eugene Smith/Life Pictures/Shutterstock
“Don’t tell my mother,” said the young man. Still under the effects of ether, he didn’t realize she’d been holding his hand during the procedure.
W. Eugene Smith/Life Pictures/Shutterstock
Dr. Ceriani checked the blood pressure of 85-year-old Thomas Mitchell, who came to the hospital with a gangrenous leg. Knowing that Mitchell might not be strong enough to endure the necessary amputation, Ceriani had been postponing surgery.
W. Eugene Smith/Life Pictures/Shutterstock
When Mitchell finally rallied, the doctor gently carried him from the basement ward up to the operating room of the hospital, which had no elevator.
W. Eugene Smith/Life Pictures/Shutterstock
Dr. Ceriani gave the 85-year-old man spinal anesthesia before amputating his gangrenous left leg.
W. Eugene Smith/Life Pictures/Shutterstock
Dr. Ceriani responded to a late-night call when an 82-year-old man suffered a heart attack at a boarding house. Town marshal Chancy Van Pelt and one of the man’s fellow tenants stood by.
W. Eugene Smith/Life Pictures/Shutterstock
Knowing the man who suffered the heart attack at the boarding house will not make it through the night, Dr. Ceriani called for a priest from the kitchen.
W. Eugene Smith/Life Pictures/Shutterstock
Dr. Ceriani helped the town marshal carry the heart attack victim to the ambulance. There, the country doctor would see that his patient was as comfortable as possible, knowing there was nothing he can do to save him.
W. Eugene Smith/Life Pictures/Shutterstock
The treeless ranching community of Kremmling, Colo., stood on a 7,000-ft. plateau beneath the towering Rocky Mountains.
W. Eugene Smith/Life Pictures/Shutterstock
Dr. Ceriani held 11-month-old son Gary as his wife, Bernetha, steadied 3-year-old Phillip on a fence while watching a parade. Though they’d been married for four years at the time Smith was profiling the doctor, Mrs. Ceriani still struggled with the unpredictability of her husband’s schedule.
W. Eugene Smith/Life Pictures/Shutterstock
A fund-raising committee in Kremmling was able to raise $35,000 in 1947 to purchase the home of the town’s retiring physician and turn it into a 14-bed hospital. The funds were used to stock the tiny hospital with as much equipment — some of it war surplus — as could be afforded. Middle Park Hospital had only three wards that could accommodate 14 patients. With a new hospital in place, the town then put out a call for a new general practitioner — a call answered by Dr. Ceriani.
W. Eugene Smith/Life Pictures/Shutterstock
After finishing a surgery that lasted until 2 AM, Dr. Ceriani stood exhausted in the hospital kitchen with a cup of coffee and a cigarette. “The nurses,” LIFE noted, “constantly admonish him to relax and rest, but because they are well aware that he cannot, they keep a potful of fresh coffee simmering for him at all hours.”
W. Eugene Smith/Life Pictures/Shutterstock
Not published in LIFE. Dr. Ernest Ceriani in the small Kremmling, Colo., hospital.
W. Eugene Smith/Life Pictures/Shutterstock
Not published in LIFE. Doctor Ceriani checked 4-year-old Jimmy Free’s foot, cut when the boy stepped on broken glass.
W. Eugene Smith/Life Pictures/Shutterstock
Not published in LIFE. Dr. Ceriani examined his handiwork after the partial amputation of a patient’s leg, Kremmling, Colo., August 1948. The patient, Thomas Mitchell, was suffering from a gangrenous infection.
W. Eugene Smith/Life Pictures/Shutterstock
Not published in LIFE. An operating room in Kremmling, Colo.
W. Eugene Smith/Life Pictures/Shutterstock
Not published in LIFE. Dr. Ceriani with a patient.
W. Eugene Smith/Life Pictures/Shutterstock
Not published in LIFE. Dr. Ernest Ceriani delivered a baby.
W. Eugene Smith/Life Pictures/Shutterstock
Not published in LIFE. Maternity ward, Kremmling, Colo., 1948.
W. Eugene Smith/Life Pictures/Shutterstock
Not published in LIFE. An incubator in Kremmling, Colo., 1948.
W. Eugene Smith/Life Pictures/Shutterstock
Not published in LIFE. The contents of a country doctor’s bag, Kremmling, Colo., 1948.
W. Eugene Smith/Life Pictures/Shutterstock
Not published in LIFE. Doctor Ceriani and town marshal Chancey Van Pelt carried a patient from a cabin in the hills near Kremmling, Colo., 1948.
W. Eugene Smith/Life Pictures/Shutterstock
Not published in LIFE. Dr. Ernest Ceriani on his way to a house call in foul weather, Kremmling, Colo., 1948.
Even in the rarefied world of fine art, clichés often hold true.
For instance, the notion of the painter or sculptor in his or her studio, feverishly working, shaping, carving, drawing, with a model striking a specific pose cliché or no cliché, that very scenario is still one of the realities of making art. The human body, after all, has long been the principal, singular form from which so many artists draw inspiration.
From the very first, LIFE magazine celebrated not only artists and their creations, but their process: drawing, sketching, sculpting, painting and all the other ways that the truly creative among us develop and bring into being their vision of what is, or perhaps what should be. Here, then, a gallery of photographs that pay tribute to the artist at work, and the simple, beautiful, living human form that so often serves as the artist’s most enduringly reliable muse.
Robert Rauschenberg (1925 – 2008)
Wallace Kirkland Time & Life Pictures/Shutterstock
Farnsworth Art School
Andreas Feininger Time & Life Pictures/Shutterstock
Thomas Hart Benton (1889 – 1975)
Alfred Eisenstaedt Time & Life Pictures/Shutterstock
Thomas Hart Benton: Painter, Writer
Alfred Eisenstaedt Time & Life Pictures/Shutterstock
Skowhegan School of Art
Eliot Elisofon Time & Life Pictures/Shutterstock
Jean Negulesco (1900 – 1993)
Jerry Cooke Time & Life Pictures/Shutterstock
Moses Soyer (1899 – 1974)
Time & Life Pictures/Shutterstock
David Fredenthal (1914 – 1958)
Gjon Mili Time & Life Pictures/Shutterstock
Fabius von Gugel (1910 – 2000)
Jack Birns Time & Life Pictures/Shutterstock
Nude With Cigarette, Ox-Bow, Michigan
Loomis Dean Time & Life Pictures/Shutterstock
Nude Model, Iowa
Alfred Eisenstaedt Time & Life Pictures/Shutterstock
Chaim Gross in His Studio
Eliot Elisofon Time Life Pictures/Shutterstock
Big Sur, 1959
J. R. Eyerman Time & Life Pictures/Shutterstock
Arthritis Patient Paints a Nude Model
Alfred Eisenstaedt Time & Life Pictures/Shutterstock
Over the course of its extraordinary run as the preeminent photography magazine of its time, LIFE sent its photographers all over the globe to cover the most famous, shocking, thrilling, controversial newsmakers and events of the 20th century. Marilyn Monroe. Steve McQueen. JFK. The Hells Angels. Woodstock. Muhammad Ali. If something or someone was on the minds of LIFE’s millions of readers, or was central at that moment to the great national conversation, LIFE’s photographers were there.
The result? A gallery in which several LIFE photographers recall favorite assignments and the people and places that—captured through their lenses—helped define both the era and their own stellar careers.
In 1965, LIFE’s Bill Ray spent several weeks with a gang that, to this day, serves as a living, brawling embodiment of the American outlaw: the Hells Angels. “I got along with the Angels,” Ray (above, with camera) recalls. “I got to like some of them very much, and I think they liked me. I accepted them as they were, and they accepted me. You know, by their standards I looked pretty funny. Just look at this picture — that’s some kind of a plaid shirt I’ve got on,” he says, incredulity mixing with amusement. “But that was the best I could do to try to fit in!”
Bill Ray Time & Life Pictures/Shutterstock
“This was a new breed of rebel,” Ray remembers today. “They, of course, didn’t have jobs. They despised everything that most Americans pursue — stability, security. They rode their bikes, hung out in bars for days at a time, fought with anyone who messed with them. They were self-contained, with their own set of rules, their own code of behavior. It was extraordinary.”
Bill Ray Time & Life Pictures/Shutterstock
In a beautifully lit, uncharacteristically quiet portrait, bikers (including the gang’s leader, Sonny, left, with a bandage covering a wound sustained during a bike wreck) and their “old ladies” sit around a table strewn with empty beer mugs and bottles. But, Ray remembers, things could go from placid to edge-of-violence tense in a heartbeat whenever the Angels were involved. “The Berdoo Angels could scare the shit out of anybody. That’s just the way they were. Whenever they walked into a place, they didn’t have to say a word — other groups, other tough-guy bikers, made way for them.”
Bill Ray Time & Life Pictures/Shutterstock
Two of the women riding with the Angels hang out at a bar. Ray has a real liking for this particular photograph. “This is one of my favorites from the whole shoot. There’s something kind of sad and at the same time defiant about the atmosphere. Ruthie (kneeling) is probably playing the same 45 over and over and over again. A real music lover, she was.”
Bill Ray Time & Life Pictures/Shutterstock
A nighttime photograph made by Bill Ray outside the Blackboard Cafe looks like it could be a still from a film noir classic. In fact, Ray says that one of the reasons he likes this picture so much is because “it feels like [the great American cinematographer] James Wong Howe could have lit it. But that’s the art and craft of the work: photographing on the fly, taking advantage of the available light — especially when there’s very little of it — and knowing how to capture it.”
Bill Ray Time & Life Pictures/Shutterstock
In the spring of 1963, LIFE sent photographer John Dominis to California to hang out with 33-year-old rising star Steve McQueen and see what sort of photos he could get. Three weeks and more than 40 rolls of film later, Dominis had captured some astonishingly intimate and iconic images of the legend-in-the-making — photos impossible to imagine in today’s restricted-access celebrity world.”Movie stars, they weren’t used to giving up a lot of time,” Dominis, now 90, recalls. “In fact, they didn’t like to give up hardly time. But I sort of relaxed in the beginning and didn’t bother [McQueen and his wife] every time they turned around, and they began to get used to me being there. If they were doing something, they would definitely just not notice me anymore.” Above: McQueen and his wife, Neile Adams, enjoy some fast, loud time together.
John Dominis Time & Life Pictures/Shutterstock
How was Dominis able to warm up McQueen? “When I was living in Hong Kong,” Dominis remembers, “I had a sports car and I raced it. And I knew that McQueen had a racing car. I rented one anticipating that we might do something with them. He was in a motorcycle race out in the desert, so I went out there in my car and met him, and I say, ‘You wanna try my car?’ We went pretty fast — I mean, as fast as you can safely go without getting arrested — and we’d ride and then stop and trade cars. He liked that, and I knew he liked it. I guess that was the first thing that softened him.”
John Dominis Time & Life Pictures/Shutterstock
“We’re sitting around the swimming pool,” Dominis recalls, “and Steve goes away and he comes back without any clothes on! He just enjoyed being out in the desert, looking at the sun. . . . He was just so natural about everything. There was no time to feel embarrassed, so I shot all the pictures that I needed to shoot. I shot some pictures specially of his backside so we could use them in the magazine, because in most of them he was just [full-on] nude. He wasn’t hiding anything.”
John Dominis Time & Life Pictures/Shutterstock
When Albert Einstein died on April 18, 1955, his funeral and cremation were intensely private affairs, and only one photographer managed to capture the events of that extraordinary day: LIFE magazine’s Ralph Morse. “I grabbed my cameras and drove the 90 miles to Princeton from my home in northern New Jersey,” Morse remembers 55 years later. “Einstein died at the Princeton Hospital, so I headed there first. But it was chaos — so many journalists, photographers, onlookers milling around outside what, back then, was a really small hospital. ‘Forget this,’ I said, and headed over to the building where Einstein’s office was.” Above: Ralph Morse’s photograph of Einstein’s office in Princeton, taken hours after Einstein’s death and captured exactly as the Nobel Prize-winner left it.
Ralph Morse Time & Life Pictures/Shutterstock
“On the way to Einstein’s office,” Morse says, “I stopped and bought a case of scotch. I knew people might be reluctant to talk to me, and I knew that most people were happy to accept a bottle of scotch instead of money if you offered it in exchange for their help. So, I get to the building and nobody’s there. I find the building’s super, give him a fifth of scotch, and he opens up Einstein’s office so I can take some photos.”
Ralph Morse Time & Life Pictures/Shutterstock
“I drove out to the cemetery to tried to find out where Einstein was going to be buried,” Morse remembers. “But there must have been two dozen graves being dug that day! I see a group of guys digging a grave, offer them a bottle, ask them if they know anything. One of them says, ‘He ain’t gettin’ buried. He’s being cremated in about twenty minutes. In Trenton!’ That’s about twenty miles south of Princeton, so I give those guys the rest of the case of scotch, hop in my car, and get to Trenton and the crematorium just before Einstein’s friends and family show up.” Above, from left: unidentified woman; Einstein’s son, Hans Albert (in light suit); unidentified woman; Einstein’s longtime secretary, Helen Dukas (in light coat); and friend Dr. Gustav Bucky (partially hidden behind Dukas) arrive at the Ewing Crematorium in Trenton on the afternoon of April 18, 1955.
Ralph Morse Time & Life Pictures/Shutterstock
Mourners walk into the service for Einstein, passing the parked hearse that carried his body from Princeton. “I didn’t have to tell anyone where I was from,” Morse says of his time spent photographing the events of the day. “I was the only photographer there, and it was sort of a given that if there was one photographer on the scene, he had to be from LIFE.” At one point during the day, Einstein’s son Hans asked Morse for his name — a seemingly insignificant, friendly inquiry that would prove, within a few hours, to have significant ramifications. When Morse got to LIFE’s offices later in the day with his film, he learned that Hans had called the magazine’s managing editor and asked that LIFE not run the photos. The story was, indeed, killed and Morse’s pictures never ran in LIFE.
Ralph Morse Time & Life Pictures/Shutterstock
Dr. Thomas Harvey (1912 – 2007) was the pathologist who conducted the autopsy on Einstein at Princeton Hospital in 1955. The stranger-than-fiction tale of Einstein’s brain — which Harvey controversially removed during the autopsy, carefully sliced into sections, and then kept for years for research purposes — and the intrigues long-associated with the famous organ, are far too convoluted to go into here. However: On the day that Einstein died, Ralph Morse was able to take a few quick photographs of Dr. Harvey at the hospital. Morse says he’s certain that that is Einstein’s brain under Dr. Harvey’s knife. Then, after a pause, he qualifies that certainty: “You know, it fifty-five years ago. Honestly, I don’t remember every single detail of the day. So whatever he’s cutting there …” Morse’s words hang in the air. Then, mischievously, he laughs.
Ralph Morse Time & Life Pictures/Shutterstock
For a few days in August 1969, on a dairy farm in upstate New York, a half-million young people got together to hang out, dance, and listen to music at what became one of the defining events of the ’60s. For LIFE photographer John Dominis, covering the festival became one of the most moving adventures of an amazing 25-year career. “I was much more interested in the people who were there than the musicians,” he recalls. “I liked the music okay, but I liked the kids, and what they were doing, and how they felt about it all.”
John Dominis Time & Life Pictures/Shutterstock
A man sits with two young boys in front of Ken Kesey’s legendary Merry Prankster bus, Further. (See the sign above the windshield.) “I got a nice picture of that painted hippie bus, with a couple of kids and what I think might be their father,” Dominis says. “Whoever painted that thing really did a beautiful job!”
John Dominis Time & Life Pictures/Shutterstock
“I’ll tell you, I really had a great time,” Dominis recalls. “I was much older than those kids, but I felt like I was their age. They smiled at me, and offered me pot … You didn’t expect to see a bunch of kids so nice; you’d think they’d be uninviting to an older person. But no. They were just great!”
John Dominis Time & Life Pictures/Shutterstock
“I’m quite fond of this photo,” Dominis says of one of his most famous images from Woodstock — group of people balancing a plywood board on their heads as shelter from the rain. “You’ll never be able to plan that sort of photo. This is one moment during those three days where they aren’t giggling, or laughing. They are about being uncomfortable. And that somehow makes it work.”
John Dominis Time & Life Pictures/Shutterstock
In 1947, LIFE’s Ralph Morse went to the Dordogne region of southwest France and, over the course of a few weeks, became the first professional photographer to document the astonishing, vibrant, 18,000-year-old Paleolithic cave paintings there. “The first sight of those paintings was simply unbelievable,” Morse, now 94 and sharp as ever, recalls today. “I was amazed at how the colors held up after thousands and thousands of years — like they were just painted the day before!”
Ralph Morse Time & Life Pictures/Shutterstock
Ralph Morse and his wife, Ruth, stand outside the entrance to Lascaux with some of the photography and lighting equipment that was eventually hauled down into the cave. “We were the first people to light up the paintings so that we could see those beautiful colors on the wall,” Morse remembers. “Some people, not many, had been down there before us, of course — but with flashlights, at best. We were the first to haul in professional gear and bring those spectacular paintings to life. This little French town simply didn’t have the money, the equipment, the capability to do anything like this after the war. So we did it—and they helped out, because they were as excited as we were to really see what was down there.”
Ralph Morse Time & Life Pictures/Shutterstock
“Most people don’t realize how huge some of the paintings are. There are pictures of animals there that are ten, fifteen feet long, and more.” Above: A Ralph Morse photograph of what he described, in his notes on the assignment, as a “very important horse” that may well be “the first example anywhere of drawing in modern perspective.”
Ralph Morse Time & Life Pictures/Shutterstock
“We were there, in the village of Montignac, for at least a week, maybe two” Morse says, chuckling at the memory of his time in the Dordogne more than 60 years ago. “There we were, living in this little French town, heading down into the ground to go to work everyday. It was a challenging project — getting the generator, running wires down into the cave, lowering all the camera equipment down on ropes. But once the lights were turned on … wow!”
Ralph Morse Time & Life Pictures/Shutterstock
They had fame, reams of money, and fans willing to do wild, unmentionable things just to breathe the same air — but in 1971, LIFE set out to illustrate a different side of rock stars. Assigned to take portraits of the artists with their sweetly square folks, photographer John Olson traveled from the suburbs of London to the San Francisco Bay Area to show that, like most other mortals, these celebrities came from humble backgrounds, with moms and dads who bragged and worried about them every day. “As I remember,” Olson told LIFE.com of his time with the Jackson 5 (above), “they followed my requests to a T, and were incredibly polite.” And what about notorious patriarch Joseph Jackson? “The dad,” Olson admits, “was pretty stern.”
John Olson Time & Life Pictures/Shutterstock
“I got a lot of the drug stories, a lot of the rock and roll stories, and a lot of the anti-war stories,” Olson told LIFE.com of his assignments as a young LIFE photographer. “So when this story came up, I guess I got it because of my age. In hindsight, it was a most unusual time in my life.” Of the stars he photographed for this assignment Olson notes: “I had worked with Ginger Baker (above, with his mom) before, I had worked with Joe Cocker, Grace Slick—and some of these people, the first go-round had been really difficult. Even nasty. But when they were with their parents, they were totally different people. Ginger Baker, who had been terribly obnoxious before, acted like a grown-up. I don’t think it had anything to do with respect for me, so it must have been the parents.”
John Olson Time & Life Pictures/Shutterstock
“They had a parrot in a cage,” Olson remembers of the shoot at Clapton’s grandmother’s home. “Eric’s grandmother, Rose Clapp, left the room, and the parrot talked. It said F—you! I couldn’t believe it. So Mrs. Clapp comes back and I say, ‘The parrot talks.’ And she says, ‘Yes, he says gobble gobble .’ So Eric and I are talking and I ask, ‘Hey, what’s that parrot say?’ and he looks at me like I’m crazy. He says, ‘The parrot says F—you.’ There was a group then called Delaney & Bonnie, and Eric said they stayed there for a couple of weeks and taught the parrot how to say it.”
John Olson/Life Pictures/Shutterstock
On May 19, 1962, screen goddess Marilyn Monroe — literally sewn into a sparkling, jaw-droppingly sheer dress — sauntered onto the stage of New York’s Madison Square Garden and forever linked sex and politics in the American consciousness when she famously, breathily sang “Happy Birthday, Mr. President” to JFK before a crowd of 15,000 — including LIFE’s Bill Ray. “Everybody was in front in the beginning,” Ray recalls of the setup that night inside the Garden, “but it was another one of these events where security says, ‘Hey, we’re really glad you came. Take a few pictures—now get your ass out!’ The Secret Service goons really started clearing everybody out after a few shots. I was afraid of being held in a cattle pen, which is one of the reasons I got out of the group and started moving around on my own.” Pictured: The President arriving at the Garden.
Bill Ray
The chatter about an affair between the president and Monroe was getting louder around the time of the birthday salute, Ray recalls. “People in Washington were always saying there was something going on,” Ray says, “that there was even a Polaroid of Marilyn and Jack in the bathtub performing interesting acts, that Peter Lawford was kind of a go-between, and so on. Nobody really knew. But I knew for sure I was trying to get a picture of the two of them together that night.” Above: President Kennedy and the elites in their box, on the first level facing center stage.
Bill Ray Time & Life Pictures/Shutterstock
Trying to get an angle where he might be able to get both Marilyn and JFK in the frame, Ray moved higher up in the Garden . . . and suddenly the moment arrived. “It had been a noisy place, everybody all ‘rah rah rah,'” Ray recalls. “Then boom, on comes this light. There was no sound—no sound. It was like outer space.” Marilyn was on the stage, taking off her white fur to reveal that scandalous dress underneath. “It was skin-colored and it was really tight. She didn’t wear anything underneath it, it was all sewn on, and those Swarovski crystals were sparkling. And she used this long pause…. Then finally, she comes out with ‘Happy Biiiiirthday’—she starts the whole breathy thing— and everybody just went into a swoon. I was praying [that I could get the shot] because I had to guess at the exposure. It was a very long lens, which I had no tripod for, so I had to rest it on a pipe railing and try not to breathe.” Above: Bill Ray’s most iconic photograph, and one of the most famous pictures ever taken of Marilyn Monroe, as she serenades JFK at the Garden.
Bill Ray Time & Life Pictures/Shutterstock
In 1971, LIFE’s John Shearer spent months photographing the heavyweight champ, Joe Frazier, and Muhammad Ali in the run-up to their March 1971 title bout—a fight billed as The Fight of the Century. “In 1971,” Shearer told LIFE.com, explaining a large part of the fight’s enormous hype, “despite not having held the heavyweight title for years, Muhammad Ali was still arguably the most famous person on the planet.” Above: The challenger commands a press conference at the pre-fight weigh-in.
John Shearer Time & Life Pictures/Shutterstock
“I often felt bad for Joe,” Shearer says, remembering how the 27-year-old world heavyweight champ had few fans in his corner for the 1971 fight with Ali. “In the eyes of so many, he was miscast as the bad guy in the fight. I like this picture of him. It’s a charming moment—but something in his face suggests that if you scratched the surface, you’d find a world of other feelings beneath the surface.”
John Shearer Time & Life Pictures/Shutterstock
“The fight in ’71 was the last time Ali took Joe for granted,” Shearer says. “He simply had not done the hard, hard work required to beat a man like Joe Frazier. Of course, he proved later on—in those battles against George Foreman and Ken Norton and the epic rematches against Frazier—that he was a great, tough champion. But I wonder if, deep down, he hit a point [while training in Miami] where he looked for that fire, that drive, and it just wasn’t there. Above: Ali clowns with an aide-de-camp in the back seat of his new Cadillac limo, Miami, February 1971.
John Shearer Time & Life Pictures/Shutterstock
Frazier—who had an R&B band for years called Joe Frazier and His Knockouts—tests out a band member’s trumpet on the set of NBC’s long-running Kraft Music Hall variety show. “Frazier felt that he was every bit as articulate as Ali,” John Shearer says, “and every bit the showman that Ali was.”
John Shearer Time & Life Pictures/Shutterstock
His face swollen and bruised after his battle with Ali at Madison Square Garden, heavyweight champion Joe Frazier—stoic even in victory over his nemesis—makes himself presentable. “Frazier didn’t fight by going for the head, which a lot of other boxers did,” Shearer says. “He went after Ali’s body the whole fight, pounding away, taking terrible blows to the head. You know, you keep whacking at the base of the tree, and the tree is going to come down. And that was the story of their first fight.”
![Another Bourke-White photograph of this scene -- of inmates digging a drainage ditch in Greenville, SC -- appeared in the Sept. 17, 1956 issue of LIFE. "The white girl," read the caption, "lives in a nearby house [and] came out to watch when she saw the gang start work."](https://static.life.com/wp-content/uploads/migrated/2012/02/141216-south-carolina-segregation-13-1024x661.jpg "Inmates dug a drainage ditch in Greenville. The girl in the foreground lived nearby and came out to watch when she saw the gang start to work.")
