LIFE magazine was history. Our history.
When an organization like LIFE magazine goes under for the last time, the offices are closed, the rent doesn’t get paid, so someone else moves in. The new tenant is not interested in the files that the previous tenant had collected for more than a century. Everything gets dumped and the walls get repainted.
Somebody at LIFE Magazine was smart enough to convince the decision makers that if there wasn’t going to be any caretakers of one of the largest collections of photos in the world then the pictures should be released into the wild. The Internet!
They contacted Google and made a plan.
Now everyone that can access the Internet has an unlimited library card to poke around in the LIFE archives. It’s wonderful.
Pick a subject and see the pictures.
I have only searched for ONE thing so far, because I try to limit my Internet time, but I can’t wait to sneak back there on a rainy day.
My choice? Pictures of one of my favorite cars. A car that only had three or four pictures taken of it… or so I thought.
I typed in “Dymaxion” which is Bucky’s really cool car. Wow! Thousands of pictures. There are sketches, drawings, photos of the cars, the people building the cars, and even Mr.. Fuller himself.
This stuff is gold. Set your alarm and dig in.
This is where the pictures are going to live someday: http://www.life.com/Life/
This is the site where Time-Life Photos are archived by Getty: http://www.timelifepictures.com/ms_timepix/source/home/home.aspx?pg=1
THIS is the portal that Google is running in a back room. They don’t seem to be promoting it, but since they will be the muscle behind the life.com site, you can start checking it out NOW: http://images.google.com/hosted/life
If you don’t know anything about the Dymaxion, you can see it here: Dymaxion Assortment and here: Dymaxion Notebook
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