However odd it seems today to speak of television as a “great development in radio,” LIFE was dead-on in assessing how big a deal the combination of sound and moving pictures would be:

Within the first postwar decade television will be firmly planted as a billion-dollar U.S. industry. Its impact on U.S. civilization is beyond present prediction. Television is more than the addition to sight to the sound of radio. It has a power to annihilate time and space that will unite everyone everywhere in the immediate experience of events in contemporary life and history.

After getting readers excited about the new technology, the story then went on to detail its mechanics. The photos by Andreas Feininger are beautiful and fascinating in the way they contrast the machinery of the tubes and plates with the resulting image they produce of a female model whose presence is a kind of siren song. All that glass and metal, dear reader, will magically bring this woman into your living room.

At the time this LIFE story ran, very few Americans owned television sets. In 1946, the first year the government has data for television ownership, the total number of sets in American households was 8,000. By 1951, though, the number had ballooned to more than 10 million.

The LIFE story correctly predicted that TV would give Americans the new power to witness history live, and that was transformative. Part of the immense power of the signature moments of the original run of LIFE magazine—whether it be triumphs such as the moon landing or tragedies like the assassination of John F. Kennedy—was that Americans experienced those moments together, huddled around their televisions, seeing the same things at the same time.

The lens, at right, focused its image onto a plate in an RCA television camera tube, 1944.

Andreas Feininger/Life Picture Collection/Shutterstock

This “dissector camera tube” was part of a 1944 story in LIFE on the brand new technology of television. Here’s how the magazine described the tube’s function: “Image is focussed on light-sensitive plate (left). Electrical field transforms visible image into extended electronic image…Electromagnetic field pulls this extended image back and forth in front of scanning finger mounted vertically at front of tube.”

Andreas Feininger/Life Picture Collection/Shutterstock

A Schmidt projector threw this image of a model onto a screen. A 1944 article in LIFE on the new TV technology stated that “projection screens will be part of postwar home receivers.”

Andreas Feininger/Life Picture Collection/Shutterstock

A 1944 LIFE story on how television worked showed an image of girl being focused through a lens, 1944.

Andreas Feininger/Life Picture Collection/Shutterstock

A color television camera, 1944.

Andreas Feininger/Life Picture Collection/Shutterstock

An image from LIFE’s look at the technical side of the emerging technology known as television, 1944.

Andreas Feininger/Life Picture Collection/Shutterstock

In a 1944 story about emerging television technology, this demonstration photo illustrated how lines came together to make a picture.

Andreas Feininger/Life Picture Collection/Shutterstock

The post LIFE Said This Invention Would “Annihilate Time and Space” appeared first on LIFE.

Opening on May 6, 2022, the exhibit celebrates what the Monroes call LIFE’s “stunning affirmation of the humanist notion that the camera’s proper function is to persuade and inform.” Photographs from essays by LIFE icons such as Margaret Bourke-White, Alfred Eisenstaedt, Carl Mydans, and Andreas Feininger will be on display. LIFE photographer Bob Gomel, now 88, will also be in attendance at the opening reception from 5-7pm on Friday, May 6.

LIFE.com recently caught up with the gallerists Sid and Michelle Monroe over email to learn more about their show and their thoughts on LIFE, and, well, life in Santa Fe.

How did you become gallerists? Why did you choose to focus on photojournalism?

We both entered the museum field after college, Michelle with the Cooper Hewitt, Smithsonian Design Museum and Sid with the Metropolitan Museum of Art. Michelle was also a working artist and Sid was the director of a SoHo gallery specializing in fine art editions, where the gallery owner was exploring an exhibition with Alfred Eisenstaedt in collaboration with the LIFE Picture Collection. In 1985, we sat down with Alfred Eisenstaedt to discuss the exhibition and, then in our 20s, were were awed and engaged with his stories of an extraordinary life behind the camera.

We understood that we were in the presence of something bigger than we had ever encountered before. The work of Alfred Eisenstaedt is our collective history—we didn’t live this but this is what formed the world we were born into. In the eighties, photography was only beginning to gain a foothold in the fine art market, and most galleries were concentrating on the early “masters” of fine art photography. Eisenstaedt, and in general the field of photojournalism, had not been exhibited in a gallery setting. We believed immediately that a gallery which combined the realms of art, history, and reportage would be unique, and that set us on our course.

Albert Einstein

Alfred Eisenstaedt The LIFE Picture Collection/Shutterstock

Why a LIFE exhibition? Why now?

We had our beginning in New York, and over the course of the 1990s had the extraordinary opportunity to meet, get to know, and work with many of the legendary photographers of LIFE magazine, all in their retirement years. Through countless conversations, we learned how they saw the world and recorded it for the magazine, and more importantly, for history. Their work, and work approach, helped us gain insight into how to view their photographs, decades after they made them. Ever since, we have have worked conscientiously over the past 20 years to establish Monroe Gallery of Photography at the intersection between photojournalism and fine art, showcasing works embedded in our collective consciousness that shape our shared history. The Gallery represents several of the most significant photojournalists up to the present day, but the work of the LIFE photographers has been our foundation.

Mother and child in Hiroshima, Japan, December 1945.

Alfred Eisenstaedt; The LIFE Picture Collection/Shutterstock

What do you wish collectors knew about LIFE? The general public?

The work of the photographers of LIFE magazine came to define the medium of photojournalism, and their photographs recorded history and informed us all for most of the twentieth century. It was long one of the most popular and widely imitated of American magazines, selling millions of copies a week. From its start, LIFE emphasized photography, with gripping, superbly chosen news photographs, amplified by photo features and photo essays on an international range of topics. Its photographers were the elite of their craft and enjoyed worldwide esteem. Published weekly from 1936 to 1972, the work of the photographers of LIFE magazine came to define the medium of photojournalism.

American sprinters Tommie Smith (center) and John Carlos (right), after winning gold and bronze Olympic medals in the 200 meters, respectively, raised their fists in a Black Power salute, Mexico, 1968. Australian silver medalist Peter Norman is at left.

John Dominis/Life Pictures/Shutterstock

Do you have a favorite piece in the show?

Considering we curated the exhibit from potentially thousands of images, the exhibit itself represents our favorites—with enough left over we could easily do a “part two”!

Who are some of your favorite LIFE photographers? Are there some that may have been overlooked?

That’s a difficult question, as each LIFE photographer had their own individual and particular personality and style. We consider ourselves extraordinarily privileged to have been able to have known, and call friends, so many of these great photographers. To name only a few, Eisenstaedt was by many measures the “Dean” of the LIFE photographers and he taught us how to “see”;  Carl Mydans left a deep impression on us with his humility and intense humanistic dedication; Bill Eppridge was deeply committed to documenting historic and deeply sensitive subjects; and Bob Gomel‘s versatility and ingenuity impresses us to this day. 

John Lennon, George Harrison, Paul Mccartney and Ringo Starr, February 1964.

© Bob Gomel / Courtesy of Bob Gomel

And for people who plan to visit the LIFE show in Santa Fe, are there other favorite art spots in the area that you recommend?

Santa Fe is a gem of an art-destination city. There are over 200 galleries showing every possible form of art from ancient Native American art and pottery to cutting edge contemporary art. [We recommend] SITE Santa Fe, a contemporary art space; Institute of American Indian Arts; Museum Hill; Georgia O’Keeffe Museum; and Meow Wolf, an ‘immersive art installation’ where visitors enter and discover that nothing is as it seems…

Do you have advice for young photojournalists who might want to display their works in a gallery?

Foremost, understand and dedicate yourself to the profession and its specific ethical requirements. Respect its role as the fourth estate and its check on power. Do the work. The role of photojournalists has perhaps never been as vital and important as it is today.

Indian leader Mohandas Gandhi reading next to a spinning wheel at home. (Photo by Margaret Bourke-White/The LIFE Picture Collection © DotDash Meredith)

The LIFE Photographers exhibit will be on display at Monroe Gallery from May 6 through June 26, 2022. For hours and location, please consult the gallery’s website.

Jill Golden is the director of the LIFE Picture Collection, an archive of more than 10 million photographs created by—and collected by—LIFE Magazine.

The post LIFE Magazine Show Opens At Monroe Gallery Of Photography appeared first on LIFE.

That’s why LIFE hailed the opening of the Turnpike, one of the first roads of its kind in America, as a major event in its January 18, 1952 issue with a story titled “Newly Opened Superroad Unravels Chronic Traffic Jam.”

“A road like this is something motorists caught in the nightmare of New Jersey traffic have long dreamed of,” exclaimed LIFE.

The new roadway offered drivers an express route from the Delaware Memorial Bridge up toward the Lincoln Tunnel (and has since been extended north). Before the opening of the Turnpike, LIFE wrote, motorists traversing the state “had to fight their cars bumper to bumper along the Pulaski Skyway, curse their way through honking traffic in Elizabeth, spin around endless traffic circles and spend up five hours on the trip.”

With the turnpike the 118-mile journey could now be done “in two hours flat,” LIFE declared. (And that was before the invention of E-Z Pass.) Through various extensions built since its opening, the length of the turnpike is now 148 miles.The road is heavily used not just because of New Jersey’s attractions but because it serves as a major connector to points along the East Coast. In 1952 LIFE projected that “more that eight million cars a year” might use the turnpike, but now the road is used by well north of 200 milllion toll-paying vehicles per year. From the songs of Bruce Springsteen to the opening credits of The Sopranos, the thoroughfare has gained cultural currency as a roadway that is much-traveled, if not always beloved.

LIFE’s photos, taken by Bernard Hoffman and Andreas Feininger, chronicled this major construction project. The task was completed in only 23 months: a feat that becomes more impressive when you consider the logistical elements involved. As LIFE wrote in 1952:

In cities whole blocks of houses had to be torn down, families relocated, street crossing overpassed. Out in the country farmland had to be bought for the 300-foot right of way, 196 highways and railroads had to be crossed. To take care of real estate obstacles required 3,500 separate real estate deals and $17.5 million [about $172 million in 2021 dollars]. Out in the marshlands near Secaucus, engineers found six miles of the land a floating mire sometimes 100 feet deep. In this they sank large pipes packed with sand. They covered the right of way with heavy dirt, then removed the pipes, leaving vertical columns of sand to act as drains until the weight of the dirt squeezed the water from the mire. Then they removed the surplus dirt and built the highway on top.

Five years later the opening of the Garden State Parkway created a second express route across New Jersey. While you can say that the construction of the Parkway and the Turnpike was completed by certain dates, the expansion and maintenance of these roads is on ongoing project, one that this never really done, as builders race to keep pace with the needs of a nation on the move.

Workers built an overpass for the brand new New Jersey Turnpike, 1951.

Andreas Feininger/The LIFE Picture Collection © Meredith Corporation

Workers handled one of the more difficult parts of the construction of the New Jersey Turnpike as the roadway approached New York.

Andreas FeiningerThe LIFE Picture Collection © Meredith Corporation

Construction of a stretch of the New Jersey Turnpike near New York City, 1951.

Andreas Feininger/The LIFE Picture Collection © Meredith Corporation

Workers rode a lift during the construction of the New Jersey Turnpike, New Jersey, June 1951.

Bernard Hoffman/]/The LIFE Picture Collection © Meredith Corporation

Workers rode a lift during the construction of the New Jersey Turnpike, 1951.

Bernard Hoffman/The LIFE Picture Collection © Meredith Corporation

Workers rode a lift during the construction of the New Jersey Turnpike, 1951.

Bernard Hoffman/The LIFE Picture Collection © Meredith Corporation

A group of workers talked during the construction of the New Jersey Turnpike, June 1951.

Bernard Hoffman/The LIFE Picture Collection © Meredith Corporation

Workers assembled a support strut during the construction of the New Jersey Turnpike, June 1951.

Bernard Hoffman/The LIFE Picture Collection © Meredith Corporation

Dairy cattle, cut off from their barn by the New Jersey Turnpike, were driven through a special underpass built for them by the Turnpike authority.

Bernard Hoffman/The LIFE Picture Collection © Meredith Corporation

A truck released hot liquid tar during the construction of the New Jersey Turnpike.

Andreas Feininger/The LIFE Picture Collection © Meredith Corporation

A steam roller rolled over hot liquid tar during the construction of the New Jersey Turnpike.

Andreas Feininger/The LIFE Picture Collection © Meredith Corporation

A steam roller rolled over the hot liquid tar during the construction of the New Jersey Turnpike.

Andreas Feininger/The LIFE Picture Collection © Meredith Corporation

Two men dug trenches to try to contain the water flooding from an open pipe during the construction of the New Jersey Turnpike, June 1951.

Bernard Hoffman/The LIFE Picture Collection © Meredith Corporation

In the town of Elizabeth, 240 buildings were wrecked or moved to make room for the New Jersey Turnpike.

Bernard Hoffman/The LIFE Picture Collection © Meredith Corporation

The post New Jersey Turnpike: The Building of a “Superroad” appeared first on LIFE.

With Groundhog Day upon us — when the most famous groundhog of them all, Punxsutawney Phil, emerges from his burrow and either sees his shadow, or doesn’t — we thought we’d take a moment to praise the often-maligned and largely misunderstood marmot. For example, far from the soft, doughy layabout of popular myth, the groundhog in the wild is an active animal (a single groundhog moves an average of 700 pounds of dirt when excavating a burrow); a fierce defender of its own territory; and a skilled tree-climber — when pursued by predators, at least.

Groundhogs also have a charming habit of whistling when alarmed — hence the whistle-pig moniker — and they really, really like to eat. The average groundhog will consume enough grass, grains, fruit and other non-meat foodstuffs that, if he or she was a 175-pound person, it would be the equivalent of eating a 15-pound salad. Every single day.

We could go on and on, extolling the virtues of the groundhog — and, admittedly, outlining the reasons why lots of people, especially farmers, can’t stand them — but it’s almost time for Phil to make his entrance, and we don’t want to miss it. This winter can’t end soon enough for us.

Happy Groundhog Day.

Groundhog

Andreas Feininger The LIFE Picture Collection/Shutterstock

The post The Groundhog: An Appreciation appeared first on LIFE.

Take these six-decade-old pictures of skulls and bones. Seen in a certain light, and photographed for LIFE by the great Andreas Feininger, the bones of creatures as varied in size and temperament as fish, bats, elephants, hummingbirds and humans are eloquent totems, raising questions about life, death and what we ultimately leave behind.

In the end, though, perhaps the way that humans and our fellow creatures appear when seen at the most elemental level in other words, how we look when literally stripped to the bone says more about us than we’d like to admit. Even as these pictures summon thoughts that swing between the morbid and the exalted, one thing remains strikingly clear: in the right hands, bones are beautiful.

Many of these Feininger photographs appeared in the Oct. 6, 1952, issue of LIFE.

Andreas Feininger, owl’s skull

Andreas Feininger Time & Life Pictures/Shutterstock

Andreas Feininger, picture of a mole

Andreas Feininger Time & Life Pictures/Shutterstock

Andreas Feininger photograph of a bat

Andreas Feininger Time & Life Pictures/Shutterstock

Andreas Feininger photograph of a fish

Andreas Feininger Time & Life Pictures/Shutterstock

Andreas Feininger, skeletal vertebrae of catfish, 1951

Andreas Feininger Time & Life Pictures/Shutterstock

Andreas Feininger, pygmy armadillo, 1951

Andreas Feininger Time & Life Pictures/Shutterstock

Andreas Feininger, jumping mouse, 1951

Andreas Feininger Time & Life Pictures/Shutterstock

Andreas Feininger, Human and horse skeletons, 1951

Andreas Feininger Time & Life Pictures/Shutterstock

Andreas Feininger, elephant, 1951

Andreas Feininger Time & Life Pictures/Shutterstock

Andreas Feininger, hummingbird and elephant’s femur, 1951

Andreas Feininger Time & Life Pictures/Shutterstock

Andreas Feininger, gorilla rib cage, 1951

Andreas Feininger Time & Life Pictures/Shutterstock

Andreas Feininger, shrew, 1951

Andreas Feininger Time & Life Pictures/Shutterstock

Andreas Feininger, skeletal structure of a bird, 1951

Andreas Feininger Time & Life Pictures/Shutterstock

Andreas Feininger, ostrich femur, 1951

Andreas Feininger Time & Life Pictures/Shutterstock

Andreas Feininger, bear femur, 1951

Andreas Feininger Time & Life Pictures/Shutterstock

Andreas Feininger, sloth, 1951

Andreas Feininger Time & Life Pictures/Shutterstock

The post Lovely Bones: The Art of Evolution appeared first on LIFE.

Individual New Yorkers, meanwhile, were often an afterthought: it was form, pattern and, perhaps above all else, scale that Feininger sought. Human beings might have built this thrilling, sprawling, purposeful urban panorama, but their presence in Feininger’s pictures was not necessary; their handiwork would suffice. (In fact, in his single most famous portrait of a person, his 1955 photo of the young photographer Dennis Stock, Feininger obscures or, more accurately, replaces the human face with the clean, mechanistic contours of a camera.)

Of course, no one who worked on staff for LIFE as Feininger did for almost two decades—and 340 assignments—from 1943 until 1962, could be defined by a single topic. 

Fascinated from the time he was a young boy in Germany by the natural world, Feininger made beautiful pictures of the skeletons and bones of animals, snakes and birds, investing them with an austere power that the creatures perhaps lacked when alive and covered with flesh, fur, feathers or scales. His 1956 picture of Niagara Falls in winter, with two small human forms silhouetted against a scene, might have been lifted from the last Ice Age, while one of his most famous and most frequently reproduced photographs—Route 66 in 1947 Arizona—somehow manages to reference, in a single frame, the allure of the open road, the confluence of the man-made and natural worlds and the myth of the inexhaustible American West.

The author of more than 30 books including at least one acknowledged classic, the autobiography Andreas Feininger: Photographer (1966) Feininger’s photographs were shown in solo and group shows in places as diverse as the Museum of Natural History, the International Center of Photography, MoMa, the Whitney, the Metropolitan, the Smithsonian and in smaller galleries and exhibitions around the world. A retrospective of his six-decade career, featuring 80 of his own favorite black-and-white pictures from 1928 through 1988, toured Europe in the late 1990s.

Andreas Feininger died in Manhattan in February 1999, at the age of 92.

Photographer Dennis Stock held a camera in front of his face, 1955.

Andreas Feininger/Life Pictures/Shutterstock

A crescent moon rises between Manhattan skyscrapers, 1946.

Andreas Feininger/Life Pictures/Shutterstock

Crowds filled Coney Island’s beaches on the Fourth of July, Brooklyn, New York, 1949.

Andreas Feininger/Life Pictures/Shutterstock

This slinky-like light pattern in the blackness of a moonlit sky was produced by a time-exposure of the light-tipped rotor blades of a helicopter as it took off, 1949.

Andreas Feininger/Life Pictures/Shutterstock

Air Force training, 1944.

Andreas Feininger/Life Pictures/Shutterstock

Training for chemical warfare, Maryland, 1944.

Andreas Feininger/Life Pictures/Shutterstock

Route 66 in Arizona, 1947.

Andreas Feininger/Life Pictures/Shutterstock

This view of midtown Manhattan, looking straight down 42nd Street, was taken with the aid of a 40-inch Dallmeyer telephoto lens two miles away, from New Jersey, 1946.

Andreas Feininger/Life Pictures/Shutterstock

Sculptor Ruth Vodicka altered the shoulder of her statue of William Tell, 1956.

Andreas Feininger/Life Pictures/Shutterstock

Studying black widow spiders, 1943.

Andreas Feininger/Life Pictures/Shutterstock

A macro close-up of a millipede, 1950.

Andreas Feininger/Life Pictures/Shutterstock

A forest of wells, rigs and derricks crowded the Signal Hill oil fields in Long Beach, Calif., 1944.

Andreas Feininger/Life Pictures/Shutterstock

Pouring ingots at an Illinois steel plant, 1944.

Andreas Feininger/Life Pictures/Shutterstock

A laboratory scene showed how television works, with the image of a girl being focused through a lens onto a sensitive plate as an electron beam (its path shown by glowing gases) scanned it, 1944.

Andreas Feininger/Life Pictures/Shutterstock

This image of a skeleton of a four-foot-long gaboon viper showed its 160 pairs of movable ribs, 1952.

Andreas Feininger/Life Pictures/Shutterstock

Skeletal structure of a bird, 1951.

Andreas Feininger/Life Pictures/Shutterstock

Niagara Falls in winter, 1956.

Andreas Feininger/Life Pictures/Shutterstock

The Statue of Liberty during a World War II blackout, 1942.

Andreas Feininger/Life Pictures/Shutterstock

Doctor’s head mirror, 1955.

Andreas Feininger/Life Pictures/Shutterstock

The view from a lodge at Lake Louise, looking up at Victoria Glacier, Canada, 1946.

Andreas Feininger/Life Pictures/Shutterstock

The post Photographer Spotlight: Andreas Feininger appeared first on LIFE.