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thedrifter
11-18-08, 03:42 PM
Tuesday, November 18, 2008 - 11:17 AM PST | Modified: Tuesday, November 18, 2008 - 1:01 PM
Google adds iconic Life photos to index
San Francisco Business Times - by Steven E.F. Brown

Online advertising giant Google Inc. added archives of photos from Life magazine to its collection of images users can search.

Some of the images are famous and iconic pictures — Martin Luther King Jr. waving to a huge crowd during his “I have a dream” speech, two wounded Marines on Hill 484 in Vietnam in 1966, an American sailor and nurse kissing at the end of World War II, and Dorothea Lange’s haunting photo of a migrant mother in 1936 — but others have never been seen until now.

“Only a very small percentage of these images have ever been published. The rest have been sitting in dusty archives in the form of negatives, slides, glass plates, etchings, and prints,” wrote Paco Galanes in an entry on Google’s blog on Tuesday.

Included in the many photos are serendipitous images from negatives left over from photo shoots — pictures, for example, of painter Marc Chagall and U.S. Marine Corps Gen. Evans Carlson in the same set (an odd juxtaposition) taken in the 1940s by Gjon Mili. Other negatives show the famous or infamous — Sophia Loren posing or Adolf Hitler shaking hands with Benito Mussolini. Some of Gjon Mili’s other negatives, for example, show rehearsals for and then the opening of “Macbeth” at the Metropolitan Opera in New York in 1959, with Marilyn Monroe and Arthur Miller in the audience.

Although the blog entry says the images date “all the way back to the 1750s,” the earliest images are from the Civil War era in the 1860s. Since the first photographic techniques date to the 1820s, it seems likely the date given by Google is a typographical error.

Life magazine itself started publication in 1883 as a humorous journal, but Henry Luce, who started Time, bought the rights to the publication and its name and started the photography-heavy version in 1936. It was published monthly until 2000.

Google (NASDAQ: GOOG) is based in Mountain View. The company has put forth a strong effort to digitize books and images and make them available to the public.

Ellie