A LIFE in pictures
Like everyone else on the Internet, I’ve been perusing Google’s archive of images from LIFE. The photograph above is of Winston Churchill visiting the troops in 1939. Churchill’s name is one of the most fruitful search terms I’ve tried thus far: there’s Churchill savouring a cigar at Chartwell, Churchill and Nixon, a gallery’s worth of the Grand Alliance at Yalta, posters for the 1945 General Election, and more.
A handful of other finds:
- Bobby Fischer in genius mode, 1962.
- John G. Diefenbaker on the campaign trail.
- A woman operating the ENIAC, the world’s first general-purpose computer.
- Orson Welles and Cole Porter.
- Lewis Carroll in 1890, pondering Jabberwocks.
- Gene Kelly in mid-air—or perhaps mid-chair?
- A montage of planets as seen from the moon, photographed by the Apollo 17 mission.
- The King of Thailand playing his clarinet.
- The lifeboats on the Titanic.
- The manuscript of Percy Shelley’s poem “The Mask of Anarchy”.
- Louis Armstrong singing—no, celebrating “Hello, Dolly”, trumpet in hand.
- Walt Disney and Ward Kimball reviewing sketches for Pinocchio.
- Daphne du Maurier sitting by the wreckage of a ship, looking very much like a Daphne du Maurier heroine.
- Sergei Rachmaninoff’s monstrous hands.
- And it wouldn’t be Nick’s Café Canadien without a picture of Humphrey Bogart—so here he is standing in the crowd at the McCarthy hearings.
The collection isn’t limited to photographs: you can find portraits, illustrations, magazine covers, and early daguerrotypes. At some point, though, you should get back to work.