Periodical Ramblings (11)

 

A New Book About LOOK

  Although you would have to be over fifty to have read this magazine when it was still being published, you will probably have seen a copy and surely some of the photographs published within it. It was an important magazine in the United States and that is why Andrew Yarrow has written a book about it. Here is a description of the book:

"Andrew L. Yarrow tells the story of Look magazine, one of the greatest mass-circulation publications in American history, and the very different United States in which it existed. The all-but-forgotten magazine had an extraordinary influence on mid-twentieth-century America, not only by telling powerful, thoughtful stories and printing outstanding photographs but also by helping to create a national conversation around a common set of ideas and ideals. Yarrow describes how the magazine covered the United States and the world, telling stories of people and trends, injustices and triumphs, and included essays by prominent Americans such as Martin Luther King Jr. and Margaret Mead. It did not shy away from exposing the country’s problems, but it always believed that those problems could be solved. Look, which was published from 1937 to 1971 and had about 35 million readers at its peak, was an astute observer with a distinctive take on one of the greatest eras in U.S. history—from winning World War II and building immense, increasingly inclusive prosperity to celebrating grand achievements and advancing the rights of Black and female citizens. Because the magazine shaped Americans’ beliefs while guiding the country through a period of profound social and cultural change, this is also a story about how a long-gone form of journalism helped make America better and assured readers it could be better still."

The Photographs
   This new book, Look: How A Highly Influential Magazine Helped Define Mid-20th-Century America, contains some photographs and more can be found on the Internet, offered mostly by people trying to sell old issues of the magazine. The Library of Congress has over four million of them which were donated when the magazine folded. They remain, at this point, undigitized. The Museum of the City of New York has some relating to that city and a few of those can be viewed here and here. 

The Last of LOOK
   Look ceased publication in 1971 and, as Yarrow notes: 
"The end of Look (and Life a year later, on December 29, 1972) marked the end of the mass- circulation, general-interest magazine and the greatest days of photojournalism. News magazines like Time and Newsweek could still appeal to the nation's opinion leaders and much of middle America, but their content was more limited, and photos were mostly an afterthought."

Sources: 

   An e-version of the book is available in the Western Libraries for those fortunate enough to have access. Western also has this earlier book: The Forgotten Fifties: America's Decade From the Archives of Look Magazine, by James Conaway. 

  My last ramble was about the magazines held in The Steven Lamazow Collection of American Periodicals. 

The Bonus:
   The director Stanley Kubrick was a photojournalist at Look. Western also has a book about that: Stanley Kubrick at Look Magazine: Authorship and Genre in Photojournalism.