I grew up with both Life and Look magazines in the house, but I was too young to read them - I just remember looking at the pictures. Does anyone here remember enough about them to tell me the differences between them? Did they each have a different core focus? Also, when did Look stop publishing?
Look folded in 1971. Although it spent a lot of its time trolling in Life’s wake, it had two frequent contributors its competitor didn’t: Photographer Stanley Kubrick and Norman Rockwell (Look was also after The Saturday Evening Post’s readership). Their relationship to Life was a bit like Spin’s is to Rolling Stone, or like Cracked was to Mad; it’s not better product or different product, just more product.
Like Life, the pictures were the star; the articles were not, shall we say, in depth or ambitious and served little purpose beyond selling the photos. They did little to challenge the middle-class preconceptions of their target demographic, which was basically Peoria.
Hope I remember this correctly; I checked their Wikipedia entry to be sure.
Life was a bit livelier; it was more apt to run the occasional story on drug abuse or poverty. They didn’t “get” youth culture, but could take pretty pictures of it along with their more conventional fare. They’d run lavishly-illustrated articles on Jackson Pollock, but undercut them with square references to him as “Jack the Dripper.” Their undoing (and they still are limping along as a website) was that the stories were aimed at unhip suburban parents, but the advertisers targeted someone younger and more affluent. Imagine Parade’s articles paired with GQ’s advertisers, and you can see the mismatch that caused Life to crash and burn two or three separate times.
One of the things I remember fondly about Life magazine was that on the final page they would feature one last photograph, a "Parting shot’ that even in a magazine devoted to stimulating pictures would cause you to pause and think and quite often to laugh. It was always tough but deliciously rewarding to read through the entire magazine without first turning to that final page, much like a piece of chocolate cake after a wonderful meal.
Life was far more popular and more influential and was considered the paragon of news photography. Many of the photos that are considered 20th century icons originally appeared in it.
Look was a knockoff of Life. Generally, if you a photographer, you’d try to sell to Life first, and then to Look if you failed. Still, Look was extremely popular and was usually a strong second to Life in that category.
Look also was a biweekly; Life appeared every week.
Both magazines failed for the same reason: before TV, they were the best way for advertisers to reach a mass audience, especially for color. But when color TV came along, advertisers were better able to reach the mass audience through TV – the audience was bigger and the cost per impression less. When Look failed, Life bought up their subscription list, but it didn’t help. Still, Life had over 5 million subscribers when it folded; it wasn’t subscribers, but the fact that nearly all the subscribers paid discounted rates, while 5 million subscribers was a far smaller audence than even the lowest-rated TV show.
My family subscribed to Look in the 60s rather than Life because subscriptions were so much cheaper as Look desperately tried to compete.
Life had set the standards earlier. Its WWII war photography not just set the standard but gave Americans the visual images by which they would remember the war. Life had all the money in the world. It could send photographers anywhere and have them do anything. There were jokes that Life photographers would tell Eisenhower to have the army take a step left for a better shot.
I missed that era. By the 60s, though, Look was trying to make itself a bit edgier and harder hitting than the cultural fluff that Life had sunk to. For one thing it hired Norman Rockwell to do covers. Wait, you say. That’s the opposite of edgy. Wrong. Rockwell had been radicalized by the civil rights movement. The Saturday Evening Post wouldn’t print anything but fluff, so he left. His very first Look cover, The Problem We All Live With, is one of the iconic images of that era.
Look also covered the youth movement with a bit more seriousness than Life. When I was a teen, magazines like Like and Look were the only places to read about rock stars. Hard to imagine today, but true.
Chuck has the rest of the story correct. Life was the ultimate giant among American magazines, then faded. Look was the brash younger brother.
Does anyone recall the story about one of the large format mags (Life, Look or Saturday Evening Post) trying desperately to make itself more appealing to advertisers, so they canceled the subscriptions for everyone who lived in rural areas. Among those caught in the blanket cancellations was the then-governor of Arkansas, Wintrhop Rockefeller.
Life was headquatered in a building across from an insurance company. One day, Life staffers held up signs with individual letters spelling out “Your actuarial tables are phony” at the windows.
The insurance company responded in the same way with “READ LOOK.”