life:
50 Photos That Brought the War Home. It’s Veterans Day and the least we can do.
No single picture from World War II — in fact, arguably, no single 20th-century photograph — is more famous than Alfred Eisenstaedt’s “VJ Day in Times Square.”
On August 14, 1945 — but when this photo appeared in LIFE, countless readers were drawn to the story it told: a man and a woman, both in uniform, both young, in the very heart of America’s greatest city, celebrating the end of a long, brutal conflict with that most unwarlike of gestures: a lingering, “Who cares who sees us?” kiss.
life:
The 1950s seemed to produce blonde-bombshell sex symbols like they were coming off an assembly line.
Jayne Mansfield (herself unfairly derided as a Marilyn Monroe clone) parodied the trend in this 1957 photo, relaxing in a pool filled with plastic hot-water bottles modeled after her own bikini-clad physique.
(see more — The Sexiest LIFE Photos)
life:
As we are approaching the 75th anniversary of LIFE Magazine’s debut, we present you with The 75 Best LIFE Photos.
Pictured: An Air Force pilot with patterns of light covering his face and shoulders is measured, like a contour map, for a perfectly fitted flight helmet in this 1954 Ralph Morse photo. Morse, whose technical brilliance so often meshed with his eye for the startling, striking image, managed in this portrait to perfectly illustrate the cover story of the December 6, 1954, issue of LIFE: a report titled, simply, “Jet Age Man.”
life:
J.R. Eyerman’s peek inside the opening-night screening of Bwana Devil, the first full-length color 3-D feature, certainly is peculiar: Men and women, young and old all angle in the same direction, formally dressed but for those silly specs over their eyes.
Funny as it is, with the audience members coming off like clones of an alien species, there’s also prescience in the photo — not just about the emergence of special effects in cinema but also, on a deeper level, about the hypnotizing nature of our entertainment.
(see more iconic LIFE photos here)
