The second incarnation of Life magazine was created by Henry Luce with strong emphasis on photojournalism. It appeared as a weekly until 1972 and as a monthly from 1978 to 2000. It was the first all-photography United States news magazine and dominated the market for more than 40 years. The magazine sold more than 13.5 million copies a week at one point.
Life was so popular that President Harry S. Truman, Sir Winston Churchill, and General Douglas MacArthur all serialized their memoirs in its pages. Perhaps one of the best-known pictures printed in the magazine was the photograph of a nurse in a sailor’s arms, snapped on August 27, 1945, as they celebrated VJ Day in New York City. Luce gave as much space and importance to pictures as to words. This format was an instant classic: the text was condensed into captions for 50 pages of pictures.
The magazine was printed on heavily coated paper that cost readers only a dime. The circulation skyrocketed beyond the company’s predictions, going from 380,000 copies of the first issue to more than one million a week four months later. Life spawned many imitators, such as Look, which folded in 1971. Each week, during World War II, Life brought the war home to Americans and had photographers in all theaters of war, from the Pacific to Europe.
