Study On The Photographic Narration Of The American Magazine “Life”

American Life magazine was a weekly magazine founded by Henry R.Luce in 1936 and ceased publication in 1972.Its content coverage and circulation are extremely wide,and it is known as “Photographic Essay”.The 20 th century was the golden age of documentary-journalistic photography.Photographers jointly recorded and unprecedentedly created a visualized history of human.As an important part of the visual culture of the 20 th century,Life magazine has brought countless high-quality and in-depth photographic reports to readers through its strong capital power and modern production mode,which deeply affected the development of mass media and photography art,also shaped society’s collective memory and modern way of life.This dissertation will relate photography’s “decisive moment” to the “core plot” and“American myth” in narrative,survey from the smallest unit of contents—the single photograph to the “photographic essay” to the 1864 issue of Life.Based on the great changes in the 20 th century society,the using of photographic images to construct historical narratives as clues,tracing and analyzing the photographers’ practice and the final presentation of their works,restored the rise and fall of Life magazine from 1936 to1972,and outline the development of documentary-journalistic photography terrain.The conclusion is that “Life” revolves around four key words: the white maledominated nationalistic state,modern warfare,industry,and middle-class family life;The virtue of individualism,rise of the underdog,the fall of immoral and the triumph of democracy as the core plot to construct the historical narrative of “comedy of human error”,and with the detente of Cold War,the development of satellite technology,the growth of the African-American civil rights movement,and the rise of feminism;the dualism of photography and truth,gender and the nuclear family,news and entertainment were broken and its narration eventually collapses.