Re: [Leica] LIFE....

[tedgrant@islandnet.com (Ted Grant)]

Gary Todoroff wrote:

>Just ten minutes ago I was reading the latest LIFE (photos of Springfield,
>Oregon kids on cover), and have never been as UNimpressed with a LIFE
>magazine. Layout is new and feels really hacked up. Photos seem like they
>were arranged by a junior high yearbook staff and some photo selections
>made you wonder who the photo editor was. I can't imagine that the selected
>photos represented the photographer's best shot.
>
>Is this a trend?

Gary,

I have really become disenchanted completely with LIFE magazine. Visually
it has been turned into something I wouldn't hang in the outhouse for fear
of giving me the runs or constipation!

The layouts of the pages are so confusing you can't tell where the pictures
start and end or ads blend with the layout you don't know what's editorial
(that's a joke also!) and advertising.

A recent issue had several pages layout of aerial photographs from around
the world, it had to be one of the worst I have ever seen in any magazine.
Couldn't tell where one started and the other began. Page after page of
complete visual confusion.  The dummies who layed that out should be
immediately fired as they have no sense of visual communication!

I'm afraid these days to look at LIFE with the admiring eyes of great
layouts and photography of the past, is like looking for a needle in an old
growth forest!

It's looks are equal to the trashy magazines of the grocery counters! Maybe
it's time to just pull the plug on it and put it out of it's misery, much
like a terminally ill patient.  I bet many of the great LIFE shooters of
bygone years who are in the "big Darkroom of the Sky" must be turning over
in their graves or drinking fixer to really put themselves out of their
misery.

I'm a died in the wool fan of LIFE of old, as I learned more about real
photography in the visual sense from it, than all the photo magazines put
together.  However,these days what I learn from LIFE is all the ways not to
take pictures! Maybe I shouldn't harshly condem the photography, but should
say,  the atrocious layouts of simple minded failures of the art schools of
the day!!

If I were the publisher of what once was the epitimy of photojournalism,
I'd fire the lot of the art directors, photo editors and bring in "real
people" with on the street smarts to make it look like the pedestal of
photography and editorial content it once was....... or I'd shoot the
magazine and put it down!



Ted Grant
This is Our Work. The Legacy of Sir William Osler.
http://www.islandnet.com/~tedgrant