Final Edition: Life Magazine Stops Publication

April 21, 2007 — -- For generations of Americans, Life magazine was a window to the world.

This weekend, Life is ending its run -- but not without leaving us with an incredibly rich diary of our times.

Life de-mystified far-off places.

Its cover brought home the sorrow of Franklin Roosevelt's death, and of John F. Kennedy's assassination.

It brought the tragedy and brutality of war -- and the bursting joy of peace -- back to the home front.

Before television, it brought the faces of American heroes into American living rooms.

"We did one thing which T.V. can't do," said former Life photographer Ralph Morse. "We made an individual picture, with photojournalism, that lasts forever. Every history book can use it."

Morse, now 89, recorded the space program for history. He shot Life's famous Mercury 7 cover, and even convinced NASA to let him mount a camera on the launch pad to capture the exact moment man left Earth for the moon.

"For two years, I worked with NASA about putting a camera on top of the gantry, and man left Earth through the camera," Morse said.

The image of General James Doolittle taking off for his raid on Tokyo, the first inside Japan after Pearl Harbor, lives forever because of Morse, as does the grim reality of World War II though his photos of wounded soldiers. Bringing the reader to the front lines was one of the things Life did best.

"It provided a place where the notion of the picture story, the notion of photojournalism as we understand it today, really could be developed to the maximum," said Willis Hartshorn, director of the International Center of Photography in New York City.

Every week, America anticipated the printing of Life's big, glossy pages. At its peak, nine million people stopped to look at history on Life's pages, before a decline in readership hit the magazine industry.

Former Life photographer Co Rentmeester, like Ralph Morse, covered war for Life. He went to Vietnam despite the danger.

"I needed to show what conflict of man against man was like," said Rentmeester. "Nothing is more dramatic and shocking -- war -- the ugliness of it, the pain, the suffering."