life magazine photo essay formula

The Life Magazine Formula for Visual Variety in the Photo-Essay

I've had a long-standing fascination with news and photo-journalism, and as well as numerous Magnum books, I have a battered copy of the seminal 'Pictures on a Page' by Harold Davies that I picked up in a charity shop for a couple of pounds. That book has hugely influenced how I take pictures even though I am not a news or documentary photographer. However, somewhere along the line (I don't recall where), I read about 'The Life Magazine Formula for Visual Variety in the Photo-Essay'. I immediately wrote it down for reference in my notebook and it's something I use, albeit subconsciously, as a framework for documenting the places that I visit.

For many years I struggled to find any more information about it (although there is a little more since I originally blogged  about it in 2009), but Michael Freeman does a good study of it in his 2012 book ' The Photographer's Story ', using the classic W.Eugene Smith essay ' Country Doctor '.

I should emphasise that this is very much a starting point for my documentation though. Bear in mind that this was developed for photographer's doing wide ranging human interest photo stories and not prats like me wandering round the industrial landscape or exploring mongy old mills. However, with a little intelligence, the framework can be applied to many different situations and definitely lends itself to the likes of wedding photography. It doesn't have to be adhered to slavishly - it can be adopted and adapted over time to suit your unique requirements. I'll illustrate my approach with some recent photographs of Brierfield Mill.

For a human interest story, see part 2: 

http://www.mechanicallandscapes.com/articles/2017/4/6/the-life-magazine-formula-for-visual-variety-in-the-photo-essay-part-2

1] Introductory or overall – usually a wide angle or aerial shot that establishes the scene.

I don't have a drone (or access to a helicopter), so an aerial shot was out of the question, and it's such a big site that there isn't a vantage point that allows you to get the whole place in. Sure, I could have taken several different ones from different perspectives (I did in fact), but I felt that Picture 1 has the most context. It shows the large size of the place, and it shows it in the context of the local environment - canal, gas holder, etc.

It doesn't have to be a particularly unusual or creative view, just one that sets the scene or gives context to the overall set. It is the whole, the other pictures are the parts.

2] Medium – focuses on one activity or one group.

In Picture 2, I opted to use a window as a framing device. It narrows our attention down to a much narrower field of view as well as a closer horizon than Picture 1. Like most of the set of photographs, I opted for a high contrast look, to give it a slightly grungy feel.

Picture 3 is another internal photograph, and narrows the scene down further to a smaller section of the shopfloor, now quiet and abandoned with a puddle of water forming from the leaky roof.

3] Close Up – zeroes in on one element, like a persons hands or an intricate detail of a building.

Picture 4 takes the idea of close up to extremes, but the mill was almost entirely empty, and one of the few interesting bits that remained was the clock. This is the wooden support for the clock mechanism which in itself isn't very interesting, but on it were carved the names of all the apprentices who had climbed the tower to maintain the clock, dating back to the 1950's.

Picture 5 is a typology of the glass engravings in reception, depicting the history of textile machinery though the ages.

4] Portrait – usually either a dramatic, tight head shot or a person in his or her environmental setting.

Not an easy one to interpret in this context, but in Picture 6 I gravitated to the clock and its tower as being the focal point of the site and included it in many of the photographs. This is my portrait of that clock!

5] Interaction – people conversing or in action.

Nothing for this one due to a lack of people or action! But in other contexts, this is easier. For events and weddings that I’ve photographed, candid photographs or even posed photographs (“keep talking please guys, I want this to look natural!”) can provide valuable contextual photographs of who was there and the atmosphere.

6] Signature – summarizes the situation with all the key storytelling elements in one photo – often called the decisive moment.

I'm always looking out for signs, and in Picture 7 I juxtaposed this with the empty shopfloor behind. I wanted to illustrate the idea of before and after, where once there was noise and activity, now there is silence and emptiness. Note the composition where I have effectively split the picture in two to give equal precedence to both.

7] Sequence – a how-to, before and after, or a series with a beginning, middle and end (the sequence gives the essay a sense of action).

Again, nothing in this context, but it shouldn't be too hard to think of how this could be applied in different situations. For example, I produce an annual photobook of all the photographs we take as a family every year (almost like a photo-essay of our year), and one of the things I do is photograph my daughter opening her Christmas presents - from a big pile of wrapped boxes, though the smiles and gasps of surprise through to her playing with the new toys afterwards. 

8] Clincher – a closer that would end the story.

I partially included this (Picture 8) because it was my favourite image of the set, and partially because it has a certain strength to it, far more so than the images of the same scene taken in landscape format. Why is this the closer? I think because of its strong composition - the diagonal lines of the foreground roof, as well as the rooftops on the tower and the building below it all seem to point to a single point which I regard as a form of full stop.

As I said at the start, this is a framework that forms the starting point of my documentation - I certainly don't stop when I've got images that satisfy the criteria, and neither do I carry the list round as a physical checklist to tick off. Rather, it's become an instinctive guide that I carry round mentally to show as many different aspects of a place as possible. Why not give it a try?

References and Links

Part 2 of this series: http://www.mechanicallandscapes.com/articles/2017/4/6/the-life-magazine-formula-for-visual-variety-in-the-photo-essay-part-2

http://time.com/3456085/w-eugene-smiths-landmark-photo-essay-country-doctor/

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LIFE Magazine and the Power of Photography

Margaret Bourke-White, Flame Burner Ann Zarik , 1943, printed about 2000. Gelatin silver print. Princeton University Art Museum. Photo by Margaret Bourke-White. © LIFE Picture Collection.

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Reconsidering the pictures we remember. Revealing the stories we don’t know.

From the Great Depression to the Vietnam War, almost all of the photographs printed for consumption by the American public appeared in illustrated magazines. Among them, Life magazine—published weekly from 1936 to 1972—was both wildly popular and visually revolutionary, with photographs arranged in groundbreaking dramatic layouts known as photo-essays. This exhibition takes a closer look at the creation and impact of the carefully selected images found in the pages of Life —and the precisely crafted narratives told through these pictures—in order to reveal how the magazine shaped conversations about war, race, technology, national identity, and more in the 20th-century United States. The photographs on view capture some of the defining moments—celebratory and traumatic alike—of the last century, from the Birmingham civil rights demonstrations to the historic Apollo 11 moon landing. Far from simply nostalgic and laudatory, the exhibition critically reconsiders Life ’s complex, and sometimes contradictory, approach to such stories through works by photographers from different backgrounds and perspectives who captured difficult images of ethnic discrimination and racialized violence, from the Holocaust to white supremacist terror of the 1960s.

Drawing on unprecedented access to Life magazine’s picture and paper archives as well as photographers’ archives, the exhibition brings together more than 180 objects, including vintage photographs, contact sheets, assignment outlines, internal memos, and layout experiments. Visitors can trace the construction of a Life photo-essay from assignment through to the creative and editorial process of shaping images into a compelling story. This focus departs from the historic fascination with the singular photographic genius and instead celebrates the collaborative efforts behind many now-iconic images and stories. Particular attention is given to the women staff members of Life , whose roles remained forgotten or overshadowed by the traditional emphasis on men at the magazine. Most photographs on view are original working press prints—made to be used in the magazine’s production—and represent the wide range of photographers who worked for Life , such as Margaret Bourke-White, Larry Burrows, Henri Cartier-Bresson, Frank Dandridge, Gordon Parks, and W. Eugene Smith.

Interspersed throughout the exhibition, three immersive contemporary “moments” feature works by artists active today who interrogate news media through their practice. A multimedia installation by Alfredo Jaar, screen prints by Alexandra Bell, and a new commission by Julia Wachtel frame larger conversations for visitors about implicit biases and systemic racism in contemporary media.

“ Life Magazine and the Power of Photography” offers a revealing look at the collaborative processes behind many of Life ’s most recognizable, beloved, and controversial images and photo-essays, while incorporating the voices of contemporary artists and their critical reflections on photojournalism.

The exhibition is accompanied by a multi-authored catalogue, winner of the College Art Association’s 2021 Alfred H. Barr Jr. Award.

• Ann and Graham Gund Gallery (Gallery LG31)

LIFE, November 23, 1936 (Cover photograph by Margaret Bourke-White), 1936

Illustrated periodical. LIFE Picture Collection. Photo by Life magazine. © LIFE Picture Collection.

Margaret Bourke-White, At the Time of the Louisville Flood, 1937

Gelatin silver print. The Howard Greenberg Collection—Museum purchase with funds donated by the Phillip Leonian and Edith Rosenbaum Leonian Charitable Trust. Photo by Margaret Bourke-White. © LIFE Picture Collection.

Gordon Parks, Red Jackson, Harlem, New York, 1948

Gelatin silver print. Princeton University Art Museum. Photograph by Gordon Parks. Courtesy of and copyright the Gordon Parks Foundation.

Margaret Bourke-White, Blast furnace cleaner Bernice Daunora, part of the top gang at Carnegie-Illinois Steel Corp., wearing protective breathing apparatus fr. escaping gas fumes, 1943

Gelatin silver print. LIFE Picture Collection. Photo by Margaret Bourke-White. © LIFE Picture Collection.

Margaret Bourke-White, Fort Peck Dam, Montana, 1936

(p. 96–97) [Harlem Gang Leader opening spread], 1958. LIFE magazine.

Illustrated periodical. Princeton University Art Museum. From Life magazine, November 1, 1948, pages 96–97. Photograph by Gordon Parks. Courtesy of and copyright The Gordon Parks Foundation. Text © 1948 LIFE Picture Collection.

Robert Capa, Normandy Invasion on D-Day, Soldier Advancing through Surf, 1944

Gelatin silver print. The Howard Greenberg Collection—Museum purchase with funds donated by the Phillip Leonian and Edith Rosenbaum Leonian Charitable Trust. Robert Capa © International Center of Photography / Magnum Photos.

Margaret Bourke-White, Mrs. Nelson and her two children outside her laundry which she operates without running water, 1936

Henri Cartier-Bresson, Untitled (Peiping), 1948

Gelatin silver print. LIFE Picture Collection. Henri Cartier-Bresson © Fondation Henri Cartier-Bresson / Magnum Photos.

Alfred Eisenstaedt, VJ Day in Times Square, 1945

Gelatin silver print, contact sheet. Alan and Susan Solomont. Photo by Alfred Eisenstaedt. © LIFE Picture Collection.

J. R. Eyerman, Audience watches movie wearing 3-D spectacles, 1952

Gelatin silver print. The Howard Greenberg Collection—Museum purchase with funds donated by the Phillip Leonian and Edith Rosenbaum Leonian Charitable Trust. Photo by J. R. Eyerman. © LIFE Picture Collection.

Alfredo Jaar, Life Magazine, April 19, 1968, 1995

Suite of three pigment prints on Innova paper. Courtesy Alfredo Jaar and Galerie Lelong & Co., New York. © Alfredo Jaar.

Margaret Bourke-White, Flame Burner Ann Zarik, 1943, printed about 2000

Gelatin silver print. Princeton University Art Museum. Photo by Margaret Bourke-White. © LIFE Picture Collection.

Alfred Eisenstaedt, Contact sheet w. frames from photographer Alfred Eisenstaedt’s famed set of sailor kissing the nurse and other images of the Times Square VJ-Day celebrations, 1945

Gelatin silver print, contact sheet. LIFE Picture Collection. Photo by Alfred Eisenstaedt. © LIFE Picture Collection.

J. R. Eyerman, 3D Movie contact sheet, 1952

Gelatin silver print, contact sheet. LIFE Picture Collection. Photo by J. R. Eyerman. © LIFE Picture Collection.

Carl Mydans, (Young man playing guitar in the stockade, Tule Lake Internment Camp, Newell, California), 1944

Gelatin silver print. International Center of Photography, the LIFE Magazine Collection, 2005. Photo by Carl Mydans. © LIFE Picture Collection.

Vintage NASA photograph of the Apollo 11 moon landing, National Aeronautics and Space Administration (NASA), 1969

Chromogenic print. Abbott Lawrence Fund.

Gjon Mili, Stroboscopic image of intercollegiate champion gymnast Newt Loken doing floor leaps, 1942

Gelatin silver print. LIFE Picture Collection. Photo by Gjon Mili. © LIFE Picture Collection.

In the News

Generously supported by Patti and Jonathan Kraft.

Additional support from Kate Moran Collins and Emi M. and William G. Winterer.

With gratitude to the Phillip Leonian and Edith Rosenbaum Leonian Charitable Trust for its generous support of Photography at the MFA.

“ Life Magazine and the Power of Photography” is co-organized by the Museum of Fine Arts, Boston, and the Princeton University Art Museum.

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W. Eugene Smith: Master of the Photo Essay

100 years since the birth of W. Eugene Smith, we take a look at the work of a remarkable talent who described his approach to photography as working “like a playwright”

W. Eugene Smith

W. Eugene Smith’s membership with Magnum may have been brief, spanning the years 1955-58, but his work left left a deep impression on many of Magnum’s photographers, as it has upon the practice of photojournalism generally. Smith is regarded by many as a genius of twentieth-century photojournalism, who perfected the art of the photo essay. The following extract from Magnum Stories ( Phaidon ), serves as a pit-stop tour through his most enduring and affecting works.

With “Spanish Village” (1951), “Nurse Midwife” (1951), and his essay on Albert Schweitzer (1954), “Country Doctor” is first of a series of postwar photo essays, produced by Smith as an employee of Life magazine, that are widely regarded as archetypes of the genre. The idea to examine the life of a typical country doctor, at the time of a national shortage of GPs, was the magazine’s, not Smith’s. Though it was preconceived and pre-scripted, with a suitable doctor cast for the role before Smith got involved, he was immediately attracted to the idea of its heroic central character. He left to shoot the story the day he first heard about it – and before it was formally assigned, lest his editors decide to allocate the job to a different photographer.

Country Doctor

He described elements of his approach in an interview for Editor and Publisher later the same year:

“I made very few pictures at first. I mainly tried to learn what made the doctor tick, what his personality was, how he worked and what the surroundings were… On any long story, you have to be compatible with your subject, as I was with him.

I bear in mind that I have to have an opener and closer. Then I make a mental picture of how to fill in between these two. Sometimes, at the end of the day, I’ll lie in bed and do a sketch of the pictures I already have. Then I’ll decide what pictures I need. In this way, I can see how the job is shaping up in the layout form.

When a good picture comes along, I shoot it. Later I may find a better variation of the same shot, so I shoot all over again.”

"When a good picture comes along, I shoot it. Later I may find a better variation of the same shot, so I shoot all over again."

- w. eugene smith.

Central to his method was his seeking to fade “into the wallpaper”. De Ceriani, the subject of the story and the one constant witness to his working approach, recalled in an interview with Jim Hughes, Smith’s biographer, that after a week Smith “became this community figure. He may not have known everybody, but everybody knew who he was. And you fell into this pattern: he was going to be around, and you just didn’t let it bother you. He would always be present. He would always be in the shadows. I would make the introduction and then go about my business as if he were just a doorknob.”

Smith set about what might have been a straightforward assignment with a demanding intensity. “I never made a move where Gene wasn’t sitting there,” Ceriani explained; “I’d go to the john and he’d be waiting outside the door, so it would seem. He insisted that I call when anything happened, regardless of whether it was day or night… I would look around and Gene would be lying on the floor; shooting up, or draped over a chair. You never knew where he was going to be. And you never knew quite how or when he got there. He would produce a ladder in the most unusual places.”

For a four-week shoot, Smith selected 200 photographs for consideration by Life , and while he clearly had some influence over the layout, he did not control it. It did not live up to his expectations; in the interview with Editor and Publisher, Smith stated that he was “depressed” thinking about just how far short it fell. It’s not clear how different it might have been had he done the layout himself. We know that the prints he made were rejected by Life ’s art director, on the grounds that they were too dark and would not reproduce well on the magazine’s pages. Smith’s vision was darker in other regards too. Photographs not featured in Life’ s layout, but reproduced or exhibited later, include a powerful series of 82-year-old Joe Jesmer being treated following a heart attack – an old man whose face terrifyingly reveals the apparent consciousness of his imminent death. Smith also chose, for his own exhibitions, troubling photographs of Thomas Mitchell prior to his leg amputation, as well as other images more baroque than those selected by Life . But the two brilliant images between which the layout hangs – his opener of the stoical doctor on his way to the surgery under a brooding sky and his closer, showing Ceriani slumped in weary reflection with coffee and cigarette – clearly reflect Smith’s won intentions for how the story should appear.

It is in the sophistication of its narrative structure that Smith’s innovation lies. In recorded conversations between Smith and photographer Bob Combs in the late 1960s, he elaborated on the ingredients of his approach (referring here to another story, “Nurse Midwife”):

“In the building of a story, I being with my own prejudices, mark them as prejudices, and start finding new thinking, the contradictions to my prejudices, What I am saying is that you cannot be objective until you try to be fair. You try to be honest and you try to be fair and maybe truth will come out.

Each night, I would mark the pictures that I took, or record my thoughts, on thousands of white cards I had. I would start roughing in a layout of what pictures I had, and note how they build and what was missing in relationships.

"In the building of a story, I being with my own prejudices, mark them as prejudices, and start finding new thinking, the contradictions to my prejudices, What I am saying is that you cannot be objective until you try to be fair."

I would list the picture to take, and other things to do. It began with a beginning, but it was a much tighter and more difficult problem at the end. I’d say, ‘Well, she has this relationship to that person. I haven’t shown it. How can I take a photograph that will show that? What is this situation to other situations?’

Here it becomes really like a playwright who must know what went on before the curtain went up, and have some idea of what will happen when the curtain goes down. And along the way, as he blocks in his characters, he must find and examine those missing relationships that five the validity of interpretation to the play.

I have personally always fought very hard against ever packaging a story so that all things seem to come to an end at the end of a story. I always want to leave it so that there is a tomorrow. I suggest what might happen tomorrow – at least to say all things are not resolved, that this is life, and it is continuing.”

Smith refers to working “like a playwright”. Elsewhere he compared his work to composing music, but perhaps it is the literary reference that is most relevant to “Country Doctor”. His doctor is the emblematic hero of a drama that unfolds through several episodes – literally, acts. His opening and closing tableaux have all the content of soliloquies: single moments loaded with psychological detail and environmental description that frame the play. Unlike the experience of a play in the theatre where we watch it once, from beginning to end – we read the magazine essay back and first, at the very least reviewing the images again once we have read through it. The details of the doctor’s actions lend weight to the opening and closing portraits, and vice versa, so that the depth of its characterization reveals itself across the images as a group. It would not work if it were not wholly believable as a record of a real man, and real events. As such, its strength and its place in the history of the genre lies in the manner in which it combines a record of reality within an effective dramatic structure; in short, as a human drama.

Smith’s essay-making technique was not something he developed independently of the media that published his pictures. It began with essays produced in the early 1940s for Parade , where photographers were encouraged to experiment with story structure (without the tight scripting Smith later encountered at Life magazine) and where stories often focused on an attractive central character achieving worthwhile goals against formidable odds. Although Smith is on record as being in constant struggle with Life over its scripts – as well as its layouts, the selection of photographs, and the darkness of his prints – it seems appropriate to view his achievement as the product of a dialogue with the needs and practices of the magazine. The battles were over the details of particular decisions rather than over the mission or purpose. In fact, Smith wholly identified with the Life formula, taking and refining it to a new level of sophistication.

After Smith left life in 1954 – after several prior resignations, his final departure was over the editorial slant given to his essay on Albert Schweitzer – he embarked on his ambitious Pittsburgh essay. Working for the first time outside the framework of a magazine, with only a small advance from a book publisher, and encouraged by Magnum’s reassurance that he would find a worthwhile return from serial sales of independently executed essays, he believed that he was positioned to produce his best work yet. He wrote to his brother that he Pittsburgh essay would “influence journalism from now on”, and described in an application for a Guggenheim Fellowship that he “would recreate as does the playwright, as does the good historian – I would evoke in the beholder an experience that is Pittsburgh.”

It did not really work. Becoming a landmark in the ambition of the photo essay, and including some of his strongest photographs, the Pittsburgh essay nevertheless failed to be the symphony in photographs for which Smith strove, After four years of work, it was finally published in the small-format Popular Photography Annual of 1959 , run as a sequence of “spread tapestries” – as he described his intended layout to the editor of Life . He titled the essay Labyrinthian Walk, indicating the story was less about the city than a portrait of himself locked in a life-or-death struggle with a mythical demon. Although he himself was responsible for the layout, he judged it a failure. The dream – or necessity – of Magnum failed also. He did only two minor assignments in the time he was a member, and he left completely broke, his family in poverty, with Magnum itself smarting from the investment it too had ploughed into the Pittsburgh project.

After the “Country Doctor” story was published, Smith declared that he was “still searching for the truth, for the answer to how to do a picture story”. Later, in 1951, he stated in a letter to Life editor Ed Thompson, “Journalism, idealism and photography are three elements that must be integrated into a whole before my work can be of complete satisfaction to me.” In 1974, 20 years after embarking on the Pittsburgh essay, Smith was vindicated with the triumphant artistic and journalistic success of “Minamata”, his story about the deformed victims of the pollution by the Chisso chemical plant in Japan. The story became a new paradigm for the possibilities of photojournalism, in part because of its unambiguous moral purpose.

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The Photo Essay: A FRAMEWORK

We can learn from the classic photo essayists of the past. Many of the early photo stories in Life took a formulary approach. In the early days of the magazine, stories were often told chronologically, scripted, and storyboarded. Photographers were given the formula and a list of shots to take.

The blueprint for a typical Life magazine story required eight types of pictures to ensure photographers came back with a variety of imagery—from an overall shot, to a medium view, close-up, portrait, a sequence, an action shot, a closer or end shot, and of course, the all-important signature image. 

Even today, if your photo story contained strong images from these categories, chances are it would be successful. 

By applying their simple framework to a story or essay, you can give your theme some necessary direction and structure. Moving through the next few steps in The Passionate Photographer process, you’ll learn to work your scenes and give yourself options from all the elements that follow, a shortened structure of the classic Life magazine photo essays. 

• Signature Image: This is often the strongest image, with visual impact that both tells a story itself, and invites the viewer into the story for further investigation. It’s the book cover, the storefront window display, the icon, and web page attention getter. We strive to make every image a signature image but in the end, it rises to the top from the following visual possible components that make up your essay.

• Portrait: A picture of a key player in the story you are photographing. Make sure to use background and/or foreground elements to help bolster the narrative. Environmental portraits, where the subject is caught in a real moment, can be very compelling, but so too can a series of posed portraits.

• The Overall or Wide View: This photograph gives us a sense of the place or a part of the place where your story happens. Note that sometimes a sense of place can be communicated in a series of detail images

• The Detail: Look for a photograph that examines details rather than the larger picture. This photograph can often be abstract and particularly eye-catching, a nuance. This detail also can reveal to the viewer something that would otherwise be missed in a wider shot. A series of small details can be used as a mosaic in one image.

• The Action: Show us what is going on in your story. Look for dramatic and poignant images capturing people interacting with each other, moments and gestures that elevate and amplify the visual communication in some way.

The above is meant as a guide or starting point should you need it. There are always new, innovative, and creative ways to present your story. 

Short-term projects become a powerful starting point for more comprehensive work, allowing you to delve deeper, showing new and different sides of an issue or theme. The more you shoot, the better you will get, but the catch-22 is this: If you are not inspired, you probably won’t shoot much. 

You need to find the inspiration, then let your passion for the project motivate you to work and improve. Your passion will create a strategy for momentum that will carry you through to the finish line.

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The Story of LIFE Magazine: Built on Powerful Photography

Photography Tips

LIFE Magazine is an icon in 20th Century American journalism. No other magazine before or since has placed such fantastic emphasis on pure, honest, visual storytelling, and done it so well. In an age that is rapidly seeing the decline of the professional photojournalist, this BBC Four documentary by British photographer Rankin explores LIFE in its mid-century heyday, as it paralleled the rise of America as a worldwide influence:

Made possible by advances in camera technology in the first part of the century (handheld cameras, 35mm film), LIFE was molded out of a general humour magazine into a weekly photo-centric news publication in 1936. It pioneered the “ photo essay ” – a documentary style of photography that told large narratives through several images. Through these, as well as the magazine’s unforgettable covers and sensational singular photographs, Americans were intimately connected to the world through images for the first time – through the First World War, the Korean War, and the Vietnam War, as well as the Civil Rights Movement and the Sexual Revolution.

LIFE lasted in this form until 1972, when it became financially unstable and ceased weekly production, printing intermittent “special reports” until 1978, then re-emerging as a watered-down general interest publication, released monthly.

When the American public looks back on the images that LIFE created, they see the nostalgia of their country’s golden years. In these same images, we photographers – particularly the aspiring photojournalists among us – see the shining moment of our craft’s history, full of optimism, possibility, and hope for the future. When we look at the photographs, we know that there is something drastically different about them, something elusive that is in some way unrivaled by any of the millions of photos made every day. Rankin’s interviews with some of the photographers that made LIFE so monumental help us to understand and appreciate their dedication – the way they honoured their profession and took it so seriously, striving always to make the image better, more impactful, more true. There is much to be learned from these wise men, when we take the time to listen.

LIFE was built by the founder of Time Magazine, Henry Luce. It began with only four photographers – Thomas McAvoy, Peter Stackpole, Alfred Esisenstaedt, and Margaret Bourke-White. Throughout the years, though, it employed some of the greatest photographers ever known, including Robert Capa, W. Eugene Smith, Henri Cartier-Bresson, and Dorothea Lange. Many will criticize LIFE for its frequent lack of objectivity – a value which is now entrenched in modern journalism, although is actually quite a recent idea. We often think of it as meaning “unbiased” or without opinion, but strictly speaking, it is simply an emphasis on facts, and a waryness of presenting ideas or opinions as truth. When the facts are in, it is virtually impossible for a person not to form an opinion, which makes unbiased journalism sort of a wild goose chase, and LIFE understood this.

The story of LIFE mimics the story of America’s ascent as a cultural superpower. Through the depression, the wars, the turmoil, it suffered as America suffered and triumphed as it triumphed. It was bold, fearless, and unflinching in its examination of the ups and downs of American life, always pushing to go deeper into the national psyche. Its journey holds true to its mission, as its very existence tells the dynamic story of the society that birthed, sustained, and ultimately destroyed it.

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One response to “The Story of LIFE Magazine: Built on Powerful Photography”

Excellent! A friend who worked in Time-Life photo for decades tipped me to it. One part of this online text wants to be reviewed and revised. LIFE began in 1936, but that part says (its) photo essays helped Americans follow the First World War (which was 1914-1918). I think the author meant Second WW (1939-45).

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The Life Formula for the photo story is a classic formula practiced by photographer W. Eugene Smith, who worked for Life magazine. in 1948 Eugene Smith’s photo story "Country Doctor" was published in Life magazine. The story was an instant classic, setting Smith firmly on a path as a master of the unique art form of the photo essay. He spent 23 days in Kremmling, Colorado, shadowing general practitioner Ernest Ceriani.  The Life formula for the photo essay is considered an effective method of building a photo story with visual variety and consistency. For a typical story assignment, the photographer should shoot at least eight basic types of photos to ensure complete coverage of the situation and to guarantee enough good pictures for a layout.

The photo types are as follows:  1] Introductory or overall – usually a wide angle or aerial shot that establishes the scene. 2] Medium – focuses on one activity or one group. 3] Close Up – zeroes in on one element, like a person's hands or an intricate detail of a building. 4] Portrait – usually either a dramatic, tight head shot or a person in his or her environmental setting. 5] Interaction – people conversing or in action. 6] Signature – summarizes the situation with all the key storytelling elements in one photo – often called the decisive moment. 7] Sequence – a how-to, before and after, or a series with a beginning, middle and end (the sequence gives the essay a sense of action). 8] Clincher – a closer that would end the story.  

Assignment:

1. Pick a partner to interview.

2. Ask them questions that will lead to you being able to plan a photo session for them that includes one of each of the types of photos that are in the Life formula.

3. Blog the questions that you asked the person. Blog their answers. 

4. Create a storyboard of the 8 shots you have planned. The storyboard can be hand drawn. You can then take a photo of it and post it to your blog. 

The interview is a participation grade. 

The storyboard is a daily grade. 

The blog post will be included in your end of the six weeks "Blog" grade which will be a major grade. 

All work should be posted to the blog by the beginning of class Thursday, October 8. 

Storyboard rubric: 

90-100 All 8 picture types are clearly labeled and clearly represented. 

80-90 Less than 8 picture types are represented. Those that are shown are mostly labeled correctly and mostly show clearly the focus of the photo and why it is important to the person's story. 

70-80 Some of the picture types are represented. Those that are shown are somewhat labeled correctly and the focus is somewhat clear. 

60-70 Pictures included in the storyboard don't contribute to the person's story and don't show a clear focus or plan. 

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Life Magazine and the Power of Photography

Yale University Press , April 2020 By Katherine Bussard , the Peter C. Bunnell Curator of Photography, Princeton University Art Museum, and Kristen Gresh, the Estrellita and Yousuf Karsh Senior Curator of Photographs at the Museum of Fine Arts, Boston

Offering an in-depth look at the photography featured in Life magazine throughout its weekly run from 1936 to 1972, this volume examines how the magazine’s use of images fundamentally shaped the modern idea of photography in the United States. Contributions from 25 scholars in a range of fields, from art history to American studies, provide insights into how the photographs published in Life — used to promote a predominately white, middle-class perspective — came to play a role in cultural dialogues in the United States around war, race, technology, art and national identity.  

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Life magazine’s six women who helped shape photojournalism

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Ariella Budick

Roula Khalaf, Editor of the FT, selects her favourite stories in this weekly newsletter.

When Life magazine launched in 1936, at the depths of the Depression and the height of the Works Progress Administration art project, its first cover photo was an awe-filled vista of towering concrete pylons and a couple of tiny humans. With that shot of Fort Peck Dam, Montana, Life established itself as a vivid narrator of the country’s glamour and struggles — and the glamour of struggle.

The accompanying article, titled “Franklin Roosevelt’s Wild West,” reported on the town that sprang up around the 10,000 labourers and their families who moved to the middle of nowhere and erected a great industrial monument. That the picture was taken by the Bronx-born documentarian Margaret Bourke-White also made a tacit argument that would become increasingly urgent: safeguarding America is too important a job for men to do on their own.

Life delivered that message inconsistently: only six female photographers ever joined the staff of the magazine that promised “big pictures, beautiful pictures, exciting pictures, pictures from all over the world, pictures of interesting people and lots of babies”. Now, the New-York Historical Society is honouring that pioneering half-dozen with a winsome and wistful exhibition that leaves us pining for more.

The show, too, opens with Bourke-White, who was famous for her portraits of giant machines before joining Life. In 1930, she was the first foreign photographer to penetrate the Soviet Union’s centres of industrial might. That portfolio led Life’s founder Henry Luce both to admire and underestimate her.

“What the editors expected [from the Fort Peck Dam assignment] were construction pictures as only Bourke-White can take them,” he wrote in a note to readers. “What the editors got was a human document of American frontier life which, to them at least, was a revelation.” The contact sheets that appear at the Historical Society allow viewers to mingle with the drinking and dancing patrons of “Ruby’s Place,” intrude into a ramshackle dwelling called “Gerry’s Apartments,” and greet a smiling waitress who sidles up to the bar with her towheaded child.

Bourke-White was the rare media hero, but Life’s first decade was one of mass effort, in the magazine business as well as in factories and war. Life celebrated the single, splashy image that could instantly imprint itself on the culture: Rita Hayworth in lacy lingerie, a tuxedoed Noël Coward coolly baking in the Las Vegas desert. But it also valued journalism as an ongoing, collaborative effort. Week after week, it published series that unfurled across multiple spreads, often by photographers whose names remain unknown.

The St Louis-born photographer Marie Hansen, for instance, joined Life in 1942 and was promptly assigned to track the newly formed Women’s Army Auxiliary Corps, which took on support jobs and freed men to fight. Hansen insinuated herself among the inductees as they drilled, serviced engines, organised supply chains, and performed other conventionally male duties. In one eerie shot, serried ranks of volunteers wear bug-eyed gas masks; they look like a battalion of disciplined arthropods.

Many of Hansen’s images finessed the violence, though. A formation of girls in uniform, hands on hips, skirts aflutter, hop joyfully in a field. The caption is soothing: “The exercises are designed to foster flexibility and endurance, not bulging muscles.” Hansen helped acclimate America to the idea of women in the military, portraying WAAC service as exciting but not threatening. The formula worked: over the course of the war, 150,000 women joined up.

Afterwards, as veterans returned from overseas, female workers who had stepped up to fill jobs in their absence suddenly became a problem. Employers and the government hustled them back to the kitchen, citing the “return to normalcy”. But Nina Leen, who had arrived in the US from Europe in 1939, cast a more sympathetic lens on the generation of women who had enjoyed a modicum of autonomy during the war.

For a 1947 photo essay, “The American Woman’s Dilemma”, Leen shadowed several young mothers through their routines of sacrifice and compromise. Josephine Gloss, who hasn’t yet been made redundant, leaves her home early in the morning, hugging a child she sees only on weekends. Then she heads off to her job at the doll factory, where she spends her days among babies made of plastic. Leen’s photos float a series of unanswered questions: Does Gloss feel guilty or proud to spend her days manufacturing fake children in order to support her real one? Does she have a choice — or a future?

In another vignette, a married couple hunch over separate drafting tables in their living room, while a toddler gazes up from her play chair. “Artist Edna Eicke paints covers for the New Yorker, does her work at home with her artist-husband,” the caption informs us. This portrait is a scene of stagy bliss, a perfect, if momentary, balance of creative career and engaged parenting.

The industrious Leen also underscored the costs of idleness. In one comical shot, a middle-aged matron slumps at a card table, looking desperately bored. She’s surrounded by a roomful of lookalikes with a surfeit of hair, money, and time. “Millions of women find too much leisure can be a heavy burden,” the caption warns. In another wry photo, a woman jiggles furiously in a slimming contraption, suffering for beauty. “Reducing session . . . ” the caption reads, and the rest goes unwritten: reducing the workforce can be wrenching.

An atmosphere of moral instruction wafts through the show. Work and family life were changing drastically in the mid 1940s, and have transformed since, but the mix of clichés, counter-currents, and social obligations still resonates today. Here are the McWeeneys on the lawn in front of their detached suburban home: Dad in a suit and fedora, Mom dressed up for a day of caring for the couple’s three catalogue-ready children. Surely there’s a martini and a pot roast in this household’s immediate future (and maybe a bedtime Valium, too).

But such “normalcy” can be hard-won, tenuous and oppressive. In 1949, Martha Holmes took a photo of a young white woman embracing the dashing, pencil-moustached black singer Billy Eckstine backstage, amid a crowd of grinning female fans. It’s a tableau of unselfconscious elation, a portrait of “just what the world should be like”, as Holmes put it. It was also a stick of dynamite, triggering a flood of written protests and blowing a hole in Eckstine’s career. “That picture just slammed the door for him,” recalled the pianist Billy Taylor. Life got that aspect of America just right: what brings joy to some also triggers rage in others.

To October 6, nyhistory.org

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From the Great Depression to the Vietnam War, the vast majority of the photographs printed and consumed in the United States appeared on the pages of illustrated magazines. Offering an in-depth look at the photography featured in Life magazine throughout its weekly run from 1936 to 1972, this volume examines how the magazine’s use of images fundamentally shaped the modern idea of photography in the United States. The work of photographers both celebrated and overlooked—including Margaret Bourke-White, Larry Burrows, Henri Cartier-Bresson, Frank Dandridge, Alfred Eisenstaedt, Fritz Goro, Gordon Parks, and W. Eugene Smith—is explored in the context of the creative and editorial structures at Life . Contributions from 25 scholars in a range of fields, from art history to American studies, provide insights into how the photographs published in Life —used to promote a predominately white, middle-class perspective—came to play a role in cultural dialogues in the United States around war, race, technology, art, and national identity. Drawing on unprecedented access to Life magazine’s picture and paper archives, as well as photographers’ archives, this generously illustrated volume presents previously unpublished materials, such as caption files, contact sheets, and shooting scripts, that shed new light on the collaborative process behind many now-iconic images and photo-essays.

Awards and Recognition

• Winner of the Alfred H. Barr Award Jr. Award, College Art Association
• Winner of The Photography Network Book Prize

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The birth of the photo essay: The first issues of LIFE and LOOK

Unpublished Paper held at: Summer School “Raumgeflechte / Spatial Relations”, University of Zurich – June 10, 2014 Sektion II: “Photographs on Pages”

With the arrival of photographs on the pages of magazines and newspapers a new format of communication developed: The photo essay. Today, photo essays are ubiquitous. But what led to their invention? The birth of the photo essay can easily be dated with the publication of LIFE magazine in 1936, where the term photo essay has been coined. A comparison of the first issues of LIFE magazine and LOOK, which appeared a few weeks after LIFE has been successfully launched, sheds some light on what photo essays are – and why they have risen very quickly to take over the publishing world.

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LIFE Magazine and the Power of Photography (Yale UP)

On the occasion of the 2020 exhibition "LIFE Magazine and the Power of Photography," this essay reevaluates longstanding myths about "the photo essay at life" while tracing how and by whom the magazine's varied photo features were actually produced over the course of LIFE's 36-year history.

FK Magazine

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Today, we are used to seeing documentary images by photographers such as Margaret Bourke-White, Henri Cartier-Bresson or Robert Doisneau as fine art prints in art museums and galleries. But most of these images were initially made for the magazine page where the photographer’s name often went unnoticed. The US-based illustrated weekly magazine Life was instrumental in the process of photographers gaining more recognition and global exposure. However, this process was neither smooth nor free of obstacles. This article aims to shed light on some of the obstacles that the photographers of the 1950s met in their way to reaching recognition as artists. On the magazine page, the photographer was not yet presented as a great artist. The first spread of Robert Doisneau’s series on Parisian lovers in the June 12, 1950 issue of Life is a typical example. Life was not directly concerned with changing the social status of photojournalists. But Life featured skillfully crafted and visually attractive photo essays, thus promoting the aesthetic appreciation of documentary image as such. By doing so, Life served as a catalyst for raising photographers’ self-awareness as creative individuals, artists even—something that was not yet taken for granted in the 1950s. But this was just the beginning of a long and laborious process.

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Images have invaded nearly every section of our daily lives, from newspapers and magazines to advertisements we see all around. The form that these images take usually is the photograph, accompanied by written (or spoken) words of some sort – and thus actually forming an interaction of text and images. The culmination of this interaction is the so-called “photographic essay”, a series of photographs depicting a specified topic accompanied by text, usually published in a magazine, in a book or on the internet. To understand the potential of both image and word, a close reading of the seminal photo-essay Let Us Pray Famous Menby Walker Evans and James Agee shows that words can be devoid of the logos, the “logic”, argumentative potential of language, whereas images on the other hand can be arranged to make sense in a logical way. Let Us Now Praise Famous Menis read as criticism of the photographic essay as it is used in magazines, a criticism that nonetheless shows why and how the interaction of images with the written word transforms realexperiences into experiences of reality, how it makes information happen.

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Life magazine and the power of photography.

Continue to explore Life magazine and its photographs through this interactive digital module . Here you can view each photo story featured in the exhibition as it was published on the pages of Life , as well as the cover for that week's issue and the paid advertisements adjacent to many of the stories. Begin by clicking on a thumbnail labeled with the story’s original publication date, such as August 9, 1943, for Margaret Bourke-White's "Women in Steel" or June 16, 1961, for Gordon Parks's "Freedom’s Fearful Foe: Poverty,” and then zoom in and out to study specific photographs and read captions. You can turn the pages to see the story develop over multiple spreads, the same way it was presented to Life 's readers.

Download Exhibition Checklist

Download Exhibition Didactics and Installation Images 

From the Great Depression to the Vietnam War, the vast majority of the photographs printed and consumed in the United States appeared on the pages of illustrated magazines. Offering an in-depth look at the photography featured in Life magazine throughout its weekly run from 1936 to 1972, this exhibition examines how the magazine’s use of images fundamentally shaped the modern idea of photography in the United States. The work of photographers such as Margaret Bourke-White, Larry Burrows, Henri Cartier-Bresson, Frank Dandridge, Gordon Parks, and W. Eugene Smith is explored in the context of the creative and editorial structures at Life. Drawing on unprecedented access to Life magazine’s picture and paper archives, as well as photographers’ archives, the exhibition presents an array of materials, including caption files, contact sheets, and shooting scripts, that shed new light on the collaborative process behind many now-iconic images and photo-essays.

A fully illustrated catalogue, which won the 2021  Alfred H. Barr Jr. Award , College Art Association, is available through the  Museum Store .

Life Magazine and the Power of Photography has been organized by the Princeton University Art Museum and the Museum of Fine Arts, Boston.

After its premiere at Princeton (February 22–March 15, 2020), the exhibition travels to the Museum of Fine Arts, Boston (October 9, 2022–January 16, 2023).

Life Magazine and the Power of Photography is made possible by lead support from Jim and Valerie McKinney. Generous support is also provided by the Humanities Council’s David A. Gardner ’69 Magic Project, Princeton University; Sandy Stuart, Class of 1972, and Robin Stuart; the National Endowment for the Arts; and the Allen R. Adler, Class of 1967, Exhibitions Fund.

Additional supporters include John Diekman, Class of 1965, and Susan Diekman; M. Robin Krasny, Class of 1973; Christopher E. Olofson, Class of 1992; William S. Fisher, Class of 1979, and Sakurako Fisher through the Sakana Foundation; the Sara and Joshua Slocum, Class of 1998, Art Museum Fund; David H. McAlpin Jr., Class of 1950; Nancy A. Nasher, Class of 1976, and David J. Haemisegger, Class of 1976; Tom Tuttle, Class of 1988, and Mila Tuttle; the New Jersey State Council on the Arts, a partner agency of the National Endowment for the Arts; the Frederick Quellmalz, Class of 1934, Photography Fund; Bob Fisher, Class of 1976, and Randi Fisher, and the Brown Foundation Fellows Program at the Dora Maar House.

The accompanying publication is made possible in part from the Barr Ferree Foundation Fund for Publications, Department of Art and Archaeology, Princeton University; the Joseph L. Shulman Foundation Fund for Art Museum Publications; Annette Merle-Smith; and the Wyeth Foundation for American Art.      

*Homepage banner image: Margaret Bourke-White , At the Time of the Louisville Flood (detail), 1937. Gelatin silver print. Museum of Fine Arts, Boston, The Howard Greenberg Collection—Museum purchase with funds donated by the Phillip Leonian and Edith Rosenbaum Leonian Charitable Trust. Image by Margaret Bourke-White. © 1937 The Picture Collection Inc. All rights reserved. Photograph Courtesy Museum of Fine Arts, Boston.

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Digital Photography for Community Health Activists

During the Spring of 2011, eight high school students in San Francisco were offered an opportunity to learn how to use photography as a tool to create awareness and social change. Over 12 weeks, each young photographer developed a personal photographic story related to the broad issue of health in their communities, and voiced their positions on what makes a community healthy. A selection of this work was presented at the Human Rights Summit, hosted by San Francisco State University on 5/2/11.

Photographers

Tuesday, march 15, 2011, life formula for visual variety in the photo story.

photo essay

When Dad Tried Doing Mom’s Work For a Weekend

‘Nurse Midwife’: W. Eugene Smith’s Chronicle of a Rural Hero

‘Country Doctor’: W. Eugene Smith’s Landmark Photo Essay

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Dabney Coleman, Actor Audiences Loved to Hate, Is Dead at 92

In movies like “9 to 5” and “Tootsie” and on TV shows like “Buffalo Bill,” he turned the portrayal of egomaniacal louts into a fine art.

By Mike Flaherty

Dabney Coleman, an award-winning television and movie actor best known for his over-the-top portrayals of garrulous, egomaniacal characters, died on Thursday at his home in Santa Monica, Calif. He was 92.

His daughter Quincy Coleman confirmed the death to The New York Times but did not cite the cause.

Mr. Coleman was equally adept at comedy and drama , but he received his greatest acclaim for his comic work — notably in the 1980 movie “9 to 5,” in which he played a thoroughly despicable boss, and the 1983-84 NBC sitcom “Buffalo Bill,” in which he starred as the unscrupulous host of a television talk show in Buffalo.

At a time when antiheroic leads, with the outsize exception of Carroll O’Connor’s Archie Bunker, were a rarity on television comedies, Mr. Coleman’s distinctly unlikable Bill Bittinger on “Buffalo Bill” was an exception. A profile of Mr. Coleman in Rolling Stone called Bill “a rapscallion for our times, a playfully wicked combination of G. Gordon Liddy and Groucho Marx.” (“He has to do something terrible,” Bill’s station manager said of him in one episode. “It’s in his blood.”)

Mr. Coleman’s manically acerbic performance was widely praised and gained him Emmy Award nominations as best actor in a comedy in 1983 and 1984. Reviewing “Buffalo Bill” in The Times, John J. O’Connor said Mr. Coleman “manages to bring an array of unexpected colors to his performance” and called him “the kind of gifted actor who always seems to be teetering on the verge of becoming a star.” But the ratings were disappointing, and “Buffalo Bill” ran for only 26 episodes.

Mr. Coleman revisited the formula in 1987 with the ABC sitcom “The ‘Slap’ Maxwell Story,” in which he played a similar character, this time an outspoken sportswriter for a struggling newspaper. He garnered another Emmy nomination for his performance and won a Golden Globe. But low ratings, this time combined with friction between Mr. Coleman and the producer Jay Tarses (who, with Tom Patchett, had created “Buffalo Bill”), led to its demise after just one season.

Mr. Coleman went on to play iterations of what had become his signature character on two more sitcoms, but with frustratingly little success: the 1991-92 Fox series “Drexell’s Class,” on which he was a corporate raider convicted on tax-evasion charges who accepts an offer of community service via elementary-school teaching in lieu of jail time; and the 1994 NBC series “Madman of the People,” on which he was an old-school magazine columnist who butted heads with his editor, who happened to be his daughter.

That show had an enviable time slot — it followed television’s hottest show, “Seinfeld,” on the network’s Thursday-night schedule — but it, too, was short-lived, canceled after 16 episodes.

While not necessarily explaining why all those shows failed, Mr. Coleman, in a 1994 interview with The Times, pointed to what he saw as a perennial problem with his sitcom projects. “Writers write wrong for me sometimes,” he said. “They’re trying to be funny, usually. Trying to make a joke. And that’s not what I do, you know. It’s not jokes; it’s not words. It’s acting. It’s acting funny.”

Dabney Wharton Coleman was born on Jan. 3, 1932, in Austin, Texas, to Melvin and Mary Coleman. He was raised in Corpus Christi by his mother after his father died of pneumonia when Dabney was 4 years old.

He attended the Virginia Military Institute from 1949 until 1951 and then transferred to the University of Texas, Austin, where he was a business major. He was drafted into the Army in 1953 and served two years in Germany in the Special Services Division.

By 1958 he had decided to pursue a career as an actor. He went to New York to study at Sanford Meisner’s Neighborhood Playhouse.

In 1961, a year after graduating, he appeared on Broadway in the spy drama “A Call on Kuprin.” Despite being written by Jerome Lawrence and Robert E. Lee, whose credits included “Auntie Mame” and “Inherit the Wind,” and directed by the Broadway veteran George Abbott, it lasted only 12 performances. It would be Mr. Coleman’s only Broadway credit.

But Hollywood beckoned.

In 1962, Mr. Coleman moved to California, where he began his television career with journeyman work on shows like “Armstrong Circle Theater” and “The Alfred Hitchcock Hour.” His first film, in 1965, was also Sydney Pollack’s first as a director: “The Slender Thread,” a suspense drama starring Sidney Poitier and Anne Bancroft.

He remained a busy if relatively anonymous character actor for a decade after that, appearing on a wide range of both comedies and dramas on TV and in small parts in big movies like “The Towering Inferno” (1974). Then, in 1976, he landed the role that would set the tone for much of his career: Merle Jeeter, the underhanded stage father of a child evangelist (and later the mayor of the fictional town of Fernwood), on Norman Lear’s satirical soap opera “Mary Hartman, Mary Hartman.”

Mr. Coleman later said of the series, “It had a very strange, off-the-wall type of humor, the key to which was playing it straight.” It was, he added, “where I got into this type of character.”

It was also, he said, when his jet-black mustache became an indispensable accessory to his retinue of unsavory characters. “Everything changed” when he grew the mustache, he later said. “Without it, I looked like Richard Nixon.”

If he was on his way to being typecast as an unrepentant lout, he made the most of it. “Mary Hartman, Mary Hartman” was critically acclaimed but never a bona fide hit (neither was its follow-up, “Forever Fernwood,” on which Mr. Coleman reprised his role). But Colin Higgins’s 1980 ensemble comedy, “9 to 5,” was a box-office smash and Mr. Coleman’s career breakthrough.

His character, the boss of the office workers played by Jane Fonda, Lily Tomlin and Dolly Parton, was — as was said more than once in the movie, including by Mr. Coleman himself in a fantasy sequence — a “sexist, egotistical, lying, hypocritical bigot.” Reviewing “9 to 5” in The Times, Vincent Canby wrote that Mr. Coleman, playing a “lunatic villain,” gave “the funniest performance in the film.”

Mr. Coleman would continue to play characters audiences loved to hate, notably the misogynist soap opera director in “Tootsie” (1982). But he also gave more nuanced performances, for instance as a judge in “Melvin and Howard” (1980), the love interest of Ms. Fonda’s character in “On Golden Pond” (1981) and a harried computer scientist in “WarGames” (1983). And while he remained best known for comedy, the only Emmy he won (he was nominated six times) was for a dramatic role, as a bedraggled lawyer in the 1987 television movie “Sworn to Silence.”

In the 1990s, he occasionally turned up in high-profile films, like the big-screen version of “The Beverly Hillbillies” (1993) and the Tom Hanks-Meg Ryan hit “You’ve Got Mail” (1998). But television was his focus for the rest of his career.

Mr. Coleman played lawyers on two CBS series: the legal drama “The Guardian,” from 2001 to 2004, and the sitcom “Courting Alex,” which lasted only 13 episodes in 2006. (His character on both shows was the father of the protagonist — Simon Baker on “The Guardian,” Jenna Elfman on “Courting Alex.”) He also appeared on the first two seasons of “Boardwalk Empire,” the acclaimed HBO drama set in Atlantic City, N.J., in the Prohibition era, as the mentor of the corrupt politician played by Steve Buscemi.

In 2011, in the run-up to production of the second season of “Boardwalk Empire,” Mr. Coleman was found to have throat cancer; his scenes were shot quickly, to allow time for his treatment and recovery. He returned to the show at the end of the season, when his character was ultimately murdered.

In recent years he was seen on episodes of “Ray Donovan,” “NCIS” and “Yellowstone.”

Mr. Coleman’s first marriage, to Ann Harrell, ended in divorce in 1959, after two years. In 1961, he married the actress Carol Jean Hale; they divorced in 1983. In addition to his daughter Quincy, he is survived by his children Meghan, Kelly and Randy; a sister, Beverly Coleman; and five grandchildren.

In a 2010 interview with New York magazine, Mr. Coleman reflected with pleasure on the gallery of rapscallions he had played over the years.

“It’s fun playing those roles,” he said. “You get to do outlandish things; things that you want to do, probably, in real life, but you just don’t because you’re a civilized human being.”

Hannah Fidelman contributed reporting.