Life on Google
Why Google holds the key to modernity and what Madonna arms have to do with the moon landing.
We love Google. And now they’ve joined forces with another icon of our time, LIFE Magazine, to bring us something truly marvelous — LIFE’s photo archive, spanning millions of never-before-seen photos from 1750 to today.
The collection, in all its searchable glory, includes photographs of every cultural icon you can think of, be it person or place or event.
From striking Civil War images, to Times Square in its 1942 glamor, to Neil Armstrong’s legendary first steps on the moon, to Steve Jobs sporting the “Mac guy” look way back in 1981 — everything that shaped the course of history and the evolution of culture is there.
Unfortunately, something sorely missing from the archive is the ability to browse with Cooliris the way you can with normal Google Image Search. Still, this brilliant piece of cultural capital is a force to be reckoned with.
Go, reckon.
- Day in a Life: Google Crowdsources Humanity A cinematic experiment by Google and iconic producer Ridley Scott aiming to document a single day, as seen through the eyes of people around the world....
- Google Groupies Galore: Goollery What album covers have to do with shoe shopping and Renaissance paintings - a comprehensive gallery of Google-related projects from a long the world. ...
- Historypin: Past Meets Present in Street View New Google Maps mashup shows how the world has changed by overlaying archival photos over present-day locations and crowdsourcing stories about them....
- Phylomon: The Game of Life A Pokemon-inspired push for biodiversity....
- Photographic Time Machine How to tear the space-time continuum with your bare hands and a camera lens – 3 photography projects that warp time through image....
do you think any of these images are in the public domain?
Alice,
What do you mean? They are, in the sense that they are publicly available for viewing. If you’re talking about copyright and licensing, however, I’d imagine there are all sorts of legal restrictions on their use. You can contact LIFE magazine and/or Google directly and ask, but I highly doubt they’d be copyright-free.
[...] the most culturally significant magazines release digital archives in one form or another. In 2008, LIFE partnered with Google to release one of the world’s largest and richest photographic archives. Last month, Popular [...]
[...] to archive all 137 years of the magazine. (You may remember Google’s groundbreaking similar partnership with LIFE Magazine in late 2008.) Not only is this spectacular treasure of information free, but [...]