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.
- 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. ...
- 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....
- History, Animated, Quick and Uneuphemistic The moon hoax, why Nixon lost the debate, and what dinosaurs have to do with Gerald Ford and a chicken. Despite our general dismissal of history as a boiling pot of mistakes that humanity never learned from, we have to admit it offers a great and telling tale or two....
- Project Documerica Tie-dye jeans, soda can houses, and what Thai Buddhists have to do with American cowboys. In 1971, as the environmental movement was reaching critical mass, the Environmental Protection Agency hired a slew of freelance photographers to capture the environmental problems, EPA activities and everyday life of the 70’s. For seven...
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.