Life: The Classic Collection

4.4/5 ( ratings)

Quite often a LIFE book will, in words and particularly in pictures, tell a narrative tale. It will also surprise and delight the reader with rarely or never-before seen photos - images that, when we came upon them here in the office, delighted and surprised even us.

This is not that kind of book.

It is, we hope, and entirely new and exciting kind of LIFE book.

You have certainly seen many if no most of the photographs to be presented in these pages. They include our most famous or beautiful images. All of the ones you might want to revisit are here in this collection of 100 Classics: the sailor kissing the nurse, Madonna kissing her own image, McArthur coming ashore, Jackie Robinson coming round third base, the Fab Four in a swimming pool, the Mercury Seven in their spacesuits, Lady Di on her wedding day, the fearsome monkey rising out of the water, the gentle policeman helping out the little boy. The war photography is here, the portraits of Hollywood's kings and queens are here, the funny photos that, through the decades, graced LIFE's back page are here as well. All of the famous photographers - Alfred Eisenstaedt, Margaret Bourke-White, Gordon Parks, Carl Mydans, Larry Burrows, Philippe Halsman, Ralph Morse, John Leongard, Nina Leen, John Dominis and on and on - are represented.

But they are represented in an entirely new way. They are presented in an entirely new way.

Their photographs have earned the right to stand on their own, apart from any text or magazine layout. Originally created to help tell a journalistic story, they have, quite rightly, come to be recognised as independent works of art. And here they are displayed as such, cleanly and in an oversized format. Certainly the necessary information concerning what's happening in the pictures is in this book. But it is unobtrusively separate, and the photographs are allowed to sing as they've never sung before.

Twenty-five of them are included as removable prints suitable for framing: a Classic Collection within the larger Collection, a deluxe innovation in this new kind of book.

So here you have these inarguably beautiful artefacts - the prints to be treasured forever, and the book itself to grace your coffee table. In these pages is the best of LIFE magazine and - and is clear in many of these heroic. lovely or simply touching photographs - the best of life itself.