Human Interest: Photoessays from the Collection

The middle decades of the twentieth century mark the golden age of photojournalism, when heroic cameramen and -women went out into the field to track down stories, hard-working editors crafted layouts and captions, and curious Americans devoured illustrated magazines such as Life, Look, and Collier’s. Leafing through the pages of these magazines, readers would encounter hundreds of photographs, many of them merely supplying the who, what, and where. Other pictures, however, also addressed the how and why.