My So-Called Life

A new life for Life.

More than 70 years after influential publisher Henry Luce started the first American all-photo magazine, Time Inc. and Getty Images are reinventing Life Magazine as a Web site offering free photos from top photographers from around the world for non-commercial purposes. How's that for changing times?

This isn't the first time the magazine has tried to be resurrected--in fact, it's been shut down three times before, as recent as when Time stopped publishing it as a newspaper supplement in April 2007. But the history of Life is so monumental to magazines and American history that the name still carries significance.

This is also the first time that the resources of the professional photo market will be available to consumers, including over 3,000 news downloadable photos and the extensive archives of Getty and Life Magazine.

While this seems like a clear indication of magazines moving solely online (the Magraker's biggest fear!), the new Life.com will be more a resource of photographs than a photojournalistic magazine.

The site is expected to go live early 2009.