Look: How a Highly Influential Magazine Helped Define Mid-Twentieth Century America by Andrew L. Yarrow (review)

In the world of American general interest magazines, Time Inc.’s Life takes up a lot of oxygen. Partially, this is because Life was a central component of the contemporaneous media fabric, claiming to reach roughly 17 million readers at its height. Its photography-driven journalism, adapted from earlier French and German periodicals, acclimated a generation of US readers to what Jeff Allred calls “the camera-guided mind.”¹

But Life also dominates twenty-first century histories of postwar culture for reasons having little to do with its original print run. Since 2008, through an arrangement with Google Books, every issue—along with millions of photographs from Life’s own archive, many never published—has been digitized and made freely available to anyone with web access. If one searches for images of John F. Kennedy, or articles about the Ford Motor Company, or coverage of the moon landing or postwar swimming pools, chances are they’ll find Life. Forty years after its demise, this outsized digital footprint means the magazine reigns supreme as the barometer of midcentury culture.

Andrew Yarrow’s passionately argued and deeply researched history of Look magazine, one of Life’s major competitors, returns needed texture to the print media ecology of the midcentury United States. Yarrow convincingly challenges the notion that Life sat alone on the throne of American magazines, but he also offers a nuanced rebuttal to the dominance of Luce’s “American Century” political agenda. To the first point, for most of the 1960s Look out-sold Life (and every other magazine) on newsstands while drawing top talent to its masthead: Norman Rockwell, Joseph Heller, William H. Whyte, Marshall McLuhan, Supreme Court justice William O. Douglass, anthropologist Margaret Meade, and a young Stanley Kubrick, to name a few.

To the second, Look succeeded in the market while championing African American civil rights and gender equality, challenging the worst of McCarthyism, and countering Luce’s jingoist “American internationalism” with its own “One World” philosophy. All the while, it deployed self-aware rhetorical panache: an exemplary 1950s advertisement reads, “Bored with life? Get LOOK, the exciting story of people.” Look’s mission statement was “the democratization of learning” (36), and its “tough-minded optimism” rested on the equation of access to information with social progress. A list of impending social and ecological catastrophes, from an early editorial, looks downright contemporary: “We believe that problems confronting our civilization—peace, poverty, population, and pollution, just to name a few— can and will be solved. But only if more people understand what’s really going on around them and why” (5).

For Yarrow, Look’s disappearance from contemporary cultural memory—and, along with it, a mainstream version of progressive politics—follows from accessibility rather than the quality of the product. Whereas digitized issues of Life are everywhere, Look only exists at the Library of Congress and the special collections at Drake University, in Des Moines, Iowa. While Yarrow’s main goal is to return attention to this popular, influential, but nearly forgotten publication, he also makes an implicit argument about the potential for black holes in cultural history. Look supported anti-segregation efforts in the early 1940s, ran a celebratory article about “the first homosexual marriage” in the early 1960s, and fought back against the worst of the Cold War’s anti-communist demagoguery. Yarrow sees this progressive impulse exerting a gravitational force on its competitors, bending the moral arcs of all other midcentury magazines. And yet, without easy access to this archive, Yarrow believes, the past looks more conservative than it really was.

Yarrow worked as a reporter for the New York Times and frequently writes for an array of other newspapers and popular magazines, a background that benefits the book’s narrative pace. The first half details Look’s growing pains as it helped develop the new periodical genre of photo weeklies. Founder Gardner...