World War II was still years from its conclusion when the city of Casablanca was immortalized at the intersection of love and war. The 1942 classic film Casablanca highlighted the Moroccan locale as a place where Allied and Axis forces lay in uneasy balance, and a place to which, and from which, European refugees hoped to escape. It was there that Rick Blaine (played by Humphrey Bogart) told Ilsa Lund (Ingrid Bergman), “Here’s looking at you, kid.” In 2016 another film, Allied, again brought moviegoers to Casablanca in 1942, but this time with Brad Pitt playing a Canadian military officer who meets and falls for a French resistance fighter played by Marion Cotillard.
In February of 1943, though, LIFE magazine followed a real-life couple through Casablanca for an installment of LIFE Magazine’s “Life Goes to a Party” feature. The photo essay followed an American naval lieutenant on a date with a French refugee whom he’d met there.
The two enjoyed a day out, with a picnic and a walk at the beach, but could not forget the world around them: they “hurried back for curfew” at the end of the outing.
Jim and Nikki went out on the town in Casablanca, 1943.
Eliot Elisofon The LIFE Picture Collection/Shutterstock
The couple watched the setting sun near Sidi Ab Der-Rachman.
Eliot Elisofon The LIFE Picture Collection/Shutterstock
Jim took his date’s picture as the tide went out.
Eliot Elisofon The LIFE Picture Collection/Shutterstock
Jim provided Nikki with a then-coveted American cigarette.
Eliot Elisofon The LIFE Picture Collection/Shutterstock
Nikki negotiated the rocks in high heels.
Eliot Elisofon The LIFE Picture Collection/Shutterstock
The couple was high up on the peak above the resort of Anfa,
Eliot Elisofon The LIFE Picture Collection/Shutterstock
The picturesque beach at Sidi Ab Der-Rachman.
Eliot Elisofon The LIFE Picture Collection/Shutterstock
Though the temperature was 70 degrees, the water was still cold.
Eliot Elisofon The LIFE Picture Collection/Shutterstock
Casablanca was safe enough to go out in during the day, but much less so at night.
Eliot Elisofon The LIFE Picture Collection/Shutterstock
Nikki spoke French and a little Arabic during a bargaining session.
Eliot Elisofon The LIFE Picture Collection/Shutterstock
They enjoyed a lunch cooked by Casablanca’s best chef, Papa Gouim, late of Paris and the S.S. Normandie; the lunch included hardboiled eggs, sardines, herring, beans, and African red wine.
Eliot Elisofon The LIFE Picture Collection/Shutterstock
At the Navy fliers’ club in Casablanca, called the Airdale Club, Nikki met Jim’s friends. The Navy rented the villa that was confiscated from Axis sympathizer.
Eliot Elisofon The LIFE Picture Collection/Shutterstock
Music and dancing for the Muslim `Feast of the Mutton’ was paid for by Jim. Nikki was the only unveiled woman present.
Eliot Elisofon The LIFE Picture Collection/Shutterstock
Locals watched the couple touring the town.
Eliot Elisofon The LIFE Picture Collection/Shutterstock
By covering political scandals such as the Teapot Dome bribery incident, and giving ink to poker-game shootings and boozy brawls, the New York Daily News America’s first successful tabloid paper dredged the depths of ’20s and ’30s culture, replacing staid journalism with lurid photos and a shocking, sleazy sensibility. In the process, it offered narratives tailor-made for the burgeoning world of pulp fiction and the films noirs that ensued.
Novelist James M. Cain’s Double Indemnity and The Postman Always Rings Twice, for instance, were based on the murderous machinations of Ruth Snyder, who killed her husband with the help of her lover. Dashiell Hammett’s Red Harvest and David Grubb’s The Night of the Hunter are among other works that were “ripped from the headlines.”
The tabloids also influenced the distinctive look of the films that were inspired by these fictions. In the 1930s, flashbulbs, new cameras, and faster shutter speeds allowed newspaper photographers to ply their trade pretty much anywhere, anytime. The result: a daily documentation of the previously unexplored underbelly of urban existence. Even the look of these photos added to their impact: “The lack of naturalness in these pictures was not a shortcoming but a source of their melodramatic power,” wrote John Szarkowsi in Photography Until Now. “It is as though terrible and exemplary secrets were revealed for an instant by lightning.”
Historian Luc Sante has even made a connection between specific photos and subsequent films. “A 1945 picture of a slaying at Tony’s Restaurant, with its violent angle, oblique window approach, and mocking use of advertisements, anticipates the blunt force of Anthony Mann’s T-Men . . . and the jazzy chill of Robert Aldrich’s Kiss Me Deadly,” he wrote, adding that a 1930 shot of a homicide at New York’s Chinatown People’s Theater reflects the look of Howard Hawks’s 1932 film Scarface.
No photographer was more identified with tabloid journalism than Arthur Fellig, a.k.a. Weegee, who made his name freelancing out of Manhattan’s police headquarters. (“Here was the nerve center of the city I knew,” he wrote, “and here I would find the pictures I wanted.”) With relentlessness and relish, he covered auto accidents, deli holdups, gambling joints, and “jumpers,” turning a nation of readers into rubberneckers even as he imbued ghastly Gotham with a kind of poetry. “Crime was my oyster,” Weegee said, “and I liked it.”
Weegee’s first photography book, 1945’s autobiographical Naked City, inspired the 1948 noir film The Naked City. Reflecting the documentary style that gave many noirs their sense of authenticity, The Naked City was shot entirely in New York City and ended with the iconic line “There are eight million stories in the naked city this has been one of them.”
The success of the book and film led to a minor acting career for Weegee. In a self-reflexive Hollywood hall of mirrors, he appeared in a few of the films his work had helped shape: 1949’s classic boxing noir, The Set-Up, and 1951’s forgettable remake of Fritz Lang’s proto-noir M. Even as the photographer disdained L.A.’s natives as “zombies” (“they drink formaldehyde instead of coffee, and have no sex organs”), he was collecting material for his next book: Naked Hollywood, naturally.
Read more in LIFE’s new special edition Film Noir: 75 Years of the Greatest Crime Films, available on Amazon.
Mildred Pierce, starring Joan Crawford, 1945.
Courtesy Everett Collection
Jack Carson (kneeling) and Zachary Scott in Mildred Pierce, 1945.
Courtesy Everett Collection
Faye Dunaway and Warren Beatty in Bonnie and Clyde, 1967.
Courtesy Everett Collection
Touch Of Evil director Orson Welles, 1958.
Courtesy Everett Collection
Touch of Evil, 1958.
Courtesy Everett Collection
Alfred Hitchcock at work for the film Shadow of a Doubt, 1943.
William Vandivert The LIFE Picture Collection/Shutterstock
William Hurt and Kathleen Turner, Body Heat, 1981.
The 1959 swimming and diving championships of the Amateur Athletic Union, which were held in Palm Beach, Fla., didn’t exactly look like the diving events that you would see at a national competition today.
Even though the event was supposed to be the indoor championships, it was held outside due to the heat. And the 200 or so girls and young women of the AAU wore the same modest one-piece bathing suits that can be seen in many poolside photos from the 1950s, not the sleek and modern suit today’s divers wear. Finally, perhaps unsurprisingly for 1959, much of the attention they garnered at least in the pages of LIFE magazine focused a great deal on the looks of the “pretty plungers,” rather than their skill. The burnt cork that they applied below their eyes, to minimize the glare off the water, was compared to eyeshadow.
They could not, LIFE noted dismissively, “disguise the fact that they were athletes second, girls first.”
The pictures that ran alongside the story were black and white, and provided no information about who won or what the events even were. But the photographer, Peter Stackpole, also captured these vivid color images of the divers in action. And, seeing them now, it’s clear that LIFE’s unnamed writer didn’t quite get the point. Decades later, we can’t know how central athleticism was to any of these women’s identities, but they were athletes, no hedging required. Though Stackpole did not record who among his subjects proved victorious, his photos provide evidence that a gravity-defying dive could be as impressive then as it is today.
Women’s diving champions in Florida, 1959.
Peter Stackpole The LIFE Picture Collection/Shutterstock
Women’s diving champions in Florida, 1959.
Peter Stackpole The LIFE Picture Collection/Shutterstock
Women’s diving champions in Florida, 1959.
Peter Stackpole The LIFE Picture Collection/Shutterstock
Women’s diving champions in Florida, 1959.
Peter Stackpole The LIFE Picture Collection/Shutterstock
Women’s diving champions in Florida, 1959.
Peter Stackpole The LIFE Picture Collection/Shutterstock
Women’s diving champions in Florida, 1959.
Peter Stackpole The LIFE Picture Collection/Shutterstock
Women’s diving champions in Florida, 1959.
Peter Stackpole The LIFE Picture Collection/Shutterstock
Women’s diving champions in Florida, 1959.
Peter Stackpole The LIFE Picture Collection/Shutterstock
Women’s diving champions in Florida, 1959.
Peter Stackpole The LIFE Picture Collection/Shutterstock
Women’s diving champions in Florida, 1959.
Peter Stackpole The LIFE Picture Collection/Shutterstock
Women’s diving champions in Florida, 1959.
Peter Stackpole The LIFE Picture Collection/Shutterstock
Women’s diving champions in Florida, 1959.
Peter Stackpole The LIFE Picture Collection/Shutterstock
Women’s diving champions in Florida, 1959.
Peter Stackpole The LIFE Picture Collection/Shutterstock
Women’s diving champions in Florida, 1959.
Peter Stackpole The LIFE Picture Collection/Shutterstock
Women’s diving champions in Florida, 1959.
Peter Stackpole The LIFE Picture Collection/Shutterstock
Women’s diving champions in Florida, 1959.
Peter Stackpole The LIFE Picture Collection/Shutterstock
The migration that accompanied India’s independence and partition in 1947 was the largest movement of peoples in human history, but almost no one expected it to happen. When the new Muslim homeland of Pakistan split off from the former British Indian empire, it was accepted that people might shift across the new borders, but India’s religious communities were so intertwined that mass transfers of population seemed impossible. In the event, around 16 million Hindus, Sikhs and Muslims were driven out by reciprocal pogroms, and became a modern phenomenon: migrants.
Surprisingly few photographs of this world-changing exodus survive, and some of the best were taken by Margaret Bourke-White for LIFE. The rediscovery of her contact sheets, together with the notes written by the reporter Lee Eitingon, give a powerful sense of how she did it. Having chronicled the liberation of Buchenwald and nearly every theatre of war in World War II, the celebrated and notoriously resourceful Bourke-White was not fazed by the chaos of a newly divided subcontinent. Eitingon, though in her mid-20s, was an experienced conflict reporter. A note in the archives reads: “Old India hands warned that the assignment was impossible for women – transportation would be difficult, native women were being abducted, even British army officers were being attacked.”
Ingeniously, they obtained a Jeep and an escort of a few soldiers from the military authorities including an English captain nicknamed “Snuggles” and drove to Punjab. “We were dressed in khaki shirts and slacks,” Eitingon wrote, “and we carried bedrolls, a four-gallon thermos of purified water, camera equipment and typewriter.” Although they were certainly aided by Bourke-White privilege, the two women were constantly close to danger. Driving towards Lahore, they encountered a stalled truck packed with refugees, which was in the process of being surrounded “by about 30 men with ten-foot-long spears.” The soldiers in their escort intervened. “The captain shot one attacker, then leaped into the Jeep. A stray shot followed us as we drove off,” wrote Eitingon.
In the absence of a comprehensive visual record of the horrors of 1947—in which at least one million people are estimated to have died—Bourke-White’s photographs have gained an iconic value. At Beas near Amritsar, she noted: “There were 17 corpses lying at the left of the railway tracks, the flies thick on the bloody stumps of arms.”
We “see” the partition of India through her formalized, decolored, black-and-white images: kafilas or human caravans of refugees in Punjab, wooden bullock-carts piled with belongings, faces hovering between life and death, corpses in a river watched by fat vultures, an aerial shot of migrants sheltering in Qila-i-Kuhna mosque in Delhi, a cholera hospital in Kasur in the new Pakistan which, Bourke-White records here, was “pervaded with a sickening, sweetish smell.”
With the recovery of her notes from the LIFE archives, we are afforded, nearly 70 years later, little details that return some humanity to the nameless suffering figures. A famous photograph, of a shrouded corpse of a child who has died of starvation, comes back to life. We learn his name is Mansoor; he is 4 years old, and he is being buried near Lahore Cantonment railway station. The figures around him are his mother, father and grandfather. When their house in Delhi was looted, they had stayed at a refugee camp in Humayun’s Tomb. Then some good news came: because the father was a mechanic for the water and sewerage board in Delhi, the family would be able to board a “Pakistan Special” train, bearing government employees. But in Punjab its passage was blocked, and for three days no food or water was allowed to the train. Mansoor died. Now he was being buried, and Margaret Bourke-White was a witness.
What of the stately image of a Sikh man bearing an ailing woman on his shoulders as they seek to walk to safety? From a biography of Bourke-White, we know this picture was to an extent staged. “We were there for hours,” Eitingon recalled years later. “She told them to go back again and again and again. They were too frightened to say no.” From the contact sheets, we can now see that an army vehicle was nearby, and the photograph was cropped. Bourke-White’s fierce determination to get just the pictures she wanted does not negate their quality, even if they were far from candid. From her scrupulously recorded notes, we learn this man was a farmer from Lyallpur district, now heading to India with his sick wife on his shoulders. Their kafila had been raided; 103 of its members were dead.
Across northern India and the nascent Pakistan, from Karachi to Bengal, many millions of people suffered in 1947 and the years that followed. Like all historical events, partition must be seen in the context of the time: politicians on all sides failed utterly to grasp the catastrophe they were creating. The British, bankrupt from World War II and exhausted by a dissolving empire, thought the solutions proposed by the Viceroy of India, Lord Mountbatten, and endorsed by nationalist Indian and proto-Pakistani statesmen, provided a constitutional answer.
What they had not foreseen was that terrified populations, when spurred by a new kind of identity politics, would flee or be driven from the lands in which they had lived for centuries. In that respect, the events chronicled in LIFE in 1947 seem very similar to ones that can still be seen in the world today.
Patrick French is the author of India: A Portrait and Liberty or Death: India’s Journey to Independence and Division, and a winner of the National Books Critics Circle Award.
Liz Ronk edited this gallery for LIFE.com. Follow her on Twitter @lizabethronk.
Original caption: “Spindly but determined old Sikh, carrying ailing wife, sets out on the dangerous journey to India’s border.”
Margaret Bourke-White The LIFE Picture Collection/Shutterstock
Original caption: “Misery of the dispossessed is reflected in the face of this Moslem boy, perched on the wall of the Purana Qila fortress in New Delhi. Below him thousands of his unhappy fellows, who have fled their homes in terror, are trying to survive until they can organize a convoy for the long march to Pakistan. In their squalid city of tents and lean-tos they have almost no room to sleep and little to eat. They are surrounded by filth and many will die without ever leaving camp.”
Margaret Bourke-White The LIFE Picture Collection/Shutterstock
Contact sheet showing the mass migration.
Margaret Bourke-White The LIFE Picture Collection/Shutterstock
Millions of people fled shortly after the creation of the nations of India and Pakistan.
Margaret Bourke-White The LIFE Picture Collection/Shutterstock
Original caption: “Mosque within fort also packed with homeless Moslems. The great dome provides a measure of shelter against the elements for some of the refugees.”
Margaret Bourke-White The LIFE Picture Collection/Shutterstock
The Great Migration, 1947
Margaret Bourke-White The LIFE Picture Collection/Shutterstock
Contact sheet showing the mass migration.
Margaret Bourke-White The LIFE Picture Collection/Shutterstock
Contact sheet showing the mass migration.
Margaret Bourke-White The LIFE Picture Collection/Shutterstock
The Great Migration, 1947.
Margaret Bourke-White The LIFE Picture Collection/Shutterstock
The Great Migration, 1947.
Margaret Bourke-White The LIFE Picture Collection/Shutterstock
The Great Migration, 1947.
Margaret Bourke-White The LIFE Picture Collection/Shutterstock
The Great Migration, 1947.
Margaret Bourke-White The LIFE Picture Collection/Shutterstock
The Great Migration, 1947.
Margaret Bourke-White The LIFE Picture Collection/Shutterstock
The Great Migration, 1947.
Margaret Bourke-White The LIFE Picture Collection/Shutterstock
The Great Migration, 1947.
Margaret Bourke-White The LIFE Picture Collection/Shutterstock
The Great Migration, 1947.
Margaret Bourke-White The LIFE Picture Collection/Shutterstock
A Muslim refugee cholera patient with child, getting an intravenous glucose solution in the infusion room at the Infectious Disease Hospital.
Margaret Bourke-White The LIFE Picture Collection/Shutterstock
Muslim refugee cholera patients in filthy conditions at the Infectious Disease Hospital upon their arrival after their long march from Delhi, India.
Margaret Bourke-White The LIFE Picture Collection/Shutterstock
Original caption: “As the bitter migration goes on a Moslem family pauses to bury a child who died of starvation.”
Margaret Bourke-White The LIFE Picture Collection/Shutterstock
Contact sheet showing the mass migration.
Margaret Bourke-White The LIFE Picture Collection/Shutterstock
The Great Migration, 1947.
Margaret Bourke-White The LIFE Picture Collection/Shutterstock
Great sports photography is an art of its own, and there are few chances to practice that art like the Olympics. As the world’s athletes gather to compete, so too do the photographers who capture them in action.
During LIFE Magazine’s decades as a source of the world’s most iconic photography, the magazine covered its fair share of Olympics. The images produced are as varied as the sports they portray. The photographs show the quiet moments before the race begins. They show the concentration and strength needed to win and the joy of knowing you might have done so. They show the graceful, almost abstract, forms of bodies in motion, and the iconic moments when athletes become legends.
Here’s a look back at some of the best LIFE Magazine photography from the summer Olympics.
LIFE magazine Olympic covers through the years.
LIFE Magazine
Jamaican athlete Herb McKenley standing on a track at the 1948 summer Olympics in London.
William Sumits The LIFE Picture Collection/Shutterstock
Competitors diving into pool during swimming events at the 1948 summer Olympics in London.
Ed Clark The LIFE Picture Collection/Shutterstock
US decathlon winner Robert B. Mathias waiting for turn at pole vault at the 1948 summer Olympics in London.
Ed Clark The LIFE Picture Collection/Shutterstock
Czech track and field gold medalist Emil Zatopek leading pack during the 1952 Olympic games in Helsinki, Finland.
Mark Kauffman The LIFE Picture Collection/Shutterstock
Cycling at the 1952 summer Olympics in Helsinki, Finaland.
Ralph Crane The LIFE Picture Collection/Shutterstock
Athletes competing in the 10,000-meter walk at the 1952 summer Olympics in Helsinki, Finland.
Mark Kauffman The LIFE Picture Collection/Shutterstock
Robert B. Mathias attempting the pole vault at 1952 summer Olympics in Helsinki, Finland.
Mark Kauffman The LIFE Picture Collection/Shutterstock
Gunhild Larking, Sweden’s entry for the high jump, clearing the high bar during the 1956 summer Olympics in Melbourne, Australia.
George Silk The LIFE Picture Collection/Shutterstock
Fencers competing in the 1956 summer Olympics in Melbourne, Australia.
John Dominis The LIFE Picture Collection/Shutterstock
US Runner Wilma Rudolph winning women’s 100-meter race at the 1960 summer Olympics in Rome.
Mark Kauffman The LIFE Picture Collection/Shutterstock
German Armin Harry (C) during men’s 100-meter dash event at the 1960 summer Olympics in Rome, Italy.
George Silk The LIFE Picture Collection/Shutterstock
U.S. platform diver Frank Gorman competing in the 1964 summer Olympics in Tokyo, Japan.
Art Rickerby The LIFE Picture Collection/Shutterstock
U. S. swimmers competing during the 1964 summer Olympics in Tokyo.
Art Rickerby The LIFE Picture Collection/Shutterstock
American track stars Tommie Smith (C) and John Carlos (R) standing on podium after winning gold and bronze Olympic medals, respectively, raising black-gloved fists, in support of civil rights/black power, while Australian silver medalist Peter Norman stands by at the 1968 summer Olympics in Mexico City.
John Dominis The LIFE Picture Collection/Shutterstock
US swimmer Mark Spitz training for the 1972 summer Olympics in Munich, West Germany.
Co Rentmeester The LIFE Picture Collection/Shutterstock
US wrestler eventual gold medal winner Wayne Wells (top) overpowered West German Adolf Seger in freestyle welterweight elimination match at the 1972 summer Olympics in Munich, West Germany.
Co Rentmeester The LIFE Picture Collection/Shutterstock
US track athlete Steve Prefontaine running a race at the 1972 summer Olympics in Munich, West Germany.
Co Rentmeester The LIFE Picture Collection/Shutterstock
U.S. gymnast Ludmila Turishcheva in action on the vault at during the 1972 Summer Olympics in Munich, West Germany.
John Dominis The LIFE Picture Collection/Shutterstock
Kenyan track star Kipchoge Keino finishing ahead of teammate Ben Jipcho (574) in the 3,000-meter steeplechase final at the 1972 summer Olympics in Munich, West Germany.
John Dominis The LIFE Picture Collection/Shutterstock
The summer of 1953 in New York City was torturous. The temperature was in the 90s (or higher) every day between July 15 and 21, and again between Aug. 24 and Sept. 4 a record-setting 12 days in a row. And that’s not even accounting for other 90-plus days in between.
Keep in mind that air-conditioning was far from widespread. Though the technology has been around since the early 20th century, it was then used primarily in movie theaters and other public spaces.
That meant that, as these Peter Stackpole images show, New Yorkers had to resort to some other, time-tested means of staying cool during those long days of oppressive heat. It meant keeping windows wide open, jumping in the water, keeping a steady supply of icy-cold treats available and of course relying on that most recognizable method of urban cooling: the fire hydrant. When opened, those gushers turn into a city kid’s sprinkler.
Except, of course, that it’s illegal to open a fire hydrant on your own. Today’s city residents can find relief just like their forebears, however: the Fire Department allows citizens to request to have hydrants opened with a proper sprinkler cap, which means residents can cool down without wasting extra water.
New York City heat wave, 1953.
Peter Stackpole The LIFE Picture Collection/Shutterstock
New York City heat wave, 1953.
Peter Stackpole The LIFE Picture Collection/Shutterstock
New York City heat wave, 1953.
Peter Stackpole The LIFE Picture Collection/Shutterstock
New York City heat wave, 1953.
Peter Stackpole The LIFE Picture Collection/Shutterstock
New York City heat wave, 1953.
Peter Stackpole The LIFE Picture Collection/Shutterstock
New York City heat wave, 1953.
Peter Stackpole The LIFE Picture Collection/Shutterstock
New York City heat wave, 1953.
Peter Stackpole The LIFE Picture Collection/Shutterstock
New York City heat wave, 1953.
Peter Stackpole The LIFE Picture Collection/Shutterstock
New York City heat wave, 1953.
Peter Stackpole The LIFE Picture Collection/Shutterstock
New York City heat wave, 1953.
Peter Stackpole The LIFE Picture Collection/Shutterstock
New York City heat wave, 1953.
Peter Stackpole The LIFE Picture Collection/Shutterstock
New York City heat wave, 1953.
Peter Stackpole The LIFE Picture Collection/Shutterstock
New York City heat wave, 1953.
Peter Stackpole The LIFE Picture Collection/Shutterstock
