Page 75 – LIFE

LIFE’s Most Memorable Kisses

February 12, 2025July 6, 2017 by

Sometimes you need a reason to give another person a kiss. And, as was the case in probably the most famous kissing photo of all time—the controversial sailor kiss at the moment of victory in World War II—that reason can be a big one. Other times, a kiss is its own reason to celebrate.

How people started kissing is a mystery and why we do it is complicated, but it has been around for many centuries and shows no signs of letting up. From a child’s sweet peck to a lover’s smooch to a walrus’s whiskery wet one, the act is a language of its own. And as time goes by, in each of our lives, it is easy to see that a kiss is not always just a kiss.

Shadows on the ground of kissing figures with camera on tripod between, 1930.

Alfred Eisenstaedt The LIFE Picture Collection/Shutterstock

Two walruses kissing as they eat from a hand between them at the Brookfield zoo, 1938.

William Vandivert The LIFE Picture Collection/Shutterstock

A man and woman kissing while geared to a lie detector machine to measure the emotional reaction, 1939.

Herbert Gehr The LIFE Images Collection/Shutterstock

Couple kissing in front of the Delta Tau Delta mummy at the University of the South, 1940.

Alfred Eisenstaedt The LIFE Picture Collection/Shutterstock

Actress Marilyn Hare being kissed by soldiers, 1942.

John Florea The LIFE Picture Collection/Shutterstock

Multiple exposure of Deanna Durbin and Edmond O’Brien walking toward each other and kissing; from the motion picture “Tonight and Forever.” 1942.

Gjon Mili The LIFE Picture Collection/Shutterstock

Couple in Penn Station sharing farewell kiss before he ships off to war during WWII. 1943.

Alfred Eisenstaedt The LIFE Picture Collection/Shutterstock

Mrs. Martini, wife of the Bronx Zoo lion keeper, kissing a tiger cub. 1944.

Alfred Eisenstaedt The LIFE Picture Collection/Shutterstock

Eisenstaedt’s iconic photo: A jubilant American sailor clutched a dental assistant in a back-bending kiss at a moment of spontaneous joy about the long awaited WWII victory over Japan. Taken on V-J Day, 1945, as thousands jammed Times Square. In recent decades this iconic photograph has engendered condemnation, after Greta Zimmer Friedman, the woman being kissed by the sailor (believed to have been George Mendonsa) said that the kiss was nonconsensual. In 2019, shortly after Mendonsa died at age 95, a statue of the kiss in Florida was tagged with #metoo graffiti.

Alfred Eisenstaedt The LIFE Picture Collection/Shutterstock

A little boy dressed as Uncle Sam, kissing a little girl on the cheek, 1945.

Frank Scherschel The LIFE Picture Collection/Shutterstock

Newlyweds Marshall Jacobs and wife Yolanda kiss after being married atop a flagpole. 1946.

Allan Grant The LIFE Images Collection/Shutterstock

Peggy Lee getting a goodnight kiss on the nose from her 4-year-old daughter Nicki at home. 1948.

Allan Grant The LIFE Picture Collection/Shutterstock

Baseball player Yogi Berra getting a kiss from his wife, Carmen, before leaving for the clubhouse. 1949.

George Silk The LIFE Picture Collection/Shutterstock

Gallant tiger bowing to kiss the hand of flapper Barbara Pettit, 1949.

Martha Holmes The LIFE Picture Collection/Shutterstock

Christina Goldsmith tenderly kissing a Weimaraner puppy, which she took from a litter of her father’s stock (he was a top breeder of Weimaraner hunting dogs). 1950.

Bernard Hoffman The LIFE Picture Collection/Shutterstock

Josephine Baker receiving a congratulatory kiss on the nose from her husband, orchestra leader Jo Bouillon, after Baker’s show at the Strand theater during her US tour, 1951.

Alfred Eisenstaedt The LIFE Picture Collection/Shutterstock

Jill Corey giving her grandmother, “Mamouch”, a kiss on the forehead, 1953.

Gordon Parks The LIFE Picture Collection/Shutterstock

Irish McCalla as “Sheena Queen of the Jungle” kissing her chimpanzee costar, 1955.

Loomis Dean The LIFE Picture Collection/Shutterstock

Elvis Presley tenderly kissing the cheek of a female admirer backstage before his concert, 1956.

Robert W. Kelley The LIFE Picture Collection/Shutterstock

A University of Michigan student couple engaged in an impromptu kiss in the Union Building on campus. 1957. This was forbidden conduct because rules required couples to have both feet on the floor.

Grey Villet The LIFE Picture Collection/Shutterstock

Richard Ramsey, a worker in cosmetic company, was covered with relics of lipstick kisses to prove that dyes in lipsticks are harmless. 1960.

Yale Joel The LIFE Picture Collection/Shutterstock

Steve McQueen kissed Natalie Wood’s hand as the actors met to discuss their new big-screen project, 1963’s “Love With the Proper Stranger.”

John Dominis The LIFE Picture Collection/Shutterstock

Astronaut Gus “Virgil” Grissom kissed his mother after his successful Gemini 3 mission, 1965.

Ralph Morse The LIFE Picture Collection/Shutterstock

Dustin Hoffman kissed his wife, 1969.

John Dominis The LIFE Picture Collection/Shutterstock

Oberlin College students kissed in a co-ed dorm, 1970.

Bill Ray The LIFE Picture Collection/Shutterstock

Rugged Rock Robertson, ‘Strong Man of the North’

December 16, 2019June 30, 2017 by

In 1953, photographer Wallace Kirkland explored the archetype of the Northern woodsman for LIFE Magazine, with a photo profile of the perfectly named Rock Robertson—”Strong Man of the North,” per the article’s headline.

Rock, at 31, six feet tall and 205 pounds, got his name from a grandfather who, predictably perhaps, had acquired the nickname due to his great strength. As a professional hunting and fishing guide, Rock Robertson regularly carried 300 pounds for miles and could pull off a moose mating call good enough to draw in the bulls that hunters wanted most. He once went more than a week without food, because of a storm, before walking 48 miles in snowshoes to get out of the woods. He faced the forest with a smile and a shrug, embracing the outdoors lifestyle that his ancestors—French-Canadian, First Nations and Scottish—had likewise lived.

“He has been known, when the mood takes him, to pick up a stove and heave it through a cook-shack wall,” the article noted. “But generally Rock’s moods are sunny and his broad shoulders are put to practical and picturesque uses as a woodsman and as a guide.”

Out camping deep in the Canadian north woods, Rock Robertson grinned through the doorway of trapper’s birchbark tepee.

Wallace Kirkland The LIFE Picture Collection/Shutterstock

Robertson smoked some fish in the wild country between Hudson Bay and the St. Lawrence.

Wallace Kirkland The LIFE Picture Collection/Shutterstock

Rock (right) and brother Harry arm-wrestled. After winning, Rock said, `He’s good, and I’m good.'”

Wallace Kirkland The LIFE Picture Collection/Shutterstock

On a portage Rock packed 300 pounds.

Wallace Kirkland The LIFE Picture Collection/Shutterstock

Rock’s moosecall got answering grunts from an amorous bull who came up from half a mile away.

Wallace Kirkland The LIFE Picture Collection/Shutterstock

Rock carrying a moose haunch. North woodsmen preferred moose to beef or venison.

Wallace Kirkland The LIFE Picture Collection/Shutterstock

A battered canoe leaked furiously but was still afloat, patched up with spruce gum and boughs.

Wallace Kirkland The LIFE Picture Collection/Shutterstock

A snared partridge flapped futilely after Rock pulled it from a tree.

Wallace Kirkland The LIFE Picture Collection/Shutterstock

The fire broiled the partridge and also dried out a pair of wet socks dangling from the box.

Wallace Kirkland The LIFE Picture Collection/Shutterstock

Seeing a black bear in the water, Rock paused to determine the size of quarry and to which shore he would try to herd it.

Wallace Kirkland The LIFE Picture Collection/Shutterstock

As the bear neared the shore, Rock raised his rifle. When the bear reached water’s edge he brought it down.

Wallace Kirkland The LIFE Picture Collection/Shutterstock

Rock approached the bear warily.

Wallace Kirkland The LIFE Picture Collection/Shutterstock

Bringing back the bear, Rock easily balanced the canoe on his head. Rock said he could walk for hours with this kind of load. `I sweat like hell,’ he said. `Man who don’t sweat get tired.'”

`Wallace Kirkland The LIFE Picture Collection/Shutterstock

Rock Robertson with his wife and child.

Wallace Kirkland The LIFE Picture Collection/Shutterstock

How John Dominis Photographed Wild Antelope Without a Telephoto Lens

February 24, 2020June 27, 2017 by

The photographers on LIFE Magazine’s staff did it all, taking on assignments wide and varied without a blink of the eye. John Dominis was no exception. He joined LIFE as a staff photographer in 1950 and would go on to shoot some of the biggest stars of the era Steve McQueen, Frank Sinatra and Robert Redford to name a few. He also shot one of the most iconic images of the 20th century: Tommie Smith and John Carlos giving the black power salute at the Olympics in Mexico.

Here, LIFE looks back at one of his lesser known shoots—the African Antelope, which was a cover story and a follow up to The Great Cats of Africa, which would earn him Magazine Photographer of the year in 1966 and later become a book. In the Editor’s Note that accompanies the story, Dominis described how he was able to get the dramatic photo of the “bizarre wildebeest” (the last slide in the gallery above) without a telephoto lens.

“I wanted to get low-angle shots that gave a dramatic sense of their speed. I built boxes out of plywood and mounted cameras inside of them,” Dominis explained. “John [Mbuthi, a local whom Dominis worked with on the story] and I worked for three weeks with them. We’d go a mile ahead of a herd and put down the boxes and camouflage them. Then we’d hide a quarter of a mile away and wait maybe for several hours. Meanwhile the light might change and there was no way I could alter the exposure on the cameras. If the animal reached the boxes, I pushed the button that triggered the motorized cameras by a radio signal and ran off a whole roll of film. I must have exposed 40 rolls, but ended up with only one really good frame.”

Featured in this gallery are images provided by the Briscoe Center for American History at the University of Texas at Austin of these contraptions that John Dominis set up. These rarely seen images show a photographer at work and just how resourceful Dominis was in getting the shot.

The Briscoe Center recently acquired the John Dominis archive after his daughter, Dori Beer, reached out to the center. His longtime friend and photo editor M.C. Marden organized the collection, which contains a comprehensive look at his professional and personal work and life. While his archive won’t be open to the public until later in 2017, the Briscoe Center the photojournalism collection of which also includes the work of Diana Walker, Eddie Adams, Dirck Halstead and others is open for research and focuses on a behind-the-scenes look at how Americans experience the world, from politics to war to wildlife, via the media.

“Pictures like [Dominis” animal series] have something to say about how Americans (though magazines like LIFE) perceive the outside world,” said Ben Wright of the Briscoe Center, in a statement to LIFE. “These pictures and collections are not only beautiful and interesting: they’re historical evidence that help historians to understand the past with accuracy and integrity.”

John Dominis on assignment in Africa, 1969.

John Dominis Photographic Archive/UT Austin’s Briscoe Center

There are few more spectacular sights than a herd of oryx striding across the grasslands, with scores of saberlike horns glistening in the sun.

John Dominis The LIFE Picture Collection/Shutterstock

Soaring above the thick brush of East Africa, two impala moved with a flowing grace unsurpassed in the animal kingdom.

John Dominis The LIFE Picture Collection/Shutterstock

The gazelle is one of the fleetest of the antelope. Among it’s natural enemies, only the cheetah has a chance of running it down.

John Dominis The LIFE Picture Collection/Shutterstock

John Dominis on assignment in Africa, 1969.

John Dominis Photographic Archive/UT Austin’s Briscoe Center

The wildebeest (South African Dutch for “wild beast”) are the oddest and fiercest-looking antelope of all.

John Dominis The LIFE Picture Collection/Shutterstock

The ‘Peril and Ecstasy’ of Surfing,1963

December 13, 2019June 16, 2017 by

In May of 1963, as the surf craze swept the U.S. and popular images of surfers tempted newcomers into the water in the days before wetsuits were common, LIFE magazine had a message its readers: Surfing was fun but it wasn’t all fun and games. It was also dangerous, especially when it came to the waves off the North Shore of Oahu.

The magazine explained to unfamiliar readers how the sport worked there: “The men who ride the big ones in Hawaii actually ski down the shoulder of a wave away from the curl… They call the first breathtaking schuss ‘taking the drop.’ Their boards accelerate up to 35 mph so rapidly that they kick up waves like speedboats. And a merciless mauling awaits the unfortunate who doesn’t complete his ride. He is driven downward by the appalling maelstrom, tossed around, sucked back down and frequently, after fighting up for a desperate gulp of air, hammered down again by the next wave.”

And yet a brave group of surfers sought out the big waves anyway, for what LIFE called the “peril and ecstasy” of the sport’s toughest waves. Enabled by new innovations in balsa wood surfboards that had opened new vistas to surfers in the 1940s, the surfers returned again and again, despite the risks.

Looking at these photos by George Silk, it’s not hard to see what drew the surfers back to the water. Some experienced, what surfer Fred Van Dyke described to Silk as, “the greatest feeling the world.”

Nick Beck of Honolulu caught a wave on his light board.

George Silk The LIFE Picture Collection/Shutterstock

A pair of riders, cutting frothy furrows in the wall of a wild 18-footer, seemed headed on a collision course at Sunset Beach.

George Silk The LIFE Picture Collection/Shutterstock

Surfer Rick Grigg caught a ride at Banzai Beach, Oahu, Hawaii, 1963.

George Silk The LIFE Picture Collection/Shutterstock

A teenage girl rode the surf, 1963.

George Silk The LIFE Picture Collection/Shutterstock

Hawaii, 1963.

George Silk The LIFE Picture Collection/Shutterstock

$Preston Leavey, paddling frantically to get on a wave and begin his ride. A camera, was bolted to the front of the board and recorded the glitter of refracted light from the spray.$

Preston Leavey, paddling frantically to get on a wave and begin his ride. A camera, was bolted to the front of the board and recorded the glitter of refracted light from the spray.

George Silk The LIFE Picture Collection/Shutterstock

Before riding in on great waves surfers had to fight their way out past foaming barriers.

George Silk The LIFE Picture Collection/Shutterstock

At Sunset Beach, a surfer rode a thundering 15-footer.

George Silk The LIFE Picture Collection/Shutterstock

Hawaii surfers, 1963.

George Silk The LIFE Picture Collection/Shutterstock

Joe Kaohi maneuvered desperately to cling to his board as he tried to ride into the tunnel of a wave at Banzai Beach.

George Silk The LIFE Picture Collection/Shutterstock

Hawaii surfer, 1963.

George Silk The LIFE Picture Collection/Shutterstock

The Kennedys and So Much More: The Brilliant Photography of Paul Schutzer

June 30, 2025June 5, 2017 by

On June 5, 1967 in the first hours of the Arab-Israeli Six-Day War, LIFE Magazine photographer Paul Schutzer was killed while riding in a half-track personnel carrier heading toward Gaza.

When he’d been hired in 1957, Schutzer was the youngest LIFE staff photographer. Over the course of a decade, until his death at age 36, he shot 491 stories for the magazine, including the 1960 Presidential campaign. At the Kennedy inauguration, he captured the iconic photograph of a beaming President with his glamorous wife, a symbol of the Camelot mystique.

During the magazine’s heyday, LIFE’s picture stories brought readers up close to unfolding events. For a photographer, an assignment was a passport to far-flung worlds and the front lines of history. Behind the scenes, Schutzer recorded the lives of leaders such as Presidents Eisenhower, Nixon and Kennedy, as well as Martin Luther King Jr. Describing her father’s work, Schutzer’s daughter Dena explains, “He focused on the people in power and the powerless, the people who were responsible for the events and those who were affected by them.”

From tensions at the Berlin Wall, to life in the war-torn villages of Vietnam, to the fight for desegregation by men and women demanding basic civil rights, the stories Schutzer covered required him to take numerous risks. Before boarding a bus heading to the Jim Crow south, he once wrote to his wife Bernice, “I’m going on the bus with the Freedom Riders. The magazine at first ordered me not to go, but the very reasons for not going, is the reason I must… This story should be told.” He was working at a time of American greatness, Bernice now recounts. “He wasn’t jaded or cynical.” He wanted to connect and did so by getting close. He carefully edited his own work after each assignment, telling his wife that he would have been lucky to have taken even ten great photographs in a lifetime.

Schutzer traveled extensively through Eastern Europe, where he was deeply affected by what he saw at the site of the Auschwitz concentration camp. His family tells LIFE that, particularly as a Jewish person living and working in the post-war years, he was inspired by the spirit and promise of the new state of Israel. So it was no surprise that, with war looming there in 1967, he was eager to be there. Determined, he prevailed on his friend Moshe Dayan, then Israel’s Minister of Defense, to embed with an assault unit.

He didn’t intend to stay long, saying to his wife that he was finished with war. He was shot soon after. “One perhaps can console oneself that Paul died where he wanted to die and gave his life for what he felt most. And that is true,” LIFE eulogized the next week. “But we have lost an exceptional, first-rate man in Yiddish this type is called a mensch. Paul was a mensch.”

After his death, LIFE received many condolences and tributes, including from the master photographer Henri Cartier-Bresson, who said he admired Schutzer’s work and attitude toward photography. In a telegram, Robert Kennedy wrote, “Paul Schutzer was highly regarded as a professional and a friend of President John Kennedy and all those associated with him. His ability, intelligence, sense of humor, and devotion to his craft will be missed by his colleagues and friends.”

Schutzer’s complete photographic archive, a unique chronicle of the cold war era, has never been viewed, recognized retrospectively or compiled in a book. That is something his family hopes to one day achieve, but on the anniversary of his death here is a look at some of the highlights of that body of work.

President John F. Kennedy and First Lady Jacqueline Kennedy in the Presidential Box overlooking the crowd at inaugural gala, Jan. 20, 1961.

Paul Schutzer The LIFE Picture Collection/Shutterstock

Jacqueline Kennedy and her husband John F. Kennedy, on eve of his Presidential inauguration, Jan. 19, 1961. They attended a gala hosted by Frank Sinatra at the National Guard Armory, Washington, D.C.

Paul Schutzer The LIFE Picture Collection/Shutterstock

Young women swoon at a campaign appearance of presidential candidate John F. Kennedy, late 1960.

Paul Schutzer The LIFE Picture Collection/Shutterstock

John F. Kennedy prepared a speech as admirers watched from outside a window, Baltimore, September 1960.

Paul Schutzer The LIFE Picture Collection/Shutterstock

Supporters of presidential candidate John F. Kennedy, New York City, October 1960.

Paul Schutzer The LIFE Picture Collection/Shutterstock

Sen.John F. Kennedy campaigned in New York City, October 1960.

Paul Schutzer The LIFE Picture Collection/Shutterstock

Supporters of presidential candidate John F. Kennedy on a campaign tour, 1960.

Paul Schutzer The LIFE Picture Collection/Shutterstock

President Kennedy walked hand-in-hand with daughter Caroline on St. Patrick’s Day at the White House, March 17, 1961.

Paul Schutzer The LIFE Picture Collection/Shutterstock

Supporters of President John F. Kennedy, 1960.

Paul Schutzer The LIFE Picture Collection/Shutterstock

President John F. Kennedy watched a film in Press Secretary Pierre Salinger’s office, Feb. 2, 1961.

Paul Schutzer The LIFE Picture Collection/Shutterstock

An East German policeman attempted to stop Western photographers by flashing mirrors into camera lenses. Sept. 8, 1961. A month earlier, East Germany began cordoning off the Eastern sector of the city.

Paul Schutzer The LIFE Picture Collection/Shutterstock

A seventeen-year-old East Berlin youth was helped by two West Berlin police officers after he climbed over the newly constructed wall from East Berlin, October 1961.

Paul Schutzer The LIFE Picture Collection/Shutterstock

A young girl gazed through her apartment window which looked out on barbed wire fencing that topped the nearby Berlin Wall, December 1962.

Paul Schutzer The LIFE Picture Collection/Shutterstock

Marilyn Monroe and her husband Arthur Miller drove to Connecticut in 1956, shortly after their marriage.

Paul Schutzer The LIFE Picture Collection/Shutterstock

Sen. John Kennedy with his brother at Robert Kennedy’s home in McLean, Va., May 1957.

Paul Schutzer The LIFE Picture Collection/Shutterstock

Robert Kennedy and his wife Ethel before bedtime at their home in Maclean, Va, April 30, 1957.

Paul Schutzer The LIFE Picture Collection/Shutterstock

A waiter lit a cigarette for a socialite at the Piedmont ball, 1958, Atlanta, Ga.

Paul Schutzer The LIFE Picture Collection/Shutterstock

Lewis Cousins (C) sat in a class surrounded by white students. Cousins was the first black student to attend the newly desegregated Maury High School in Norfolk, Va, 1959.

Paul Schutzer The LIFE Picture Collection/Shutterstock

Freedom Riders waited in a ‘Colored Waiting Room’ at a bus station in Montgomery, Ala., May 1961. The Freedom Riders rode buses throughout the south in the months following the Boynton v. Virginia Supreme Court case, which outlawed racial segregation on public transportation, in order to test and call attention to still existing local policies that ran contrary to national laws.

Paul Schutzer The LIFE Picture Collection/Shutterstock

Near the Mississippi-Alabama border, members of the Alabama National Guard surrounded a bus carrying freedom riders, May 1961.

Paul Schutzer The LIFE Picture Collection/Shutterstock

Julia Aaron and David Dennis with 25 other freedom riders were escorted by Mississippi National Guardsmen travelling from Montgomery, Ala. to Jackson, Miss., May 1961.

Paul Schutzer The LIFE Picture Collection/Shutterstock

White men threw stones at a bus carrying freedom riders protesting segregation in the south, as they travelled from Montgomery, Ala., May 1961.

Paul Schutzer The LIFE Picture Collection/Shutterstock

Civil Rights leader Dr. Martin Luther King attended a prayer pilgrimage, May 17, 1957, Washington, D.C., on the third anniversary of the landmark Brown v. the Board of Education decision against segregation in public schools.

Paul Schutzer The LIFE Picture Collection/Shutterstock

Demonstrators at a rallying point for the Prayer Pilgrimage for Freedom, May 17, 1957, Washington. D.C., held in support of desegregation.

Paul Schutzer The LIFE Picture Collection/Shutterstock

Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. spoke in front of the Lincoln Memorial before 25,000 people at the Prayer Pilgrimage for Freedom, May 1957 to mark the third anniversary of the landmark supreme court decision, Brown v. the Board of Education, which outlawed segregation in public schools. Among his landmark early addresses, King’s speech that day was known as “Give Us the Ballot.”

Paul Schutzer The LIFE Picture Collection/Shutterstock

Civil rights activists marched at the Prayer Pilgrimage for Freedom, May 1957 at the Lincoln Memorial, Washington, D.C.

Paul Schutzer The LIFE Picture Collection/Shutterstock

A U.S. Marine held an injured Vietnamese child while running under fire, November 1965.

Paul Schutzer The LIFE Picture Collection/Shutterstock

Weary American Marines of 7th Regiment slept following intense fighting in the area around Cape Batangan during the Vietnam War, November 1965. Marines fought from dawn until dark in temperatures that reached 130 degrees before they secured the beachhead.

Paul Schutzer The LIFE Picture Collection/Shutterstock

The eyes and mouth of a Vietcong prisoner were taped by U.S. Marines. This picture ran on the cover of LIFE’s Nov. 26, 1965 issue with the cover line, “The Blunt Reality of War.”

Paul Schutzer The LIFE Picture Collection/Shutterstock

Former teamster and labor leader Arthur L. Morgan testified against Jimmy Hoffa and others during labor racketeering hearings before a Senate Select Committee, August 1958.

Paul Schutzer The LIFE Picture Collection/Shutterstock

A man lovingly combed his girlfriend’s hair; the photo was part of an essay entitled “The Italian Man,” 1963.

Paul Schutzer The LIFE Picture Collection/Shutterstock

Actress Elke Sommer attended the Cannes Film Festival amid a sea of photographers, May 1962.

Paul Schutzer The LIFE Picture Collection/Shutterstock

Israeli children of the Habad sect played with a horse and cart at a farm May 1960.

Paul Schutzer The LIFE Picture Collection/Shutterstock

Israelis danced at the “Last Chance Cafe”, a night club in Beersheba, Israel, May 1960.

Paul Schutzer The LIFE Picture Collection/Shutterstock

Miriam Stecher, a survivor of the Auschwitz concentration camp, showed her prisoner number in reaction to news of the arrest of Adolf Eichmann, the Nazi S.S. Colonel, one of chief architects of the holocaust, May 1960.

Paul Schutzer The LIFE Picture Collection/Shutterstock

An Israeli man rested beside a newly planted tree, 1965.

Paul Schutzer The LIFE Picture Collection/Shutterstock

This image of an Israeli military vehicle as it headed towards Gaza, then part of Egypt, was one of the last 23 frames taken by Paul Schutzer. He was killed on June 5, 1967, the first day of the Arab-Israeli Six Day War, when the half-track personnel carrier he was riding in took a direct hit from an Egyptian antitank shell.

Paul Schutzer The LIFE Picture Collection/Shutterstock

The last frame on the roll of film found in Schutzer’s camera. He was killed by a 57mm Egyptian shell which hit the half-track personnel carrier he was riding in, June 5, 1967, the first day of the Arab-Israeli Six Day War.

Paul Schutzer The LIFE Picture Collection/Shutterstock

The Fight: A Legendary LIFE Photographer Battles Parkinson’s, 1959

January 14, 2020June 1, 2017 by

The great LIFE photographer Margaret Bourke-White was in Tokyo in 1952 when she first discovered that, in the middle of a physically demanding photojournalistic career, the dull pain in her left leg was becoming something more. Rising from a meal, she found herself, for a few steps at least, unable to walk.

As she would recount in an extraordinary LIFE story seven years later, it turned out after years of misdiagnosis and confusion that her brief stumble was a symptom of the onset of Parkinson’s disease, against which she would fight with everything she had for nearly two decades until her death at 67. It was, as the introduction to that 1959 article noted, the toughest battle ever faced by a woman who had seen many including literal battles in World War II, during which she served as the first woman accredited to cover the combat zones as a photojournalist.

With photographs by her fellow LIFE photographer Alfred Eisenstaedt, some of which are seen here, the story offered up the personal reflections of the woman who had taken the image that appeared on the first-ever issue of the magazine.

“When I opened some medical insurance papers one day and learned I had Parkinson’s disease, the name did not frighten me because I did not know what in the world it was,” she wrote, describing how she learned the name that her doctors had kept from her as they prescribed physical therapy for her unlabeled symptoms. “Then slowly a memory came back, of a description Edward Steichen once gave at a photographers’ meeting of the illness of Edward Weston, ‘dean of photographers,’ who was a Parkinsonian. I remembered the break in Steichen’s voice: ‘A terrible disease… you can’t work because you can’t hold things… you grow stiffer each year until you are a walking prison… there is no known cure…'”

The knowledge was, unsurprisingly, devastating to Bourke-White.

But she set her mind to learn what she could, to look for anything she could do for relief. She learned, she wrote, that she was just one of three quarters of a million Americans with the disease “often they appear to be struck down at their peak,” she wrote and that, despite this number and the fact that the symptoms had been observed for thousands of years, nobody knew what caused it or how to stop it. Though Bourke-White was an extreme devotee of her exercise routine and even underwent a then-cutting-edge brain surgery to “deaden permanently” part of her brain, she knew that the operation she’d received had only treated some of her disease and that there was no way to know how the symptoms would progress from there.

Today, more than half a century later, many of the questions that confronted Bourke-White remain frustratingly unresolved for those who receive the same diagnosis she did. Treatment options, however, have advanced significantly since Bourke-White’s time and new advances are offering the hope for something even better.

For one thing, says Dr. Rachel Dolhun, vice president of medical communications at the Michael J. Fox Foundation for Parkinson’s Research, a person with Parkinson’s disease in the 1950s had no effective options for medication. The most widely prescribed therapy used today—levodopa, which temporarily addresses some Parkinson’s-related loss of dopamine, a movement-regulating brain chemical—wasn’t discovered until the late 1960s. It is now also understood in a way that it was not a few decades ago that many different brain chemicals and parts of the body are involved in symptoms linked to Parkinson’s, not just dopamine and the brain. In addition, the operation that Bourke-White received to basically destroy part of her brain is largely obsolete today, and a patient who was a candidate for brain surgery now would likely instead receive deep brain stimulation, which uses wires or electrodes to stimulate parts of the brain. (The physical therapy that was prescribed for Bourke-White, however, is one thing that hasn’t changed: exercise remains a key way to address symptoms.)

And Dolhun said that advances in genetic science in the last 20 years or so, by offering new insights into how the disease works, have opened up a new range of research angles and hope for a real cure, rather than just a better way to address the symptoms. For example, experts are excited by the testing of possible therapies that would target a protein called alpha-synuclein. “Right now, because of those understandings, the development pipeline is richer than it’s ever been,” she said.

Technology is also changing what’s possible for researchers and scientists. The Michael J. Fox Foundation is running an online clinical study in which patients can log on and tell researchers about what it’s like to live their experience of Parkinson’s disease, Dolhun said, and devices like wearables and smartphones are providing new ways to track and communicate about the symptoms. For example, whereas it used to be that a doctor might observe a patient’s tremor for 15 minutes at a time every couple of months, now an app or a watch can allow patients to log data that gives researchers a 24/7 look at information about those symptoms.

These new possibilities are particularly important when it comes to Parkinson’s disease, since the experience of what it’s like to live with and fight the symptoms is very individualized. “It’s a different journey for every single person who’s on it,” said Dolhun. “That’s why we need the patient experience to inform us so much, and that’s why it’s so important for patients to be involved directly in research.”

That’s also one reason why the openness of people like Margaret Bourke-White mattered in 1959 and continues to matter today. There can still be a stigma attached to telling others that you are experiencing something that might make them see you as weak or in need of assistance. But if those who have it keep their experiences to themselves, it’s harder for researchers to make progress toward a cure and harder for others with the diagnosis to feel that they’re not alone.

For Bourke-White, as she described for LIFE’s readers, her fight against Parkinson’s was, to the fullest extent possible, a reminder to keep working and enjoying what her body could do for every second possible. Nowadays, she wrote in 1959 after the surgery that helped her do that longer than would otherwise have been possible, “my fingers are more and more often loading my cameras, changing their lenses, and turning their winding buttons as I practice the simple blessed business of living and working again.”

“It’s not uncommon for people to feel shy about sharing their stories,” Dolhun said. “For [Bourke-White] to share her story so publicly I think really speaks volumes. When we see people come forward with their story, it’s not an uncommon thing for them to say, ‘I really wish I had shared it earlier.’ They feel a burden lifted.”

Straining to relearn how to speak distinctly after disease had blurred and weakened her voice, Bourke-White, with another patient, was taught by therapists (rear) to exaggerate lip movements.

Alfred Eisenstaedt The LIFE Picture Collection/Shutterstock

Crumpling paper into balls, Miss Bourke-White worked to keep fingers from stiffening.

Alfred Eisenstaedt The LIFE Picture Collection/Shutterstock

Face intent with effort, Margaret Bourke-White exercised as part of her fight against Parkinson’s disease.

Alfred Eisenstaedt The LIFE Picture Collection/Shutterstock

A nurse aided photographer Margaret Bourke-White during a therapy session.

Alfred Eisenstaedt The LIFE Picture Collection/Shutterstock

Margaret Bourke-White did the tango during a dance class meant to improve her coordination.

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Margaret Bourke-White squeezed a towel.

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Margaret Bourke-White with her camera during her later years, when the LIFE staff photographer was struggling with Parkinson’s disease.

Alfred Eisenstaedt The LIFE Picture Collection/Shutterstock

Margaret Bourke-White during her Parkinson’s therapy.

Alfred Eisenstaedt The LIFE Picture Collection/Shutterstock

A doctor explained an operation, here identifying the brain’s thalamus.

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Researching her case, Miss. Bourke-White insisted on learning all details from Dr. Cooper (left) and Dr. Manuel Riklan, interviewed them as though on journalistic assignment. “I realized I had been through one of the greatest adventures of my life,” she explained. “The patient’s world was for me a new world. Experiencing surgery was like going on a new assignment.” She asked if she could watch a similar operation to one she had already had.

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Margaret Bourke-White prepared to observe a surgery.

Alfred Eisenstaedt The LIFE Picture Collection/Shutterstock

Margaret Bourke-White said, “I reached for his hand quite impulsively, when suddenly it stopped trembling. The balloon’s pressure had reached the right spot in the man’s brain. His once-rigid fingers were now relaxed, his hand steady for the first time in 10 years. Dr. Cooper asked him to make a fist, then open it. The fingers closed and opened easily. ‘God bless you, Dr. Cooper,’ the man said. For me this was a magic moment. I knew that in a few days, after the surgeon had deadened the area located by the balloon, this man would be up and about, his tremors relieved. I never met the man, or heard his name, but I shared with him a miracle.”

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“Proof of progress,” she declared, “is that at long last I again can load my camera.”

Alfred Eisenstaedt The LIFE Picture Collection/Shutterstock

Margaret Bourke-White at home.

Alfred Eisenstaedt The LIFE Picture Collection/Shutterstock

Margaret Bourke-White outside her home with her cats.

Alfred Eisenstaedt The LIFE Picture Collection/Shutterstock

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