Life Magazine Archive Dance Photos Chronicled a Changing America

A new book draws on the Life magazine archive to survey how dance photography documented American culture from 1936 onward. Life launched in 1936 with the stated aim of showing the US the world in pictures, and in December of that year its cover feature was devoted to dance, with performers from the new School of American Ballet on the front page. The weekly ran until 1972, a period the magazine's photographers spent covering wars, political manoeuvres, social trends, hemlines and Hollywood across the globe. Dance, as a vividly visual medium, became a recurring subject in its pages. The book's images range from George Balanchine to the Rockettes, and include prom nights, parties and gender politics, with the varied ways people moved their bodies presented as a mirror of shifting times. The author was asked to write the accompanying text for the collection of dance-themed images from the archive. Life's golden age of photojournalism, arriving while television was still experimental, brought the outside world into American homes.