On a summer afternoon in 1950, Life magazine photographer Edward Clark spent some time outdoors with a then-unknown starlet, snapping dozens of pictures of 24-year-old Marilyn Monroe as she walked along a tree-lined path, lounged on a park bench reading a book, posed alongside a stream and peered wistfully over the rail of a bridge. Few, if any, of those photographs have ever been seen by the public.
Until now.
Under contract to Life and Google, a Frederick-based imaging company has spent two years scanning those rare images, along with a few million others from the magazine archives. All told, some 20 technicians, working as a team about 16 hours a day, have scanned nearly 6 million images. Google has put about 2 million online: pictures of the Rev. Martin Luther King Jr. preparing for the March on Washington, of Clark Gable at his home, of atomic bomb tests on Bikini atoll in the South Pacific, of Madame Curie in her lab and Louis Armstrong on his trumpet.
"It's some neat stuff," says Pat Crowley, vice president of the Crowley Company, builders, distributors and operators of sophisticated scanning technology. "I had some historical perspective on the photographs. I'm 41 years old, and I certainly knew what Life magazine was. ... But we tried to treat it like any other project."
Of course, for anyone with any sense of history, or photography, or celebrity, or mass media, this is far more than just "any project."
From 1936 to 1972, and again from 1978 to 2000, Life defined photojournalism, taking its readers to important events throughout the globe, acquainting them with the rich and famous, showcasing the work of such masters as Alfred Eisenstadt, Robert Capa, Margaret Bourke-White, Gordon Parks and David Douglas Duncan.
Some of the photographs, which can be accessed by going to the Images section of google.com and clicking on the Life Photo Archive button, may look familiar, such as a Paul Schutzer photograph of John and Jacqueline Kennedy leaving their Georgetown residence on the morning of the president-elect's inauguration in 1961. But while only that one photograph may have actually appeared in the magazine, dozens of others Schutzer shot at the same time are now available.
"About 90 percent of this collection was never seen by the public," says Andrew Blau, president of Life. "The number of photographs we've actually published is very small, compared to what we have in the archives."
