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Andrew HeiskellAndrew Heiskell
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Session:         Page of 824

a womb. It Was constantly opening horizons, and therefore it tended to create itself more than, you know--Time could say it said everything important that happened last week. Period. That's the definition within which you can work. But there is no definition that says: “Hey, I can show a fetus inside a womb! Hey, I can show animals so small that nobody has ever seen them! I can show a molecule being split!”

Q:

Or I can bring the war home, right?

Heiskell:

Bring the war'home, or--I mean, we didn't even realize when we started that showing India was something absolutely new. When Marguerite Bourke-White did that big photographic essay on India, it was revelation! You couldn't define, you couldn't say--you would have had to say in ten thousand words, if you were going to say, all the things that LIFE could be--there wasn't a sentence that covered it. To my mind the word revelation came closest to why LIFE succeeded and also why LIFE failed, ultimately, because a new form of revelation occurred through the medium of television. LIFE was a different medium, because it used a different tool to see the world. All other magazines used, essentially, words. They illustrated them a bit, but that was it.

Q:

Since we started this, let's take this through a little. From my notes, I know that at least on two occasions, and I would probably on a lot more--Luce himself got involved with redefining or defining or “let's find a definition for LIFE.” One was in 1946,





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