Is Life dead? In this episode, Joel Kovel gives a critical reading of Life magazine. Kovel proposes that, from its founding by Henry Booth Luce in the 1930s until the early 1970s, Life was the voice of American cultural supremacy. The magazine’s close relationship with the American government allowed the state to use Life as a tool to shape public opinion through powerful images. Over the twentieth century, Life’s focus shifted to the American past, losing the future-forward optimism of previous issues. After it came under new ownership in the late 1970s, Kovel posits, Life became the voice of American consumerism, replacing the reportage of its past with features on foreign cars and debutantes. Within this state of regressive corruption, Kovel says, a succession of commercial images and odes to consumer culture replaced early Life’s efforts to articulate moments of lived experience through the printed image.

Joel Kovel is an American politician, academic, writer and eco-socialist with a background in psychiatry and psychoanalysis.