Saturday, April 4, 2009

New Life.com Photo Archive Brings Access to Usable Images to Your Classroom


Photos are a perennial source of inspiration and material for student art projects. Read on about a new source from LIFE magazine. Note that the article below states "Photos on the site are organized into five channels: news, celebrity, travel, animals, and sports. Visitors can print individual images and share them through sites like Facebook, Twitter, and Delicious. New features of Life.com, due to roll out in the coming months, will allow users to create their own photo galleries (on, say, the life and work of Maya Angelou, for English class, or animal life in the Everglades, for science). All the site's tools will be free."


From edutopia:

"Alabama governor George Wallace stands in the doorway of the University of Alabama, physically blocking African American students from integrating the school. Humphrey Bogart, in Washington, DC, protests the blacklisting of artists by the House Un-American Activities Committee. Neil Armstrong and Buzz Aldrin walk on the dusty surface of the Moon.
These and seven million other images of American history and culture are newly available on Life.com. The relaunched site -- accessible to everyone but especially useful to educators -- makes the entire archives of photo giants Life magazine and Getty Images available free. Users can view galleries curated by the site's editors or search the library by names, dates, subjects, and locations. The archive chronicles current events, too, with daily news galleries and the addition of 3,000 new Getty photos a day.


Once America's leading photo-centric news magazine, Life chronicled the nation and the world for seven decades before issuing its last print publication in 2007. Life's last editor, Bill Shapiro, who heads up the new project, wants students, teachers, and parents to use the site to make history more tangible. "The most iconic moments in American history -- we have those," Shapiro reports. "We didn't want simply to create a historical repository or a dusty archive. We wanted these events to feel as alive as they did when they happened."

Photos on the site are organized into five channels: news, celebrity, travel, animals, and sports. Visitors can print individual images and share them through sites like Facebook, Twitter, and Delicious. New features of Life.com, due to roll out in the coming months, will allow users to create their own photo galleries (on, say, the life and work of Maya Angelou, for English class, or animal life in the Everglades, for science). All the site's tools will be free..."


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