The Power of Photos

Photographs have the power to stir emotions, pique curiosity, make a statement, or tell a story. Many online photo resources are available for use in our classrooms and provide us with ways to develop visual literacy and create meaning for our students.  Last week I discovered a new photo resource that we can use for all these purposes.

Google's LIFE Photo Archive presents images from the decades when LIFE magazine was publishing amazing photos in each issue.  In fact, the entire collection, with a total of more than 10 million images, is now online, and 97% of the photos never have been seen before by the public.  

The collection includes pictures from photojournalists such as Margaret Bourke-White and Gordon Parks.   In addition, the LIFE Photo Archive includes the Zapruder film of the assassination of President John F. Kennedy and Hugo Jaeger's pictures of Nazi-era Germany.

A great feature of this Google image archive is that you can access its photographs directly from Google Images by typing the search term followed by the words source:life.  This indicates that you want to search only for images within the LIFE Photo Archive.  For example, you could enter this search phrase in Google Images:  joe lewis source:life.  Be sure to include the colon between the words source and life.  This will search only the LIFE Photo Archive, directly from the main Google Images page.

These LIFE photographs capture forever the pivotal events and characters in our history, all through the lenses of incredibly talented photographers.  Bring these images into your classroom to make learning "out of the ordinary."