''Look'' was a biweekly, general-interest

magazine A magazine is a periodical publication, generally published on a regular schedule (often weekly or monthly), containing a variety of content. They are generally financed by advertising, purchase price, prepaid subscriptions, or by a combinatio ...

published in

Des Moines Des Moines () is the capital and the most populous city in the U.S. state of Iowa. It is also the county seat of Polk County. A small part of the city extends into Warren County. It was incorporated on September 22, 1851, as Fort Des Moines ...

Iowa Iowa () is a U.S. state, state in the Midwestern United States, Midwestern region of the United States, bordered by the Mississippi River to the east and the Missouri River and Big Sioux River to the west. It is bordered by six states: Wiscon ...

, from 1937 to 1971, with editorial offices in

New York City New York, often called New York City or NYC, is the List of United States cities by population, most populous city in the United States. With a 2020 population of 8,804,190 distributed over , New York City is also the L ...

. It had an emphasis on

photograph A photograph (also known as a photo, image, or picture) is an image created by light falling on a photosensitive surface, usually photographic film or an electronic image sensor, such as a CCD or a CMOS chip. Most photographs are now create ...

s and

photojournalism Photojournalism is journalism that uses images to tell a news story. It usually only refers to still images, but can also refer to video used in broadcast journalism. Photojournalism is distinguished from other close branches of photography (such ...

in addition to human interest and lifestyle articles. A large-sized magazine of , it was a direct competitor to market leader ''Life'', which began publication months earlier and ended in 1972, a few months after ''Look'' shut down.

Origin

Gardner "Mike" Cowles Jr. (1903–1985), the magazine's co-founder (with his brother

John John is a common English name and surname: * John (given name) * John (surname) John may also refer to: New Testament Works * Gospel of John, a title often shortened to John * First Epistle of John, often shortened to 1 John * Secon ...

) and first editor, was executive editor of ''

The Des Moines Register ''The Des Moines Register'' is the daily morning newspaper of Des Moines, Iowa. History Early period The first newspaper in Des Moines was the ''Iowa Star''. In July 1849, Barlow Granger began the paper in an abandoned log cabin by the junction ...

'' and '' The Des Moines Tribune''. When the first issue went on sale in early 1937, it sold 705,000 copies. Although planned to begin with the January 1937 issue, the actual first issue of ''Look'' to be distributed was the February 1937 issue, numbered as Volume 1, Number 2. It was published monthly for five issues (February–May 1937), then switched to biweekly starting with the May 11, 1937 issue. Page numbering on early issues counted the front cover as page one. Early issues, subtitled ''Monthly Picture Magazine'', carried no advertising. The unusual format of the early issues featured layouts of photos with long captions or very short articles. The magazine's backers described it as "an experiment based on the tremendous unfilled demand for extraordinary news and feature pictures". It was aimed at a broader readership than ''Life'', promising trade papers that ''Look'' would have "reader interest for yourself, for your wife, for your private secretary, for your office boy".

Highlights

From 1946 to 1970, ''Look'' published the

Football Writers Association of America The Football Writers Association of America (FWAA) is an organization of college football media members in the United States founded in 1941. It is composed of approximately 1,200 professional sports writers from both print and Internet media out ...

College All America Football Team and brought players and selected writers to New York City for a celebration. During that 25-year period, the FWAA team was introduced on national television shows by

Bob Hope Leslie Townes "Bob" Hope (May 29, 1903 – July 27, 2003) was a British-American comedian, vaudevillian, actor, singer and dancer. With a career that spanned nearly 80 years, Hope appeared in more than 70 short and feature films, with ...

, Steve Allen,

Perry Como Pierino Ronald "Perry" Como (; May 18, 1912 – May 12, 2001) was an Italian-American singer, actor and television personality. During a career spanning more than half a century, he recorded exclusively for RCA Victor for 44 years, after signin ...

, and others. Its January 24, 1956, article "The Shocking Story of Approved Killing in Mississippi", included murder confessions from J. W. Milam and Roy Bryant, who had been acquitted in 1955 of killing 14-year-old boy

Emmett Till Emmett Louis Till (July 25, 1941August 28, 1955) was a 14-year-old African Americans, African American boy who was abducted, tortured, and Lynching in the United States, lynched in Mississippi in 1955, after being accused of offending a whi ...

Circulation peak

Within weeks of its debut, more than a million copies were bought of each issue, and it became a biweekly. By 1948, it sold 2.9 million copies per issue. Circulation reached 3.7 million in 1954, and peaked at 7.75 million in 1969. Its advertising revenue reached its highest point in 1966 at $80 million. Of the leading general-interest, large-format magazines, ''Look'' had a circulation second only to ''Life'' and ahead of ''

The Saturday Evening Post ''The Saturday Evening Post'' is an American magazine, currently published six times a year. It was issued weekly under this title from 1897 until 1963, then every two weeks until 1969. From the 1920s to the 1960s, it was one of the most widely ...

'', which closed in 1969, and ''

Collier's ''Collier's'' was an American general interest magazine founded in 1888 by Peter Fenelon Collier. It was launched as ''Collier's Once a Week'', then renamed in 1895 as ''Collier's Weekly: An Illustrated Journal'', shortened in 1905 to ''Coll ...

'', which folded in 1956. ''Look'' was published under various company names: Look, Inc. (1937–45), Cowles Magazines (1946–65), and

Cowles Communications Cowles Media Company ( ) (1935–1998) was a newspaper, magazine and information publishing company based in Minneapolis, Minnesota in the United States. The company operated Cowles Business Media, Cowles Creative Publishing, and Cowles ...

, Inc. (1965–71). Its New York editorial offices were located in the architecturally distinctive

488 Madison Avenue 488 Madison Avenue, also known as the Look Building, is a 25-story office building in the Midtown Manhattan neighborhood of New York City. It is along Madison Avenue's western sidewalk between 51st and 52nd Streets, near St. Patrick's Cath ...

, dubbed the "Look Building", now on the

National Register of Historic Places The National Register of Historic Places (NRHP) is the United States federal government's official list of districts, sites, buildings, structures and objects deemed worthy of preservation for their historical significance or "great artistic ...

. KGB defector Yuri Bezmenov, regarding the October 1967 ''Russia Today'' issue, said: "From the first page to the last page, it was a package of lies: propaganda cliché which were presented to American readers as opinions and deductions of American journalists. Nothing could be urtherfrom hetruth." He goes on to explain exactly how the ''Look'' reporters were compromised. ''Look'' ceased publication with its issue of October 19, 1971, the victim of a $5 million loss in revenues in 1970 (with television cutting deeply into its advertising revenues), a slack economy, and rising postal rates. Circulation was at 6.5 million when it closed.

Aftermath

French publisher

Hachette Hachette may refer to: * Hachette (surname) * Hachette (publisher), a French publisher, the imprint of Lagardère Publishing ** Hachette Book Group, the American subsidiary ** Hachette Distribution Services, the distribution arm See also * Hachett ...

brought back ''Look, the Picture Newsmagazine'' in February 1979 as a biweekly in a slightly smaller size. It lasted only a year. Subscribers received copies of ''

Esquire Esquire (, ; abbreviated Esq.) is usually a courtesy title. In the United Kingdom, ''esquire'' historically was a title of respect accorded to men of higher social rank, particularly members of the landed gentry above the rank of gentlema ...

'' to fulfill their terms. The ''Look'' Magazine Photograph Collection was donated to the

Library of Congress The Library of Congress (LOC) is the research library that officially serves the United States Congress and is the ''de facto'' national library of the United States. It is the oldest federal cultural institution in the country. The libra ...

and contains about five million items. After the closure, six ''Look'' employees created a fulfillment house using the computer system newly developed by the magazine's circulation department. The company,

CDS Global CDS Global, Inc. is a multinational corporation based in Des Moines, Iowa, that provides business process outsourcing and customer data management to various industries worldwide. They handle 710 million consumer sales promotions, 65 million c ...

, is now an international provider of customer relationship services.

Notable staff photographers and illustrators

Stanley Kubrick

Stanley Kubrick Stanley Kubrick (; July 26, 1928 – March 7, 1999) was an American film director, producer, screenwriter, and photographer. Widely considered one of the greatest filmmakers of all time, his films, almost all of which are adaptations of nove ...

was a staff photographer for ''Look'' before starting his career in feature films. Of the more than 300 assignments Kubrick did for ''Look'' from 1946 to 1951, more than 100 are in the Library of Congress collection. All ''Look'' jobs with which he was associated have been cataloged with descriptions focusing on the images that were printed. Other related Kubrick material is located at the

Museum of the City of New York A museum ( ; plural museums or, rarely, musea) is a building or institution that cares for and displays a collection of artifacts and other objects of artistic, cultural, historical, or scientific importance. Many public museums make these ...

Frank Bauman

Frank Bauman was a staff photographer for ''Look'' following his career as war correspondent in

World War II World War II or the Second World War, often abbreviated as WWII or WW2, was a world war that lasted from 1939 to 1945. It involved the World War II by country, vast majority of the world's countries—including all of the great power ...

. Bauman worked alongside Margaret Bourke-White to document life in

Cuba Cuba ( , ), officially the Republic of Cuba ( es, República de Cuba, links=no ), is an island country comprising the island of Cuba, as well as Isla de la Juventud and several minor archipelagos. Cuba is located where the northern Caribb ...

and the

Soviet Union The Soviet Union,. officially the Union of Soviet Socialist Republics. (USSR),. was a transcontinental country that spanned much of Eurasia from 1922 to 1991. A flagship communist state, it was nominally a federal union of fifteen nationa ...

during the

Cold War The Cold War is a term commonly used to refer to a period of geopolitical tension between the United States and the Soviet Union and their respective allies, the Western Bloc and the Eastern Bloc. The term '' cold war'' is used because t ...

. Bauman was known for his experimental styles, and collaborated

Doc Edgerton Harold Eugene "Doc" Edgerton (April 6, 1903 – January 4, 1990), also known as Papa Flash, was an American scientist and researcher, a professor of electrical engineering at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. He is largely credited with ...

to develop the

Stroboscopic effect The stroboscopic effect is a visual phenomenon caused by aliasing that occurs when continuous rotational or other cyclic motion is represented by a series of short or instantaneous samples (as opposed to a continuous view) at a sampling rate c ...

, which proved that the

Curveball In baseball and softball, the curveball is a type of pitch thrown with a characteristic grip and hand movement that imparts forward spin to the ball, causing it to dive as it approaches the plate. Varieties of curveball include the 12–6 curv ...

curves, settling a longstanding dispute.

William Bradford Huie

Alabama journalist

William Bradford Huie William Bradford Huie (November 13, 1910 – November 20, 1986) was an American writer, investigative reporter, editor, national lecturer, and television host. His credits include twenty-one books that sold over 30 million copies worldwide. In ad ...

was commissioned by ''Look'' and other periodicals to write articles about the

Civil Rights Movement The civil rights movement was a nonviolent social and political movement and campaign from 1954 to 1968 in the United States to abolish legalized institutional racial segregation, discrimination, and disenfranchisement throughout the Unite ...

in the South. In January 1956 he published an interview in ''Look'' in which two of the six white men who killed

admitted their guilt and described their crime. They had been acquitted at trial several months previously by an all-white jury. His work for ''Look'' was criticized at the time as " checkbook journalism", because he was known to pay interviewees to speak with them.

James Karales

James Karales James H. Karales (July 15, 1930, Canton, Ohio – April 1, 2002, Croton-on-Hudson, N.Y.) was an American photographer and photo-essayist best known for his work with ''Look'' magazine from 1960 to 1971. At ''Look'' he covered the Civil Rights Mo ...

was a photographer for ''Look'' from 1960 to 1971. Covering the

throughout its duration, he took many memorable photographs, including the iconic photograph of the Selma to Montgomery march showing people proudly marching along the highway under a cloudy, turbulent sky.James Karales, Photographer of Social Upheaval, Dies at 71
/ref>

Norman Rockwell

Beginning in 1963,

Norman Rockwell Norman Percevel Rockwell (February 3, 1894 – November 8, 1978) was an American painter and illustrator. His works have a broad popular appeal in the United States for their reflection of the country's culture. Rockwell is most famous for the ...

, after closing his career with the ''Saturday Evening Post'', began making illustrations for ''Look''.

References

External links

''Look'' collection
in the

.
Cowles Family Publishing Legacy
{{Authority control 1937 establishments in Iowa 1971 disestablishments in Iowa Defunct magazines published in the United States Magazines established in 1937 Magazines published in Iowa Magazines disestablished in 1971 Mass media in Des Moines, Iowa News magazines published in the United States Photojournalistic magazines Weekly magazines published in the United States