In case you hadn?t seen it yet, Google is now hosting the Life magazine photo archive. You can search on the cutlines of images, the locations of the photographs, the subject of the photo and best of all to those doing photographic research, the photographer?s name! 

The archive boasts photos taken from the 1850s to today. Interestingly, Googles blurb about the archive states that you can

 

which might be a bit difficult since photography is generally accepted as starting in the 1820s. I think perhaps they meant their archive dates to the 1850s to today.

Here are some searches that I recently that turned up images by many of my photographic heroes:

• Weegee: The original paparazzi – http://images.google.com/images?q=weegee&q=source%3Alife (note that there are not many of his photos but a fun picture of him and a Time magazine cover that used one of his images)
• Margaret Bourke-White http://images.google.com/images?hl=en&q=Margaret+bourke-white+source%3Alife
• Alfred Eisenstadt http://images.google.com/images?hl=en&q=alfred+eisenstad+source%3Alife
• Larry Burrows http://images.google.com/images?q=Larry+Burrows+source%3Alife
• James Natchwey http://images.google.com/images?hl=en&q=James+Nachtwey+source%3Alife
• Robert Capa http://images.google.com/images?hl=en&q=Robert+Capa++source%3Alife
• Gordon Parks http://images.google.com/images?hl=en&q=Gordon+Parks+source%3Alife 
• W. Eugene Smith http://images.google.com/images?hl=en&q=W.+Eugene+Smith+source%3Alife