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.In its report from the colony on 13 February 1939, for example, it announced that American colonization had made its people “the luckiest inthe Orient,” yet depicted them as so backward as to be unable to appreciateU.S.beneficence.Its two-page spread on the culture of the archipelago used the Igorot highlanders as the quintessential Filipinos, and its most prominent photoLife, Margaret Bourke-White, and Partisan Objectivity 171presented a quite literal image of their partial assimilation: it exhibited a group of Igorots wearing Western shirts and hats, but completely naked from the waist down.The accompanying text stated that Filipinos “are still incredibly lazy and incompetent, spoiled and quarrelsome.Accustomed to nakedness, the Igorots,like those below, put on shirts and shoes when they come to town, but no trou-sers.For all the fond belief that the Filipinos have learned democratic ways, they will inevitably slide into dictatorship” (53).Like so many other peoples it deemed fundamentally deficient, Life saw no reason to include Filipinos in the American Century in 1939, nor to move its readers to a more positive view ofthem.A similar fate would befall the Chinese after the revolution of 1949.Thus Life’s American Century reached beyond American borders to include some of those formerly held to be racial aliens, and took very tentative steps to highlight southern injustices against black Americans.But it was not guidedby a consistent antiracist philosophy, nor did it generally put forth a relationship of equality between white Americans and “the darker races” at home andabroad.At its worst, Life perpetuated the hard racism within American culture; at its best, it exhorted its affluent white readers to recognize their agency, to lift themselves out from the crowd and embark on a global mission of capitalistuplift, one that sometimes brought them into imaginative contact with racialothers whom they had been reared to view as threats.The Dangerous PlaygroundLife and Fetishized ReadingThe consumerist basis of Luce’s imagined global community—visually ren-dered by the Chinese athletic director holding a basketball—meant that thecultivation of consumer desire among readers of Life was fully in keeping with its political project.In its drive to generate a culture of consumption—and, more immediately, to remain viable as a profit-driven publication—the magazine and its advertisers turned to aesthetics other than realism.Realism was not the only means of bringing about the American Century within the pages ofLife; while it was a powerful force within the photo-essays, it was not the only representational mode within the magazine.The photo-essays were only a partof Life—they were wedged between mazes of advertisements that grew more complex as the magazine aged.The overall layout defined the way in whichthe reader would experience the realism within the photo-essays; as a result, it cannot be conveniently bracketed off.When we examine other elements ofthe magazine, we find that the overall effect of Life can hardly be described as172Life, Margaret Bourke-White, and Partisan Objectivityrealist, for juxtapositions between advertisement and photo-essay underminethe ideological coherence (necessary to realism) the essays work to create.Some of the advertisements, when viewed independently, do operate under a realistmode, as they tell stories of ordinary people with everyday problems, using a linear, frame-by-frame technique reminiscent of comics (sometimes the framesare even numbered to make the sequence abundantly clear), and they tell suchstories with photographs to boot.Much more often, however, they are nowhereclose to realism, and instead display an advertised object within a stylized setting using a single image, often a drawing—a classic instance of commodityfetishism.But whether creating linear narratives or not, the ads were generally in keeping with the hard-boiled advertising style of the 1930s, when copywriters rejected the elegant lines and colors of the 1920s in favor of a more ugly, blunt aesthetic (Marchand 300–306).This made the ads more seamlessly blend withthe black-and-white, photograph-based layout of Life.In a magazine reading experience familiar to the modern reader, one mustnavigate one’s way through a maze of advertisements in order to find the articles.In my investigation, the proportion of ad to article in the early days of the magazine hovered around 43 percent.For instance, of the ninety pages in Life’s 22 May 1939 edition, thirty-nine pages are composed of ads.14 Whereas the news articles are bracketed off relatively clearly, its lifestyle, culture, “women’s interest,” and curiosity articles are not.In these categories, photo-essays are juxtaposed with advertisements featuring photos, often on the same page, which has the effect of blurring the line between article and ad [ Pobierz całość w formacie PDF ]