Gandhi and his spinning wheel: the story behind an iconic photograph

Some personalities of the 20th century were - and remain - so recognizable that literally billions of people around the world such as Mohandas Karamchand Gandhi (1869-1948). Albert Einstein, JFK, Martin Luther King, Jr. - There is a sort of evocative power of the most famous paintings of these men who immediately calls to mind not only the time in which they live, but the words and deeds that made them so memorable. Gandhi is perfectly suited to this group of iconic figures, and no individual image has become more closely linked with their life and their way of life, than the portrait 1946 from Margaret Bourke-White of the pioneers of civil disobedience next to his prized Distaff.

Bourke-White was, of course, one of the most intrepid chroniclers of the century of wars and conflicts: your photos from Buchenwald in 1945, for example, and of the terrible violence that attended the India 1947 partition and the creation of Pakistan are among the most powerful of his extraordinary career. But was also capable of sensitive to documenting the silent - and, in many cases, the representative - moments of the life of the great and the powerless, alike. Incredibly, however, his now-famous image of Gandhi does not appear in the article in life magazine for which it was originally shot.

In 1946, during the period prior to the partition of 1947 historical - and the independence from Great Britain to the India and Pakistan - Bourke-White spent time in India working on a feature, in the final analysis, titled "Leaders of la India", which would operate in the edition of May 27, 1946, of life. (See at the end of this gallery to see article, page margins, as it appeared in the magazine). He made hundreds of photographs, including many of the same Gandhi: his family; at her spinning-wheel; in the sentence. More than one dozen of pictures running in the "Leaders" article in the may issue of 46. Only two were of Gandhi, and none of them was the well-known picture of the spinning wheel.

In fact, this photo does not appear in life until months later - and still, functioned as a small image at the top of an article published in June 1946 (left) which focused on the fascination of Gandhi what he calls the magazine "nature cures" of patients.

"At the age of 76," life wrote, "Mohandas Gandhi has embarked on a new career as a doctor. It is characteristic of the Mahatma who, at this time when their permanent quest for a free India seems to have reached its final crisis, takes time out of a busy political life to preach a nature cure. Gandhi has license to practice, of course, but to ask the Mahatma would be such a document as requiring President Truman to produce your ticket when it goes up to [the first presidential airplane, nicknamed] Holy cow. "

It should be noted, however, that life does not entirely forgot about Bourke-White photo once it was published for the first time. From the beginning of February 1948, photography was given pride of place in a multiple page tribute to Gandhi published immediately after his assassination. Fill half a page in the article, 'India loses its 'great soul',' the image serves as a eulogy visual agitation for man and his ideals.

In typed notes that accompanied the Bourke-White film when he was sent from the India offices of New York life in the spring of 1946, the importance of the simple spinning wheel in the picture is very clear:

[Gandhi] rotates each day during 1 hr usually starts at 4. All the members of his ashram should turn. He and his followers encouraged everyone to turn. Even M. B-W dared to lay down [] to rotate the camera... When I photograph and spinning were crafts, I said seriously, "the largest of the 2 spins." Spinning is elevated to heights almost a religion with Gandhi and his followers. The spinning wheel is a kind of an Ikon with them. Spinning is one cure all and spoken of in terms of high poetry.

The most famous Bourke-White portrait made of Gandhi, meanwhile, note the editors of life simply says: "reading clippings Gh. [a common abbreviation for Gandhi in the notes] - spinning wheel in the foreground, which just finished using." It would be impossible to exaggerate the reverence in which Gh 'personal own spinning wheel' is carried out at the ashram. "

Here, on the anniversary of the assassination of Gandhi - they shot him dead (January 30, 1948) by a hindu nationalist Nathuram Godse who felt that he was the Apostle of non-violence, in some way, catering to Muslims in India - life returns to publish great portrait of Bourke-White, as well as other images of the same allocation Gandhi called. We have also included the lists of pages of the article "The Indian leaders" that ran in May 1946.

A final note: as many photographers, Bourke-White was not above time when itself allowing the freedom of a playful self-portrait. Here it is, then - legendary photojournalist in India, posing with a loom of his own.

Margaret Bourke-White - time & life Pictures/Getty Images

-Ben Cosgrove is the Editor of LIFE.com
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The Marmot: an appreciation

Some call it a marmot. Others prefer the more evocative title, "silbato-cerdo". But for most of us - and certainly for those who turn their eyes towards Punxatawney, PA., in the first week of February of every year - bisojo creature, teeth sharp in the photo above is and always will be, a marmot.

With Groundhog Day on us - when everyone, Punxatawney Phil, most famous Groundhog emerges from its burrow and not see his shadow or not - we think we took a moment to praise the Marmot often maligned and widely misunderstood. For example, away from the soft, doughy loafer of popular myth, the Marmot in the wild is an active animal (a marmot single moves an average of 700 pounds of dirt when digging a burrow); a fierce defender of its own territory; and an expert arbol-escalador - when chased by predators, at least.

Woodchucks also have a charming habit of whistles when alarmed - therefore the nickname of silbato-cerdo - and like to eat. The average Groundhog consumes sufficient grass, grains, fruits, and other non-meat foods that, if he or she was a person of 175 pounds, would be equivalent to eating a salad of 15 pounds. Every day.

We could go and extolling the virtues of the Marmot - and, indeed, reasons why many people, especially the peasants, cannot withstand them - but it is almost time for Phil to make its entry, and not want to lose it. This winter may not end soon for us.

Happy Groundhog Day.
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Manly men: rude American classics, seen through the lens of life

Once again, the Super Bowl is about us, and once again, the occasion brings all the chaos, marketing, fan frenzy and insults that titanic sporting events are heir. With the Super Bowl, however, people being cranked up to 11 - and is not surprising. Professional football is unique among American sports due to its pure spectacle, oversized. It is stronger than the baseball, brasher than basketball and usually more violent sport of the phenomenally physical NHL hockey and high speed NASCAR madness. In fact, all major sports in North America, soccer is indisputably that highlights any vestiges of machismo could be lurking in even the most seemingly slight fan.

After all, football is for manly men. That said, the intensely masculine (doubt call it homosexual) energy that revolves around the event each year - and perhaps especially this year, with the male manliest of them all, Peyton Manning, in the center of the scene - made us think about this chimerical figure, the tough American. Specifically, how was he, as a subspecies of the ideal universal male, portrayed in the pages of life through the years?

There are many types of hardness, of course. Mental toughness (Jackie Robinson); quiet toughness (Gregory Peck, Gary Cooper); Sandy hardness (determined a fatigued, American Marine); crazy, spasmodic hardness (sociopath of Cagney, Cody Jarrett in White Heat); Run-right-on-your-hardness (Jim Brown); and it continues.

Here, on the eve of the 48th Super Bowl, LIFE.com offers a look back at some of the emblematic faces and personalities which, on their own time and in your own chosen pursuit, were hard enough to respond to this historical question: who is the man?
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Jackson Pollock: First photos of the action painter at work

Is it the best painter of life in the United States?

That was the question direct, provocative in an August 1949 LIFE magazine article reputation of helped to cement Jackson Pollock. It was a question Pollock spent much of the rest of his life struggling to answer - while waiting desperately prove to skeptics for life was right when not even one question so monumental in the first place.

As the single most recognizable practitioner of abstract expressionism - the movement that put to United States and, specifically, post World War II New York at the epicenter of the art of painting - Pollock was a star of genuine art. But soon both abandoned the radical technique "drip" that had earned him fame and vilipendio among some art critics, and he spent the last years of his life battling the twin demons of depression and alcoholism.

Here, life presents outtakes from photographer Martha Holmes 1949 with Pollock - shoot images that offer a unique portrait of the artist's life House with wife and fellow painter Lee Krasner on Eastern Long Island and the unique method of work which made him an icon of the art world.

With a down payment provided to them by art dealer Peggy Guggenheim, Pollock Krasner bought lands in the village of Springs, New York and moved to the House that would be residence of Pollock in the last decade of his life. Pollock developed a small near stable in a Studio, where she was to create many of his most famous works. As his fame grew, the small town of springs - part of East Hampton, attracted other great artists and writers, such as Willem de Kooning, Kurt Vonnegut, Nora Ephron, Philip Roth and Joseph Heller.

Despite leaving the city to live on a farm near the ocean, it is difficult to say that nature was a source of inspiration for paintings of Pollock, which were so abstract that its only apparent source was subconscious of the artist. Even so, the natural world found his way in his paintings in the form of sand and other materials that the artist applied routinely to his canvas, along with his paintings, while job titles - as his gigantic (1950) autumn rhythm - reflect a sensibility attuned to the seasons of the year.

Pollock's work was often referred to as "action painting" and the performance of dance in which he hooked while a painting was essential to the aesthetic result. Instead of using a Sawhorse, stretches a canvas on the floor of his barn and they scamper around all four sides painted. Instead of using brushes, sticks to flick and drip paint he used, or he poured directly Tin, favoring the enamels on traditional oils.

Today, you can get a painting of "Drip period" Pollock North of $100 million in an auction.

When she became successful and famous, Pollock bought his own truck to the air free, a 1950 Oldsmobile 88 convertible. This was the vehicle driving on August 11, 1956, when, less of a mile from his home, he drove off the road and overturned the car, killing himself and a passenger, Edith Metzger and wounding her lover Ruth Kligman.

Krasner, a gifted abstract painter in his own right, put career on hold during the decade with Pollock of Long Island House for supporting the career of her husband. After his death, she began to paint in the barn that had been his study. When she died in 1984, at age 76, was finally recognized by his own work, and not simply as "The Lady Jackson Pollock". Today, farm and barn Studio married painters include a museum dedicated to the study of the working life intertwined.
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Control de armas de la vieja escuela: Retrato de la seguridad del arma de fuego en Indiana Rural, 1956

[Note: LIFE.com is aware that find images of weapons and the children in a classroom may be distressing to some readers - even if those images were made for decades and represent an adult school in a rural community in the correct and safe use of firearms instructing.] [Our intention is not to incite, but to add context and nuances to the national dialogue about guns, violence and security of the gun in the United States.]

Weapons. Sometimes it seems, especially that we cannot speak of any thing in American life without somehow, sometime, now refers to enduring obsession nation by arms. After the unspeakable horror of Sandy Hook (and the massacre of temple Sikh of Wisconsin, Virginia Tech, Columbine, killing of 2011 of Jared Lee Loughner in Tucson, Chicago frightening spike in gun violence in 2012 and continues), the national conversation for the rights of gun and arms control has taken on an urgency verging at times despair.

What the hell, everyone seems to ask, we can do about death without end?

Numbers related to armed violence in the land of the free are, of course, deeply chilling. More than 8,500 Americans were killed by weapons (or rather, by the killers) wielding weapons in 2011, according to the latest data from the FBI. Of those, 565 were under the age of 18 years; 119 were children of 12 years or less. Wherever one lower in the debate of the gun, most healthy people can be agreed that these statistics are shameful national and... well, crazy.

But there are literally tens of millions of Americans who own and shoot weapons completely within the letter and the spirit of the law. For example, hunting is a pastime and a rite of passage in countless communities around the United States and the majority of hunters - men and women and children - is not taking deer, bears and ducks and doves with slingshots or bows and arrows. They use rifles and shotguns - as they have done for generations.

For six decades, in its March 26, 1956, Edition, LIFE magazine published a remarkable series of photos that accompanied an article entitled "A grain of drawing on safety". Here, with the hope to provide at least a little more context and a small degree of perspective in the arms of the nation debate, life takes those images and that article. After all, the focal point of the current discussion around weapons is how to make safer communities. Assuming that shotguns, at least, it is likely that he will be with us for a while and that families and friends will continue to hunt together for the foreseeable future, lessons on how to shoot what you are hunting, rather than blasting itself or the companions, always will have a necessary place in our gun-happy culture.

Like life in "Drawing a bead on safety," all those years (citing a statistic that is atrocious even today):

In 1954, more than 550 American children under 15 died in accidents related to careless handling of firearms, five of them in lake County, Indiana. [In 2010, 606 people were killed by "accidental discharge of firearms," according to the CDC. - ed.] This situation impacted to Indiana conservation officer Rod Rankin, who decided to offer a course in gun safety to all children interested in the County. Last year 2,500 children of 6 years, with the approval of their parents, have adopted it in it.

Rankin stressed two things: never designated as weapon to anyone, not even in the game and always check immediately if the gun is loaded... Rankin is glad to answer routine questions such as "how fast and far a bullet go?" but tries to the talk to "have you shot someone?" and "do if you shoot a man in the head how long it takes to die?"

Some people think that Rankin is from children in arms too young. But the National Rifle Association says that four States now permit gun safety in elementary courses and says, "the earlier a child learns to respect a gun and what not to do with it natural curiosity's best chance to not get it into trouble".

Love or hate the NRA, it is difficult to argue with a logic that emphasizes education and firearms safety.

Now, those millions of firearms without a license out there...

-Ben Cosgrove is the Editor of LIFE.com

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The 'box of knowledge': photo a Wikipedia early, Trippy, analog in 3-d

A full three decades until a British computer scientist, 35-year-old named Tim Berners-Lee invented the World Wide Web, forever changing the way that humans share and consume information (translation: photos of the cat), a young, visionary Designer in Chicago created a device that he called, simply and evocative, a "box of knowledge".

As life magazine described the artifact to its readers in the edition of September 1962, in language very similar to that used by digital age proselytizers and skeptics of the technology today - knowledge box appeared be an invention which does not help our species intentionally self-destructive to obtain knowledge faster and easier that ever, which perhaps enables us at least delaying our extinction... or could only accelerate our inevitable death. You know, in any way. Whatever it is.

As the imagination of many men creates a fantastic new world, the danger is that each individual can soon found himself lost in it. You can be an expert in their special field - microbiology, perhaps, but otherwise remains ignorant. New teaching techniques and devices, therefore, requires much to put so much knowledge as possible, as soon as possible, in the brain of swimming.

Out of the imagination of a specialist, designer Ken Isaacs the Illinois Institute of Technology's 32-year-old has become a machine called a "knowledge box" hoping to help fill this need. Isaacs, looking from inside his strange cell invention [see slide #4 in the gallery], believes that the traditional classroom environment is how inadequate for the learning of a ball park. Inside the box of knowledge, alone and quiet, the student would see a quick procession of thoughts and ideas that are projected on the walls, ceiling and floor in a panoply of images, words and patterns of light, leaving the middle to conclude for yourself. It is a machine of visual impact that could represent, for example, a history of the Civil war in a single session, or easily give an astronaut expects a lesson in celestial navigation.

The knowledge box was dismantled and went into storage shortly after left the article in life. But cube of 12 feet, Isaacs wooden frames '-with its multiple projectors of slides fuego-manguera Visual data to the occupants, was rebuilt and put on display a few years ago, at the School of Sullivan galleries of the Art Institute of Chicago. By all accounts, the "rare cell ploy" was as rare and as impressive five decades later as it was when Isaacs first introduced to an unsuspecting world in 1962.

Robert W. Kelley - time & life Pictures/Getty Images

Ken Isaacs, 1962.

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The Apollo 1 Launchpad fire: Recalling to Grissom, white and Chaffee

Men and women have been shot into space from the surface of the earth over the past fifty years - enough that now much of the public in general considers space missions as relatively safe, memorization efforts. Projects that, inconceivably complex and technically nuanced as establishing an SUV of State size of the itinerant art laboratory on the surface of Mars - without breaking it, can still attract the attention of the world. For many people, however, when it comes to missions manned as the discontinued program of space shuttle flights to and from the international space station, the thrill is far away.

But the business of space exploration is not and has never been, surely. Explosions, fires, parachute failure and other disasters have left dozens of astronauts, cosmonauts, pilots and crew worker dead and wounded over the years. Some (Challenger and Columbia, for example) are spectacular, terrifying disasters. Others are smaller, quieter, calamities, but for any involved person who survives, wounded or not, experiences life-changing.

Here, on the anniversary of one of the worst disasters in the history of NASA and its first public tragedy - LIFE.com remembers astronauts Gus Grissom, Ed White and Roger Chaffee, who died in a fire inside your module's command on a platform from Cape Canaveral on January 27, 1967. As Jeffrey Kluger time (the author of Apollo 13) wrote once, when three astronauts are commemorated:

Test pilots can feel immediately if they are working with a good vehicle or a bad one, and the crew of the Apollo 1... I knew almost immediately that they had been assigned to a scoundrel. By late 1966, the last ship robust Gemini, two men had flown, and NASA was the deployment of the ships Apollo three men who, finally, men to the moon. The spaceship was sweet machines, but in test - runs on the platform, which were a disaster. Fried electrical, communications died, repairs and improvements were late to arrive... More worrying, however, was the insistence of NASA in continue using pure oxygen to 100% in their atmospheric systems - a flammable explosive gas that had worked very well so far in the Mercury and Gemini ships, but that could ignite like gasoline in the presence of both an errant spark... Early one Friday night, when the Apollo 1 astronauts locked up in the spaceship for a session of practice outside of the pad, just a spark escaped a wire frayed along the seat of Grissom. In less than a minute, the three men were dead. For a time, it seemed, the Apollo program would also perish.

The program, of course, survived and less three years after the 1967 fire launchpad, Neil Armstrong, Buzz Aldrin and Michael Collins flew Apollo 11 to the Moon and back - leaving human footprints on the lunar surface, in what some consider the triumph firm 20th century.

Ralph Morse - time & life Pictures/Getty Images

Workers in the North American aviation installation CSM-012 "Block I" command module, the type in which Grissom, white and Chaffee died.

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