The Wonderful World of Witches: Portraits of English Pagans

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Just about 50 years ago, in the fall of 1964, LIFE magazine published what must have felt to the venerable weekly’s long-time readers like a strikingly weird feature. Titled “Real Witches at Work,” the piece included photographs of modern-day British pagans — doctors, housewives, nurses, teachers — celebrating their ancient rites, dancing around fires and generally behaving like perfectly normal, faithful worshippers of the sun, the moon and Mother Nature have been acting for thousands of years.

Today, of course, when magic, the supernatural and the occult are central elements of some of pop culture’s most familiar (and profitable) franchises, and Wiccans are more likely to be found serving on the local school board or city council than practicing their beliefs in secret for fear of being “found out,” an article on real, live witches would excite little more than a shrug and a meh. In the early 1960s, however — and certainly in much of the United States – the notion of grown men and women getting naked in order to practice their religion would likely have blown a goodly number of puritanical minds.

But then, as Mrs. Ray Bone — a British housewife and pagan high priestess — noted in a nicely reasoned defense of witchcraft penned for that long-ago issue of LIFE: “It seems obvious to me that people can be just as immoral with their clothes on as with them off.”

Amen to that, Mrs. Bone. Amen to that.
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Unhappy Returns: Portraits of Miserable, Anxious Taxpayers

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We all know the feeling: a gnawing anxiety that somewhere out there, an IRS auditor is reaching for our file. But perhaps we can draw some very small solace from the realization that this painfully specific, tax-related misery is nothing new.

LIFE’s Alfred Eisenstaedt captured the most dreaded rite of spring — filing tax returns — seven decades ago, and except for the style of clothes on display, these pictures might have been taken last April, or the April before that. Here, a full century after the enactment of the income tax (Feb. 3, 1913), LIFE.com commemorates the grim, unavoidable task of paying one’s national dues with a gallery of photographs.

Eisenstaedt’s candid shots of taxpayers, taken with a telephoto lens from around 40 feet away from his subjects at an IRS information center in 1944 New York, reaffirm the old adage that, even when it comes to taxes, the more things change, the more they remain — for better or for worse — very much the same.
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Lost city: portraits of New York before 9/11 changed everything

Of all the cities of the world, could well be the most photographed in New York. The Brooklyn Bridge; Times Square; Central Park; Coney Island; Harlem; the Lower East Side; wonderful public library Lions; the 59th Street Bridge; buildings Chrysler, Woolworth, Empire State; and it continues. Sometimes it seems as if we've seen all possible views of the city, in each of the New York countless, countless forms - taken from all imaginable angles and that there is no way of experiencing again a familiar place.

And then, suddenly, we have a new way to see the world's largest city - and remember, once again, how variegated, and what beautiful is New York.

In the 1990s, at the insistence of his friends for a long time and gallerists, Phyllis Wrynn and Mitch Freidlin, a photographer born in Bronx called George Forss began photographing New York rooftops, towers-location - private balconies - to which very few people had access. In the next decade, Forss created a remarkable Chronicle of a New York invisible - a new New York - captured from a unique point of view. The resulting images, collectively known as "The Access project," offered unexpected glimpses of monuments that we thought we knew, while rethinking and, in a sense, revitalize the most emblematic urban landscape of the world.

[This gallery has 15 photos of "acceso". Find more here.]

Finally, it should be noted that Forss took its last "project access" photos of the year before the attack against the twin towers 2001. Not only New York physically transformed in the Decade and a half since Forss stopped the unique search and caches, since the shoot, but the entire atmosphere in the country has changed. There is simply no way, for example, it would allow to Forss shooting from the JFK airport air traffic control tower simply because an acquaintance who worked for the port authority invited him up to check out the view.

In more than one, New York and America as a whole is less free for 15 years. Seen in that light, photographs of George Forss are a celebration of and an elegy for a lost world.

George Forss (b. 1941) lives and works in Cambridge, New York. Visit him online at ForssBlog or in the Ginofor Gallery and see and buy his work in excellent Park Slope Gallery Brooklyn.
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The war at home: rare portraits of black soldiers from World War II training

In August 1943, at the height of the second world war, LIFE magazine published an extensive article titled, "Division of black". Racial tensions that inexorably shaped American history and, to a large extent, defines American culture rarely have been more urgent or widespread they were in that moment, when U.S. troops were "fighting for freedom" overseas encoded time prejudice and inequality legislation remained in force in the United States. In fact, few months until the article appeared in life, a massive riot tore through Detroit, leaving several dead, hundreds injured and thousands - mostly African-American - low arrest.

"Black Division" of the life article, meanwhile, chronic and (somewhat mutely) celebrated the growing number of black troops in U.S., focusing primarily on a single unit combat units: the famous 93rd infantry division, its 16,000 soldiers and their thousand officers--half of whom were African-Americans - training at Fort Huachuca in Arizona.

Here, as another black history month it becomes an appearance of LIFE.com, at a crucial moment in American history, when many thousands of citizens, men and women, were otherwise and training to fight to defend a country that long had resisted the notion of "freedom and justice" for all. There is more heroism in that kind of effort; seen in a certain point of view, there is a kind of radical optimism that, in the end, defines the imperfect, bold American experiment as well as something you have.

-Ben Cosgrove is the Editor of LIFE.com
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