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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Ghosts in the Sun: Hitler’s Personal Photographer at Dachau, 1950

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Do places have memories? Do buildings where people did terrible, bestial things to other human beings somehow retain an echo of that savagery within their walls, their floors, their foundations? Is it just our imagination that makes the skin crawl at places like Cambodia’s Genocide Museum, or Elimina Castle in Ghana, or any one of the Nazi’s extermination and slave-labor camps — or is it possible that there’s still something there, palpable and chilling, years later?

Even the most die-hard realist might find it hard to resist those sorts of questions when looking at Hugo Jaeger’s eerily quiet, color pictures from Dachau in 1950. Jaeger, after all, was not just another visitor to the former concentration camp; as Adolf Hitler’s personal photographer, he traveled with and chronicled Hitler and his Nazi cohorts at rallies, military parades, parties and, frequently, in quieter, private moments. The photos Jaeger made during his stint with Hitler were evidently so attuned to the Führer’s vision of what a Thousand Year Reich might look like that Hitler himself reportedly declared, upon seeing Jaeger’s early work: “The future belongs to color photography.”

[MORE: How Time Inc. bought Hugo Jaeger's archive of color photos.]

But what of the photos in this gallery, made five years after Hitler’s death (by suicide in a sordid bunker) and the fall of the Reich?

Even an avowed Nazi like Jaeger could not pretend that documenting a brick-and-mortar remnant of “master race” depravity would help serve the Nazi cause. In fact, at the time Jaeger was making these pictures, Dachau was still occupied — by refugees left homeless, and in some cases stateless, by the war that Jaeger’s degenerate cohorts started years before.

(At left: The dead at Dachau, 1945. Photo: David E. Scherman—The LIFE Picture Collection/Getty Images.)

Whatever the reasons for Jaeger’s 1950 visit to Dachau — which opened exactly 80 years ago, on March 22, 1933 — the photographs he made of the decaying, sunlit place feel at-once banal and vaguely obscene. Taken by anyone else, the pictures would be forgettable snapshots; when we know Hugo Jaeger was behind the camera, however, the sunlight itself seems cold, and Dachau teems with restless, invisible, unappeased ghosts.

– Ben Cosgrove is the Editor of LIFE.com
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The Great Alaska Earthquake of 1964: Rare Photos From an Epic Disaster

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When the Great Alaska Earthquake convulsed the south-central region of that vast state on March 27, 1964, the energy released by the upheaval — the largest quake in recorded North American history — was, LIFE magazine reported, “400 times the total [energy] of all nuclear bombs ever exploded” until that time. The megathrust event unleashed a colossal 200,000 megatons of energy, destroying buildings and infrastructure in Anchorage and far beyond; raising the land as much as 30 feet in some places; and sparking a major underwater landslide in Prince William Sound, which killed scores of people when the resulting waves slammed into Port Valdez.

When all was said and done, the 9.2-magnitude quake — which struck around 5:30 in the evening on Good Friday — and its many powerful aftershocks caused hundreds of millions of dollars in damage; killed more than 130 people (including more than a dozen tsunami-related deaths in Oregon and California) and; in ways literal and figurative, forever altered the Alaskan landscape in places like Anchorage, Seward and Valdez.

Here, on the 50th anniversary of the epic natural disaster, LIFE.com presents photos — many of them never published in LIFE — from the cataclysm’s aftermath.

Stan Wayman—LIFE Magazine

LIFE Magazine, April 10, 1964.

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Eire apparent: Recalling Ireland of Sean O'Casey disappeared

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Vesuvius: Last major eruption of the volcano photos

The most legendary volcano on Earth, looms Italy Vesuvius on the Gulf of Naples as an unpredictable God. The history of the mountain 79 A.D. eruption that destroyed Pompeii and Herculaneum, burying those two ancient cities in rock and ash Burns - has been represented many times in art and literature that has taken on the feel of the myth. But for the thousands killed in the most famous of all volcanic cataclysms, sudden, insondablemente horrible end of the world was too real.

Vesuvius has appeared dozens of times in the centuries since Pompeii and Herculaneum were almost erased from history, sometimes killing thousands (as in 1631), on other occasions, destroying houses and entire villages including but no one leaving dead. The last major eruption took place 70 years ago, in the middle of Mundial Guerra II and was photographed by the great British photographer and a founding member of Magnum, George Rodger.

As life pointed its readers in April 17, 1944, issue of the magazine, the eruption "has aggravated the complexities of war and merely existing in the South of Italy." Starting on 18 March continues, the eruption the Allied military Government has given thousands of refugees rather than care and are illuminated the horizon of the night as far north as Anzio beachhead. "

But life also cited the Director of Observatory Mount Vesuvius, Professor Giuseppe Imbo, who offered a refreshingly optimistic take on relationship of the Neapolitan people with the brilliant, unpredictable volcano in the midst of them:

"A wonderful thing, my Vesuvius," the enthusiastic teacher. "That covers the Earth with beautiful ash that makes the land fertile and cultivating grapes and wine. That is why, after each eruption, people rebuild their homes on the slopes of the volcano. This is why you call the slopes of Mount Vesuvius the felix company - the happy land. "

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Brassaï in Paris: A Photographer’s Love Letter to the City of Light

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It’s unlikely that any single artist has ever been — or ever will be — as intimately associated with Paris as the Hungarian-born photographer, writer and filmmaker Gyula Halász, known to the world as Brassaï. Through his gorgeous black-and-white portraits of Parisians in cafes, gardens and dance halls, Brassaï defined, and continues to define, an ideal of the City of Light that has lasted for generations. Countless people around the globe – when they think of the Paris of the 1930s and 1940s — envision the great, ancient city as Brassaï captured it through his artful lens.

On the Eiffel Tower’s 125th birthday — the grand emblem of the French capital opened on March 31, 1889 — LIFE.com presents a handful of pictures from a wonderful new book, Brassaï: For the Love of Paris (Flammarion).

As the mayor of Paris, Bertrand Delanoë writes in his foreword to the book: “My heartfelt wish is that those who view these photographs lose themselves for a time in a Paris of chance encounters, made more loving, more alive than ever by Brassaï’s inquiring eye.”

We couldn’t have said it better ourselves.
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LIFE With Classic Comics: In Praise of an American Art Form

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Comic books, cartoons, the Sunday funnies — the seemingly inexhaustible variety of ways in which comics have been created, presented and enjoyed through the years says as much about the readers who devour them as it does about the medium itself. Comic fans, after all, usually gravitate toward the form — i.e., the melding of the written word and graphically inventive still pictures — rather than embracing a specific format to the exclusion of all others.

There are purists, of course — often humorless, male and, for the most part, single — who tend to draw hard, distinct lines between the myriad media in which comics have been produced. For instance, they might state, categorically, that comic books have nothing, nothing, to do with comic strips like, say, Hagar the Horrible, Boondocks or Doonesbury.

Others clasp their Alan Moore and Frank Miller graphic novels to their chests and refuse to concede that Harvey Pekar’s American Splendor, Peter Bagge’s Neat Stuff or any Calvin and Hobbes collection one wants to name might be as great (if not greater) an imaginative feat than Watchmen or The Dark Knight Returns.

But for most of us, comics are comics are comics, and we’ll just as happily sit down with a Fantastic Four adventure written, lettered and colored in 1981 (Firefrost, anyone?); a dog-eared Maus II; or the companionable fare in pretty much any Sunday newspaper.

In that spirit, LIFE.com offers photos from the early 1940s through the late ’50s celebrating the ever-expanding universe of the comic: pictures of men, women and children caught up, if only for a while, in captivating, imaginary worlds that somehow manage to feel at-once utterly familiar and wholly, vividly new.

— Ben Cosgrove is the Editor of LIFE.com
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