PARIS.- Bonhams Cornette de Saint Cyr will hold a sale of nearly 200 prints from the archives of the famous LIFE magazine on 22 September 2022 in Paris. For only the second time in Europe, unpublished photos from this mythical magazine will be exhibited and offered at auction. The Golden Years of LIFE is the result of specific research in the magazine's archives on the iconography of America's golden years, from the end of the 1929 stock market crash to the end of the 1960s. Estimates range from €1,000 to €4,000.

This sale is conceived and organised by BITL under the direction of Agnès Vergez.

Created in 1936 by Henri Luce, an American press magnate and co-founder of Time Magazine, LIFE magazine was published weekly and then monthly until the 2000s. It is considered the absolute reference for photojournalism in the world. With more than eight million copies printed, the magazine became the most widely distributed magazine in the world in 1960. In 70 years, it has employed the world’s greatest photojournalists: Margaret Bourke-White, Alfred Eisenstaedt, Andreas Feininger, Gordon Parks, John Dominis, Nina Leen, to name a few.

At its peak, the magazine reached one in three Americans. Today owned by the Meredith Group, LIFE has one of the largest photographic collections in the world, kept in New York: more than 10 million photographs produced by its own photographers who made 120,000 reports. Created, as its founder Henri Luce said: "To see life, to see the world, to eyewitness great events...", LIFE thus became the mirror of a generation which, tasting little by little the delights of the consumer society, discovered the emotional power of images.

Prestigious magazines such as Vu or Regard, born between the two World Wars, affirmed the primacy of the image over the text. But it was undoubtedly LIFE that made this its credo and, from the early 1950s, illustrated the golden age of photojournalism and the glorious myth of the photoreporter.

This sale offers a dynamic and colourful selection (1/3 of the lots are in colour) of photographs evoking the 1950s and 1960s in the United States, which was experiencing unprecedented development and transformation.

Several themes are covered: sport (from boxing matches in Madison Square Garden to the madness of car racing), music (from Ella Fitzgerald performing in a Chicago nightclub to the Beatles, via Elvis Presley's tours), cinema (Marilyn Monroe, Marlon Brando, Steve McQueen), and the United States (from the drive-ins to the first supermarkets, and from the streets of Chicago to the neon lights of New York and Las Vegas), and the way in which Americans look at the world.

The prints offered for sale are very high-quality modern prints, made with techniques exclusively reserved for this auction and selected according to the nature of each image. The colour prints are produced partly using the unique Fresson process (direct carbon prints with a matt finish and saturated colours), and partly on Fujiflex paper (prints with an ultra-bright finish similar to cibachrome prints).