Sulayman’s Stories

Google announced yesterday that it was making available 10 million images from Life magazine’s archives (photos and etchings) dating back to the 1750s. Only a small percentage of the images have even been published. The rest have been “sitting in dusty archives in the form of negatives, slides, glass plates, etchings, and prints.” At this point about 20% of Life’s archive is online; the rest is promised within months.

Here’s the Google page of LIFE photo archive

I do love photos, and Google has made them very easy to search using Google Image. You just type in a word and it will search the captions for it. There’s some nice ones they suggest, like Taj Mahal, and as a tip they suggest “Add “source:life” to any Google image search and search only the LIFE photo archive. For example: computer source:life ”

Well this was a great tool so I started searching through some predictable keywords: New York University,  mosque, Pakistan, Afghanistan, Iran, Mecca, etc. There were some great photos in all of them, and I encourage you to browse through those. They even have extra-large sizes on some of them, soif you need desktop wallpaper for your computer or iPhone, here’s a nice place to browse.

One of the amazing things is that there are some very old photos of Islamic things, that supposedly haven’t been shown publicly or published before. I should note that Life’s captions like to use archaic terms like “Mohammedan” or “Moslem” so keep that in mind if you’re searching. (One is even captioned as “An islam praying onboard a ship.”) That aside, I found some fascinating photos of Islam in America in the 1940’s; Jazz star Dizzy Gillespie making salat in 1948 or New Mosque in Washington (I assume it’s the famous Islamic Center of Washington).

Some other notable photos I found:

• Shia commemoration of Ashura in Karachi, Pakistan 1948, and 1947
• Free Kashmir rally in Karachi, 1947
• Casualties of the India-Pakistan partition (see more under ‘related images’)
• Badshahi Masjid Lahore, 1947
• Eid-ul-Fitr at Jami’ Masjid, Delhi, India, 1946: Wudu 2 and pool 2, Qayaam, Rukoo, Sajdah, Qa’da-i- Akhira, Duaa
• Dome of the Rock, Jerusalem, 1948, in color 1945, and entourage and brief pic of Al-Aqsa
• Welcome to Tehran sign during the Shah’s reign, undated
• Wedding of the Caliph(?) of Spanish Morocco, 1949
• Egypt 1953, months after independence
• Muhammad Ali, 1963
• 2004 Cover of Time Magazine
• 1979 Cover of Time Magazine (ever notice its never positive?)

There’s a lot more in the archive, and I spent nearly an hour poring through it. If you found something noteworthy, leave a comment.

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