Not exactly, but close. Google is now hosting “millions” of images from the archives of LIFE magazine, the vast majority of which were never before published. The best part: the scans are wallpaper-makingly ginormously huge. Some of them suffer from some halftone issues, but hey, what do you expect?
Obviously, there’s no Creative Commons license on these images, so keep these out of your next car commercial, but they’re a great source of design inspiration. It’s great to see the mistakes too—the bad exposures and soft-focuses that give these photos some humanity (and make you think twice about deleting your bad photos).
Here are some of my favorites (There’s a NASA-overload in this list, but anyone who knows me shouldn’t be surprised):
[Google/Life Magazine Image Search]
