My current undergraduate honours student, Franklin Sayre, recently discovered that Google is hosting the entire archive of Life magazine photographs. He did a search of “psychology” and came up with a stunning collection of images. His favorites are posted on his own blog along with a bit of commentary.
Very nice! I found several photos related to an article called “Baby in a Quandary” showing children and animals on Eleanor Gibson’s visual cliff, several of which were not published in the original article.
For example:
http://images.google.com/hosted/life/l?q=psychology+source:life&imgurl=db07c89c5087f0b7
Unfortunately, they seem to be very inadequately labeled. The labels offer only generalities (“Child Behavior, Psychology, Babies, Children, 1950s”), nothing about Gibson or the apparatus or Cornell (and I found at least one factual error). As far as I can tell there doesn’t seem to be any way for more knowledgeable people to contribute to the labels.
However, something that I noticed while looking through all the psychology-labeled pictures in search of Gibson was just how many photos were of children and child-related research. If indeed this is all of Time’s psychology photos, then it would seem to be an interesting fact that research depicting children made it into the publication so frequently.