3 days ago · The photos by George Silk capture that world in vivid color, and Moser’s words bring to life the characters trying to make a life in the Outback. One cattle rancher, Bill Waudby, talked about the …

The following is adapted from the introduction to LIFE’s newcspecial issue 100 Photographs: The Most Important Pictures of All Time and the Stories Behind Them, available at newsstands and online:

LIFE magazine was fortunate enough to visit Cabo Blanco in 1959, when the club was still in its heyday. Staff photographer Frank Schershel captured the fisherman out at sea and along the shore.

This important truth is one that suffuses this collection of harvest-time photos taken during LIFE’s original run from 1936 to 1972. The crops being harvested in these photos include corn, wheat, …

When LIFE magazine visited Big Sur in 1959, the Esalen Institute was three years from opening, but the coastal community had long been attracting free-thinking types.

Explore 1960s within the LIFE photography vault, one of the most prestigious & privately held archives from the US & around the World.

All 800 paratroopers landed safely (including Kuhl, who snapped a photo on the way down for LIFE), despite encountering some initial sniper fire. But the mission itself was an anticlimax.

Explore World War II within the LIFE photography vault, one of the most prestigious & privately held archives from the US & around the World.

In early 1965, LIFE photographer Bill Ray and writer Joe Bride spent several weeks with a gang that, to this day, serves as a living, brawling embodiment of our ambivalent relationship with the rebel: Hells …

Co Rentmeester took countless memorable photographs during his years as a LIFE photographer, on a wide range of subjects, from the Watts riots to the war in Vietnam to snow monkeys in Japan.