LIFE photographers ventured to this picturesque city many times for many reasons—popping in on Peggy Guggenheim, for example—but this story is built off two shoots by Dmitri Kessel. Both were done in the 1950s, and they are very different. Kessel shot Venice in 1959 during the peak of summer with a focus on the American tourists who thronged there, and the other shoot was done in 1952, in winter, when the streets were largely empty and also flooded in areas, as tends to happen that time of year.

The moods could not be more different. During the summer a navy of gondoliers rule the waterways and visitors fill Piazza San Marco, or St. Mark’s Square, while in the winter those boats are all tied up. The two constants are the stunning architecture and the pigeons. Even in the winter, a local woman finds the time to give the birds a little attention.

The real message of this shoots is that Venice is beautiful in every circumstance.

American tourists sightseeing in Venice, Italy, 1959.

Dmitri Kessel/Life Picture Collection/Shutterstock

American tourists in Venice, Italy, 1959.

Dmitri Kessel/Life Picture Collection/Shutterstock

American tourists in a gondola in Venice, Italy, 1959.

Dmitri Kessel/LIfe Picture Collection/Shutterstock

Tourists in a gondolas, Venice, Italy, 1959.

Dmitri Kessel/Life Picture Collection/Shutterstock

Americans in Venice, Italy, 1959.

Dmitri Kessel/Life Picture Collection/Shutterstock

American tourists in Venice, Italy, 1959.

Dmitri Kessel/Life Picture Collection/Shutterstock

American tourists gathering in Saint Mark’s Square in Venice, Italy, 1959.

Dmitri Kessel/Life Picture Collection/Shutterstock

American tourists in Venice, Italy, 1959.

Dmitri Kessel/Life Picture Collection/Shutterstock

American tourists in Venice, Italy, 1959.

Dmitri Kessel/Life Picture Collection/Shutterstock

American tourists in a gondola, Venice, Italy, 1959.

Dmitri Kessel/Life Picture Collection/Shutterstock

American tourists in Venice, Italy, 1959.

Dmitri Kessel/Life Picture Collection/Shutterstock

Venice, Italy, 1959.

Dmitri Kessel/Life Picture Collection/Shutterstock

Moored gondolas on a foggy Grand Canal in Venice, 1952.

Dmitri Kessel/Life Picture Collection/Shutterstock

The Doge’s Palace on a rainy day in the Piazza San Marco in Venice, 1952.

Dmitri Kessel/Life Picture Collection/Shutterstock

Pedestrians threading their way along makeshift wooden sidewalk across a flooded Piazza San Marco during its usual winter condition, 1952.

Dmitri Kessel/Life Picture Collection/Shutterstock

A flooded Venice, Italy in the winter of 1952.

Dmitri Kessel/Life Picture Collection/Shutterstock

Moored gondola on Grand Canal in front of Piazza San Marco during off-season in Venice, 1952.

Dmitri Kessel/Life Picture Collection/Shutterstock

Moored gondolas in canal that runs between ancient buildings of Venice, 1952.

Dmitri Kessel/Life Picture Collection/Shutterstock

The flooded Piazza San Marco during off-season in Venice, Italy, 1952.

Dmitri Kessel/Life Picture Collection/Shutterstock

Venice, Italy during off-season, 1952.

Dmitri Kessel/Life Picture Collection/Shutterstock

A local woman fed the pigeons in the Piazza San Marco on a rainy day, 1952.

Dmitri Kessel/Life Picture Collection/Shutterstock

Pigeons flocking above pedestrians crossing Piazza San Marco on a rainy Venice day, 1952.

Dmitri Kessel/Life Picture Collection/Shutterstock

The post Vintage Venice, In and Out of Season appeared first on LIFE.

Liz Ronk, a photo editor at LIFE.com, curated this gallery. Follow her on Twitter @lizabethronk.

January 23, 1950 cover of LIFE magazine.

Gordon Parks LIFE Magazine

March 13, 1950 cover of LIFE magazine.

Gjon Mili LIFE Magazine

April 24, 1950 cover of LIFE magazine.

Milton H. Greene LIFE Magazine

May 15, 1950 cover of LIFE magazine.

Nina Leen LIFE Magazine

June 19, 1950 issue of LIFE magazine.

Nina Leen LIFE Magazine

September 11, 1950 cover of LIFE magazine.

Nina Leen LIFE Magazine

October 30, 1950 cover of LIFE magazine.

Martha Holmes LIFE Magazine

February 12, 1951 cover of LIFE magazine.

Milton H. Greene LIFE Magazine

March 5, 1951 cover of LIFE magazine.

Gordon Parks LIFE Magazine

May 21, 1951 cover of LIFE magazine.

Milton H. Greene LIFE Magazine

December 3, 1951 cover of LIFE magazine.

Sharland LIFE Magazine

January 7, 1952 cover of LIFE magazine.

Nina Leen LIFE Magazine

February 25, 1952 issue of LIFE magazine.

Nina Leen LIFE Magazine

April 14, 1952 issue of LIFE magazine.

Mark Shaw LIFE Magazine

June 2, 1952 issue of LIFE magazine.

Mark Shaw LIFE Magazine

June 23, 1952 issue of LIFE magazine.

Christa LIFE Magazine

August 25, 1952 issue of LIFE magazine.

John Raymond Solowinski LIFE Magazine

September 8, 1952 issue of LIFE magazine.

Milton H. Greene LIFE Magazine

November 24, 1952 issue of LIFE magazine.

Milton H. Greene LIFE Magazine

January 26, 1953 issue of LIFE magazine.

Lisa Larsen LIFE Magazine

March 9, 1953 issue of LIFE magazine.

Philippe Halsman LIFE Magazine

May 11, 1953 issue of LIFE magazine.

Milton H. Greene LIFE Magazine

July 27, 1953 issue of LIFE magazine.

William Helburn LIFE Magazine

October 12, 1953 issue of LIFE magazine.

Sharland LIFE Magazine

December 21, 1953 issue of LIFE magazine.

Sharland LIFE Magazine

February 1, 1954 issue of LIFE magazine.

William Helburn LIFE Magazine

April 12, 1954 issue of LIFE magazine.

Mark Shaw LIFE Magazine

June 14, 1954 issue of LIFE magazine.

Christa LIFE Magazine

June 28, 1954 issue of LIFE magazine.

Paul Himmel LIFE Magazine

May 16, 1955 issue of LIFE magazine.

Mark Shaw LIFE Magazine

September 5, 1955 issue of LIFE magazine.

Mark Shaw LIFE Magazine

December 5, 1955 issue of LIFE magazine.

Mark Shaw LIFE Magazine

January 9, 1956 issue of LIFE magazine.

Mark Shaw LIFE Magazine

May 14, 1956 issue of LIFE magazine.

Mark Shaw LIFE Magazine

September 23, 1957 issue of LIFE magazine.

Milton H. Greene LIFE Magazine

January 27, 1958 issue of LIFE magazine.

Loomis Dean LIFE Magazine

March 11, 1958 issue of LIFE magazine.

William Helburn LIFE Magazine

August 11, 1958 issue of LIFE magazine.

Paul Schutzer LIFE Magazine

March 2, 1959 issue of LIFE magazine.

Milton H. Greene LIFE Magazine

November 16, 1959 issue of LIFE magazine.

Jack Robinson LIFE Magazine

The post LIFE’S Fashion Covers of the 1950s appeared first on LIFE.

In June 1954, LIFE magazine published an article titled “The Luckiest Generation” that, revisited decades later, feels like an almost perfect snapshot of a certain segment of American society at a particular moment in the nation’s history. We’ll let LIFE set the scene:

The morning traffic and parking problems became so critical at the Carlsbad, N.M., high school that school authorities in 1953 were finally forced to a solution: they set aside a special parking area for students only. In Carlsbad, as everywhere else, teenagers are not only driving new cars to school but in many cases are buying them out of their own earnings. These are the children who at birth were called “Depression babies.” They have grown up to become, materially at least, America’s luckiest generation.

Young people 16 to 20 are the beneficiaries of the very economic collapse that brought chaos almost a generation ago. The Depression tumbled the nation’s birth rate to an all-time low in 1933, and today’s teenage group is proportionately a smaller part of the total population than in more than 70 years. Since there are fewer of them, each in the most prosperous time in U.S. history gets a bigger piece of the nation’s economic pie than any previous generation ever got. This means they can almost have their pick of the jobs that are around. . . . To them working has a double attraction: the pay is good and, since their parents are earning more too, they are often able to keep the money for themselves.

A few things to point out here. First, and most disheartening, is the racial makeup of the “teenage group” that LIFE focused on, at least pictorially, in that 1954 article: there are no people of color.

Second, the nature of the boon of the improbable and unprecedented good fortune that befell these kids is not that they’re spoiled rotten, or that every possible creature comfort has been handed to them. Instead, it’s that they have the opportunity to work at virtually any job they choose. “They are often able to keep the money” that they earn.

So, yes, they were lucky and compared to countless generations of youth who came before, all over the world, white working- and middle-class teens in 1950s America were, for the most part, incredibly lucky. But unlike the entitled creatures that most of us would count as the “luckiest” (and the most obnoxious) among us these days, the teens profiled in LIFE in 1954 don’t look or feel especially coddled.

They look secure. They look confident. They look, in some elemental way, independent. They’re learning, day by day, what it means to make one’s way in the world.

In that sense, maybe they were the luckiest generation, after all.

Liz Ronk edited this gallery for LIFE.com Follow her on Twitter at @LizabethRonk.

In an aura of fun and well-being, students danced at weekly Sock Hops in a Carlsbad high school gyn. The music was provided by a 12-piece student band.

Nina Leen The LIFE Picture Collection/Shutterstock

Cars of Carlsbad High students in their parking lot.

Nina Leen The LIFE Picture Collection/Shutterstock

An electrician, Jack Harris, 16, still in school, picked up good pay doing part-time repair jobs.

Nina Leen The LIFE Picture Collection/Shutterstock

A young sales girl holding up a blouse to a store customer.

Nina Leen The LIFE Picture Collection/Shutterstock

A young investor, David Lenske, 17, having bought four shares of A.T.&T., talked with a banker.

Nina Leen The LIFE Picture Collection/Shutterstock

The Luckiest Generation: 1950s Teenagers

Nina Leen The LIFE Picture Collection/Shutterstock

The Luckiest Generation

Nina Leen The LIFE Picture Collection/Shutterstock

The prosperous pay-off of after-school jobs brought Mike Sweeney and Harold Riley (right) with Pat Marsh (left) and Nita Wheeler, all 17, to Carlsbad’s Red Barn restaurant, a favorite party spot.

Nina Leen The LIFE Picture Collection/Shutterstock

Young couples at a formal dance dreamily swaying on the crowded floor of a ballroom lit by a chandelier.

Nina Leen The LIFE Picture Collection/Shutterstock

The Luckiest Generation

Nina Leen The LIFE Picture Collection/Shutterstock

The Luckiest Generation

Nina Leen The LIFE Picture Collection/Shutterstock

The Luckiest Generation

Nina Leen The LIFE Picture Collection/Shutterstock

Pay in trade was taken by Margaret High, 17, who worked in a music store and spent her salary on records.

Nina Leen The LIFE Picture Collection/Shutterstock

Rada Alexander, 19, a bookkeeper, earned $200 a month in a job she got with an auto firm after graduation.

Nina Leen The LIFE Picture Collection/Shutterstock

Jere Reid Jr., 17, who bred chinchillas, held one valued at $3,000.

Nina Leen The LIFE Picture Collection/Shutterstock

Sonny Thayer, 19, packed for a hunting trip.

Nina Leen The LIFE Picture Collection/Shutterstock

The post ‘The Luckiest Generation’: Teenagers in the ’50s appeared first on LIFE.

In fact, Graham owes much of his fame to two media moguls: newspaper magnate William Randolph Hearst and Henry Luce, co-founder of Time Inc. and creator of TIME, LIFE, Fortune, and other influential American publications. Both Hearst and Luce were impressed by Graham’s first major crusade, a marathon revival in a tent in Los Angeles in 1949. They were also impressed by the combination of his message of spiritual renewal and his strong anti-communist politics. Hearst sent his editors a telegram with the two-word order, “Puff Graham.” For his part, Luce had the L.A. crusade covered favorably in both TIME and LIFE.

Long a spiritual adviser to people in power, Graham’s first visit to Washington to counsel a president didn’t go very well. After blabbing to the press about what he and Harry Truman had discussed, Truman blasted him as a “counterfeit” and a publicity hound. Thereafter, he kept the topics of his Oval Office meetings to himself. He also held considerable sway over other Washington politicians. In 1952, during a crusade in D.C., Graham persuaded Congress to pass a law allowing him to conduct a service on the Capitol steps. Unlike other Evangelical preachers who rose to political prominence, Graham seldom advocated policy; sometimes, he was just a sympathetic shoulder, as when he spent the night in the White House praying with the Bushes in 1991 on the eve of the Gulf War.

He is one of the most famous ministers who ever lived, but Billy Graham had no formal theological training. Born in 1918 and raised on a dairy farm outside Charlotte, N.C., he received undergraduate degrees from the Florida Bible Institute and Wheaton College. Still, in 1947, when he was just 30 years old, he was named president of Northwestern Bible College in Minnesota. He served from 1948 to 1952, the years that also marked the beginning of his international celebrity as a traveling evangelist.

Graham’s road as a preacher has not always been an easy one. For example, at the height of tension over integration in Little Rock, Ark., in 1959, Billy Graham held one of his crusades there and stipulated, as he always did, that the seating be desegregated. Graham’s refusal to knuckle under to the threats of segregationists and white supremacists made a big impression on a 13-year-old in attendance with his Sunday school class, a teenager named William Jefferson Clinton. “I was just a little boy,” Clinton recalled nearly 50 years later, after he’d served as president and received Graham at the White House, “and I never forgot it, and I’ve loved him ever since.”

Controversy has occasionally tarnished, if only temporarily, Graham’s reputation as a man of God, as in 2002 when declassified White House audio tapes from 1972 revealed him uttering to then-President Richard Nixon blatantly anti-Semitic remarks about, among other things, Jews controlling the American media. In the midst of the subsequent uproar, Graham abjectly apologized, saying that “if it wasn’t on tape, I would not have believed it [was me speaking]. I guess I was trying to please [Nixon]. I felt so badly about myself I couldn’t believe it. I went to a meeting with Jewish leaders and I told them I would crawl to them to ask their forgiveness.”

Many of the photographs of Graham that LIFE published over the years captured the public man, but the private Billy Graham seen in these rare pictures relaxing with his family, preaching one-on-one to the world’s most powerful people and to the poorest of the poor, wrestling with God on the golf course may prove something of a minor revelation even to those who thought they knew all there was to know about the the man.

The Rev. Billy Graham in 1952.

Mark Kauffman/LIFE Pictures/Shutterstock

Billy Graham, Washington, D.C., 1952.

Mark Kauffman/LIFE Pictures/Shutterstock

Billy Graham, Washington, D.C., 1952.

Mark Kauffman/LIFE Pictures/Shutterstock

Billy Graham and his daughter, Ruth, in 1956.

Ed Clark/LIFE Pictures/Shutterstock

Billy and Ruth Graham and their four children in North Carolina in 1956: Franklin (who would become the pastor’s designated successor as head of the Billy Graham Evangelistic Association), Virginia, Anne and Ruth.

Ed Clark/LIFE Pictures/Shutterstock

Billy Graham and family in North Carolina in 1956.

Ed Clark/LIFE Pictures/Shutterstock

Billy Graham preached in Little Rock, Arkansas, in 1959.

Francis Miller/LIFE Pictures/Shutterstock

Billy Graham in Africa on a six-week crusade in 1960. He traveled 14,000 miles and preached to a third of a million people, some 20,000 of whom raised their hands as a sign of their born-again experience.

James Burke/LIFE Pictures/Shutterstock

While in Africa in 1960, Graham preached in stadiums, on banana plantations and in mud huts. One place he did not preach was South Africa. He was a vocal opponent of apartheid and insisted on desegregated seating at his rallies in Africa, as he did in the American South and everywhere else he preached.

James Burke/LIFE Pictures/Shutterstock

Billy Graham during his 1960 crusade through Africa.

James Burke TIME & LIFE Pictures/Shutterstock

Billy Graham in Africa, 1960. When he first began to preach, as a student at the Florida Bible Institute, he would paddle a canoe across the Hillsborough River to a little island where, as he wrote in his autobiography, “I could address all creatures great and small, from alligators to birds. If they would not stop to listen, there was always a congregation of cypress stumps that could neither slither nor fly away.” Today, the area is the site of Rev. Billy Graham Memorial Park.

James Burke/LIFE Pictures/Shutterstock

During his 1960 African crusade, Graham explained the Bible to a group of Waarusha warriors living in a village at the base of Mount Meru, not far from Kilimanjaro, in Tanganyika (now Tanzania).

James Burke/LIFE Pictures/Shutterstock

Billy Graham, 1960.

James Burke/LIFE Pictures/Shutterstock

As the 1960 presidential campaign heated up, LIFE asked several leaders and thinkers to address the topic of “The National Purpose” in a series of essays. Graham wrote that, despite America’s postwar prosperity, there was a nationwide sense of unfulfillment, a “moral and spiritual cancer” that could only be cured by a return to God.

Alfred Eisenstaedt/LIFE Pictures/Shutterstock

Billy Graham, 1960. Golf played a key role in Graham’s life; he wrote in his autobiography that he received his calling to preach the gospel on the 18th green of the Temple Terrace Golf and Country Club.

Alfred Eisenstaedt/LIFE Pictures/Shutterstock

Billy Graham in 1960

Alfred Eisenstaedt/LIFE Pictures/Shutterstock

Billy Graham read from the book of Isaiah, Chapter 33, Verse 2: “O Lord, be gracious unto us; we have waited for thee: be thou their arm every morning, our salvation also in the time of trouble.”

Alfred Eisenstaedt/ LIFE Pictures/Shutterstock

Billy Graham joined newly inaugurated president John F. Kennedy at a national prayer breakfast at Washington’s Mayflower Hotel in February 1961.

Paul Schutzer/LIFE Pictures/Shutterstock

The post LIFE With Billy Graham: Rare Photos From the Early Years of His Career appeared first on LIFE.

Parks’ diverse and expansive catalog of creative works included countless photo collections; popular films such as Shaft and The Super Cops; three memoirs and an autobiographical novel, The Learning Tree; several books of poetry; a ballet (Martin, dedicated to Martin Luther King, Jr.); and musical compositions. It feels like the work of several lifetimes, Metaphorically, Parks, who died in 2006 at age 93, did live multiple lives, climbing his way from a life of poverty to great success.

Parks, born on Nov. 30, 1912, in Fort Scott, Kan., the son of a tenant farmer, was the youngest of 15 brothers and sisters. He attended a segregated elementary school and was told by a teacher that he should let go of his dreams of higher education. When Parks was 14, his mother died and he was sent to Saint Paul, Minn., to live with family. Shortly thereafter, he found himself turned out on the streets, learning to survive on his own.

Parks worked odd jobs. He was a piano player in a Minnesota brothel, as well as a busboy and waiter. In 1938, after seeing images in a discarded magazine, he was inspired to take up photography. He bought a camera at a pawn shop, and within months his pictures were exhibited in Minneapolis. His success as a photographer blossomed from there.

After moving to Chicago, Parks began to produce society and fashion photographs, while also pursuing his passion of documenting the hard lives of impoverished African Americans. “I saw that the camera could be a weapon against poverty, against racism, against all sorts of social wrongs,” Parks told an interviewer in 1999. “I knew at that point I had to have a camera.” His most famous images from this time were from a series documenting Chicago’s black ghetto—a collection that earned him a fellowship with the Farm Security Administration and catapulted his career.

Parks’ talent eventually led him to New York City, where, despite the racial prejudice of the time, he was hired by Vogue’s Alexander Liberman to shoot a collection of evening gowns. He continued to freelance for Vogue for several years, developing a distinctive style that was realistic, romantic and full of movement. In 1948, Parks was hired as the first African-American staff photographer and writer for LIFE, where he produced works on subjects ranging from fashion and sports to poverty and racial discrimination. He remained at the magazine for 23 years, becoming one of the title’s most popular and influential photographers.

French fashion model Simone Bodin posed at a tannery, in a leather suit printed in small neat design, 1956.

Gordon Parks The LIFE Picture Collection/Shutterstock

A model wore a nursemaid’s kerchief by Lilly Dache that had a stiff coronet and strings that went under her hair to tie through a loop at its back.

Gordon Parks The LIFE Picture Collection/Shutterstock

Models showed off ball gowns designed by Jacques Fath.

Gordon Parks The LIFE Picture Collection/Shutterstock

This sheath cocktail dress by Balenciaga was made from hundreds of scalloped bands of silk chiffon sewn on a straight slip, 1950.

Gordon Parks The LIFE Picture Collection/Shutterstock

This dress and hat were by Cuban designer Adolfo; the hat featured multi-colored rosettes made of ribbon, 1958.

Gordon Parks The LIFE Picture Collection/Shutterstock

A model wore a dusting cap of calico on a felt base which wrapped around her head like the scarf, 1952.

Gordon Parks The LIFE Picture Collection/Shutterstock

French fashion models, 1950.

Gordon Parks The LIFE Picture Collection/Shutterstock

Ladies modeled tie-on collars and matching barrel muffs made of natural fox skin, 1952.

Gordon Parks The LIFE Picture Collection/Shutterstock

A California designer created this sheath dress topped by ostrich feathers, 1959.

Gordon Parks The LIFE Picture Collection/Shutterstock

Cuban designer Ferreras created this evening dress with a yellow rose design, 1958.

Gordon Parks The LIFE Picture Collection/Shutterstock

The post Beyond Boundaries: Gordon Parks’ Fashion Photography of the 1950s appeared first on LIFE.