Serendipity

A great new service has been announced jointly between Life magazine and Google: the Life image archives are now on-line.

In the Google image tab you just enter the search item you are interested in followed by "source:Life" into the usual address box and voila, matching images from over a century of Life's peerless collection. Fascinating stuff, and covered extremely well here.

As is often the way with the Internet, you never quite know what you might get back. I wanted to see if they had any interesting shots of Brighton's piers, so I tried "Pier". Turns out that there was a 50s actress named Pier Angeli who, based on the photos that showed up, liked standing in things and looking very happy. The exact description was:

Pier Angeli
Actress Pier Angeli, 22, clad in strapless chiffon party dress, exhulting in a downpour of rain as she stands knee-deep in a woodland pond.

Location: CA, US
Date taken: June 09, 1954
Photographer: Allan Grant

You just don't see words like "exhulting" used any more, especially when, surely, they meant to write "exulting"? (Pier's filmography here for those interested. Only one I recognise is Battle Of The Bulge, a war she has most demonstrably won on more than one front.)