Selecting a mere ten covers from the quite a pair of,000 problems that graced LIFE magazine through the years may appear like the associate degree not possible task. Foolhardy, even. howeverwe tend to trust that nobody in his or her right mind would quibble with the Yousuf Karsh cowl of Churchill in 1945 (slide 3), or the inclusion of Leonard McCombe's "Marlboro Man" from 1949. Is anyone about to seriously argue that the 1969 classic, "To the Moon and Back," doesn't belong in any list of the foremost picture LIFE covers — or an inventory of the foremost picture magazine covers, period?
Could Lennart Nilsson's landmark photograph of an individual's craniate in utero for the Gregorian calendar month 1965 "Drama of Life Before Birth" issue presumably be left off such a list?
And then there is the Gregorian calendar month 1945 cowl that includes W. Eugene Smith's photograph from Iwo Jima Jima, as Marines take cowl on a side amid the burned-out remains of a banyan jungle at the terribly instant that a Japanese bunker is blotted outit's an imagea good image, that captures the violence inherent in war maybe additional diagrammatically than the other ever printed in LIFE.
[MORE: "World War II: photos we tend to Remember"]

The photographers delineate here, in the meantime — those on workers (Ralph Morse, Margaret Bourke-White, Larry Burrows) and people United Nations agency worked on contract (Philippe Halsman, Karsh) — are among the perfect United Nations agency ever picked up a camera. That there are actually variant others United Nations agency shot for keeps United Nations agency even as capably work that description speaks volumes regarding the magazine itself, and regarding the standard of news media that was practised by dedicated men and girls in those years once LIFE was still a weekly to be reckoned with.
Not everybody can trust all the alternatives during this gallery. and that is alrighthowever, from our perspective, these covers give as sturdy and as varied a sampling joined is probably going to seek out of ten photos that capture the perfect of LIFE through the years.