When LIFE.com contacted me to ask whether I would be interested in being a guest editor of a photo gallery of course I was, especially since I was given the freedom to pick the theme, and I had full control over the edit. LIFE’s photography archive is huge, containing some very important photography, and I had always thought about creating new contents from older archives. After a bit of thinking and looking I decided to do a set of images called Portraits of Power, which is now up. The basic idea is to show how people project power in photographs, using powerful - and now mostly obscure - people from about seventy years ago. Read the text along the images to see what I am after.