Photos that changed the world - Part 2
Tiananmen Square 1989
A hunger strike by 3,000 students in Beijing had grown to a protest of more than a million as the injustices of a nation cried for reform. For seven weeks the people and the People’s Republic, in the person of soldiers dispatched by a riven Communist Party, warily eyed each other as the world waited. When this young man simply would not move, standing with his meager bags before a line of tanks, a hero was born. A second hero emerged as the tank driver refused to crush the man, and instead drove his killing machine around him. Soon this dream would end, and blood would fill Tiananmen. But this picture had shown a billion Chinese that there is hope.
Dying Soldier Hangs to Priest
Dying Soldier Hangs to Priest
Puerto Cabello naval base, Venezuela, 4 June 1962. A soldier who has been mortally wounded by a sniper clings onto navy chaplain Luis Padillo. About the image Braving the streets amid sniper fire, to offer last rites to the dying, the priest encountered a wounded soldier, who pulled himself up by clinging to the priest’s cassock, as bullets chewed up the concrete around them. Rondón Lovera, who had to lie flat to avoid getting shot, later said that he was unsure how he managed to take this picture.
Dorothy Counts First Black Student
Dorothy Counts First Black Student
World Press Photo of the Year: 1957 Douglas Martin, USA, The Associated Press. Charlotte, North Carolina, USA, 4 September 1957. Dorothy Counts, one of the first black students to enter the newly desegregated Harry Harding High School. About the image Reporters and photographers bore witness and recorded the violence that erupted when Dorothy Counts showed up for her first day at an all-white school. People threw rocks and screamed “Go back where you came from”. They got their way - after a string of abuses, Dorothy’s family withdrew her from the school after only four days.
Burial of an unknown child
Burial of an unknown child
Burial of an unknown child. This unknown child has become the icon of the world’s worst industrial disaster, caused by the US multinational chemical company, Union Carbide.
The First X-ray
In 1901 Wilhelm Konrad Roentgen was the first recipient of the Nobel Prize for Physics, and he truly deserves his place in history because his discovery revolutionized the medical world. A series of experiments helped him notice that barium platinocyanide emits a fluorescent glow. Combining his observation with a photographic plate and his wife’s hand, he made the first X-ray photo, and thus, made it possible to look inside the human body without surgical intervention.
How Life Begins
In 1957 he began taking pictures with an endoscope, an instrument that can see inside a body cavity, but when Lennart Nilsson presented the rewards of his work to LIFE’s editors several years later, they demanded that witnesses confirm that they were seeing what they thought they were seeing. Finally convinced, they published a cover story in 1965 that went on for 16 pages, and it created a sensation. Then, and over the intervening years, Nilsson’s painstakingly made pictures informed how humanity feels about . . . well, humanity. They also were appropriated for purposes that Nilsson never intended. Nearly as soon as the 1965 portfolio appeared in LIFE, images from it were enlarged by right-to-life activists and pasted to placards.
Loch Ness Monster
Mouse with Human Ear
Back in 1997, a rather bizarre photograph suddenly became very famous. It showed a totally hairless mouse, with what appeared to be a human ear growing out of its back. That photograph prompted a wave of protest against genetic engineering, which continues today. But there was absolutely no genetic engineering involved in getting that ear to cover almost all of the mouse’s back
Lunchtime atop a Skyscraper
Lunch atop a Skyscraper (New York Construction Workers Lunching on a Crossbeam) is a famous photograph taken by Charles C. Ebbets during construction of the GE Building at Rockefeller Center in 1932.
The photograph depicts 11 men eating lunch, seated on a girder with their feet dangling hundreds of feet above the New York City streets. Ebbets took the photo on September 29, 1932, and it appeared in the New York Herald Tribune in its Sunday photo supplement on October 2. Taken on the 69th floor of the GE Building during the last several months of construction, the photo Resting on a Girder shows the same workers napping on the beam.
Eare image by the same photographer showing the workers sleeping on the crossbeam
Anne Frank
Six million Jews died in the Holocaust. For many throughout the world, one teenage girl gave them a story and a face. She was Anne Frank, the adolescent who, according to her diary, retained her hope and humanity as she hid with her family in an Amsterdam attic. In 1944 the Nazis, acting on a tip, arrested the Franks; Anne and her sister died of typhus at Bergen-Belsen only a month before the camp was liberated. The world came to know her through her words and through this ordinary portrait of a girl of 14. She stares with big eyes, wearing an enigmatic expression, gazing at a future that the viewer knows will never come.
Stopping Time
Harold Edgerton’s famous high speed picture of a bullet going through an apple. Taken in 1964, it became a very famous image , not least because it was such an unusual photo based on a great achievement in high speed photography. Edgerton, professor at MIT, is also inventor of the strobe flash and a pioneer of stop-action photography. He collaborated with Jacques-Yves Cousteau to experiment photographing some of the deepest seabeds in the world.
Patterson Bigfoot
Patterson Bigfoot
The most famous recording of an alleged Bigfoot is a short film shot in 1967. Filmed in Bluff Creek, California, it shows a large, manlike creature striding through a clearing. In many ways the veracity of the film is crucial; unlike many alleged Bigfoot photographs, the subject in the film cannot be a misidentification. Either the film is a hoax or it is an unknown, hairy giant. The film’s authenticity has been hotly debated, both among the public and among Bigfoot researchers.
Ruby shoots Oswald
Ruby shoots Oswald
Ruby (also known as “Sparky,” reportedly because of his short temper) frequently carried a handgun, and witnesses saw him with a handgun in the halls of the Dallas police headquarters on several occasions after President Kennedy’s assassination and arrest of Lee Harvey Oswald on November 22, 1963. In addition, WFAA-TV (Dallas) and NBC newsreel footage show Ruby impersonating a newspaper reporter during a press conference, at Dallas Police Headquarters, on the night of the assassination. At the press conference, District Attorney Henry Wade said that Lee Oswald was a member of the anti-Castro Free Cuba Committee. Ruby corrected Wade by stating that it was the pro-Castro Fair Play for Cuba Committee.
Ruby received international attention two days later. After driving into town and sending a money order to one of his employees, he walked the short distance to the nearby police headquarters. There is some evidence it was on a whim, for he left his favorite dog, Sheba, in the car, when he shot and fatally wounded the 24-year-old Oswald on Sunday, November 24, 1963, at 11:21 am CST, while authorities were preparing to transfer Oswald by car from police headquarters to the nearby county jail. Stepping out from a crowd of reporters and photographers, Ruby fired a snub-nosed Colt Cobra .38 into Oswald’s abdomen
When Ruby was arrested immediately after the shooting, he told several witnesses that his killing of Oswald would show the world that “Jews have guts,” that he helped the city of Dallas “redeem” itself in the eyes of the public, and that Oswald’s death would spare Jacqueline Kennedy the ordeal of appearing at Oswald’s trial Ruby stated that he shot Oswald to avenge Kennedy. Later, however, he claimed he shot Oswald on the spur of the moment when the opportunity presented itself, without considering any reason for doing so. At the time of the shooting Jack Ruby was taking Preludin, a slimming tablet which, while removing appetite, also roused the metabolism to hyperactivity.
Hector Peterson
Hector Peterson
Hector Pieterson (1964 – 16 June 1976) became the iconic image of the 1976 Soweto uprising in apartheid South Africa when a news photograph by Sam Nzima of the dying Hector being carried by a fellow student, was published around the world. He was killed at the age of 12 when the police opened fire on protesting students. For years, June 16 stood as a symbol of resistance to the brutality of the apartheid government. Today, it is known as National Youth Day — a day on which South Africans honour young people and bring attention to their needs..
Solomos Solomou
Solomos Solomou
Following the funeral of Tassos Isaac who was beaten to death by a Turkish mob in the UN buffer zone three days earlier, a group of unarmed Greek Cypriots re-entered the area where Isaac was murdered in order to demonstrate against his unlawful killing.
Among these demonstrators was Solomou who was a second cousin of Isaac. At around 2:20 pm, Solomou distanced himself from the rest of the demonstrators and walked towards a Turkish military post in Dheryneia. With a cigarette in his mouth, Solomou climbed the flag pole with the intention of removing the Turkish flag but was shot by Turkish snipers three times; in the mouth, in the neck and in the stomach.The whole scene was taped by bystanding journalists and was seen on live television. Solomou’s funeral was held on the 16th of August in Paralimni, among thousands of people and an official Cypriot day of mourning.
A few days after the killings of Isaac and Solomou, the then Prime Minister of Greece, Costas Simitis came to Cyprus and together with the then President of Cyprus, Glafcos Clerides visited the homes of the families of the two cousins.
On her part, the then Turkish Foreign Minister, Tansu Ciller who also visited Cyprus (the occupied north) a few days after Isaac and Solomou were killed, addressed a rally saying that Turks would “break the hands” of anyone who insulted their flag.
Death of a loyalist soldier
Death of a loyalist soldier
From 1936 to 1939 Robert Capa photographed the horrors the Spanish Civil War. In 1936, he became known across the globe for a photo he took on the Cordoba Front of a Loyalist Militiaman who had just been shot and was in the act of falling to his death. Because of his proximity to the victim and the timing of the capture, there was a long controversy about the authenticity of this photograph. Historians eventually succeeded in identifying the dead soldier as Federico Borrell García and proved it authentic. This is the best-known picture of the Spanish civil war.
Migrant Mother
Migrant Mother
The photograph that has become known as “Migrant Mother” is one of a series of photographs that Dorothea Lange made of Florence Owens Thompson and her children in February or March of 1936 in Nipomo, California. Lange was concluding a month’s trip photographing migratory farm labor around the state for what was then the Resettlement Administration. In 1960, Lange gave this account of the experience:
I saw and approached the hungry and desperate mother, as if drawn by a magnet. I do not remember how I explained my presence or my camera to her, but I do remember she asked me no questions. I made five exposures, working closer and closer from the same direction. I did not ask her name or her history. She told me her age, that she was thirty-two. She said that they had been living on frozen vegetables from the surrounding fields, and birds that the children killed. She had just sold the tires from her car to buy food. There she sat in that lean- to tent with her children huddled around her, and seemed to know that my pictures might help her, and so she helped me. There was a sort of equality about it.
Omaha Beach
Omaha Beach
Omaha Beach was the code name of one of the points where the Allies would land and invade France, which was then conquered by Germany during the World War II. The beach is located in the shores of Normandy, facing the English Channel.
The British troops invaded Omaha Beach on June 6, 1944, and waged an attack on the German forces in three bloody assaults. To land on the beach was a difficult task due to the rocky terrains of the area, but because of the joined powers of the Air Force and Navy, the Germans were defeated by end of the day, and the D-Day objectives were fulfilled.
Conrad Schumann
On 15 August 1961 he found himself, aged 19, guarding the Berlin Wall, then in its third day of construction, at the corner of Ruppinerstraße and Bernauerstraße. At that stage of construction, the Berlin Wall was only a low barbed wire fence. As the people on the Western side shouted Komm rüber! (”come over”), Schumann jumped the barbed wire and was driven away at high speeds by a waiting West Berlin police car. Photographer Peter Leibing captured a photograph of his escape on film and it became a well-known image of the Cold War.
Last Jew of Vinnitsa
Picture from an Einsatzgruppen soldier’s personal album, labelled on the back as “Last Jew of Vinnitsa, it shows a member of Einsatzgruppe D is just about to shoot a Jewish man kneeling before a filled mass grave in Vinnitsa, Ukraine, in 1941. All 28,000 Jews from Vinnitsa and its surrounding areas were massacred at the time.
Assassination of Asanuma
This picture was taken only a second before the japanese socialist Party leader Inejiro Asanuma was assassinated by an right wing student. Photographer Yasushi Nagao said he was only on the right place and on the right time. He received a Pulitzer price for this photo.
Che Guevara
Photograph of Che Guevara was taken on March 5, 1960 by Alberto Korda at a funeral service for victims of the La Coubre explosion, it was published seven years later. Che Guevara was 31 at the time of the photo.
If you enjoyed this post, please consider to leave a comment or subscribe to the feed and get future articles delivered to your feed reader.
Comments
I believe the photo by Robert Capa of the Spanish civil war was a set up. Several different photos of the same scene exist.
He spent the rest of his life trying to live it down by going into places like Omaha beach to take those photos of D-day.
Omaha beach wasn’t a British beach, it was American. One can’t say the allies defeated the Germans on D-day. Much of what they had hoped to gain on d-day wasn’t captured, especially at Omaha beach. They did get a tenuous foothold on the beaches. The battle of Normandy lasted till August 25 when Paris was retaken. The war continued for another 11 months till May 8th 1945.
D-day was the beginning of the end.
Historians think today that d-day made the difference between half of Europe being communist and the whole of Europe being communist, as the Russians were slowly but surely pushing the Germans back.
There is still much to see along the 50 miles of the d-day beaches. It’s an amazing and moving place to visit, if you have a guide that is, otherwise you’re just looking at concrete blocks.
[...] Original admin [...]