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The Greatest Photographs of All Time

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Written by Staff Writer
Sep 13, 2007 at 11:27 AM
This photograph, taken in Saigon by Eddie Adams in February 1968 during the Tet offensive, embodies the horror and brutality of the Vietnam War. It shows a member of the National Liberation Front, the Viet Cong, being shot in the temple by South Vietnam police chief Lt Colonel Nguyen Ngoc Loan. The man was later identified as Nguyen Van Lam, known in the Viet Cong as Bay Lap. The Tet offensive, so called because it began on the day of the lunar new year (Tet Nguyen Dan), was a series of operations coordinated by North Vietnamese guerillas against the South Vietnamese army and the US military. This photograph was taken after the lynching of two young black men accused of raping a white girl. They were hanged by a mob of 10,000. The faces of the crowd are very telling. A third man was saved by the girls uncle who said he was innocent. By Lawrence Beitler. The Soweto uprising was a violent uprising initiated by the black youth in Soweto. One boy witnessing the shootings described the scene. He said, "They opened fire. They did not give any warning. They simply opened fire. Just like that. Just like that. And small children, small defenseless children, dropped down to the ground like swatted flies. This is murder, cold-blooded murder." The uprising still stands as one of the most awful and violent events in South Africa’s history. Sam Nzima's photo shows a frozen moment in time: 13-year-old Hector Peterson dying after being struck down by a policeman's bullet. It was the fourth school year since segregation had been outlawed by the Supreme Court. Things were not going well, and some southerners accused the national press of distorting matters. This picture, however, gave irrefutable testimony, as Elizabeth Eckford strides through a gantlet of white students, including Hazel Bryant (mouth open the widest), on her way to Little Rock's Central High. Photo by Will Counts It was a warm spring Saturday in New York City, March 25, 1911. On the top three floors of the ten-story Asch Building just off of Washington Square, employees of the Triangle Shirtwaist Factory began putting away their work as the 4:45 p.m. quitting time approached. Most of the several hundred Triangle Shirtwaist employees were teenage girls. Most were recent immigrants. Many spoke only a little English. Just then somebody on the eighth floor shouted, "Fire!" Flames leapt from discarded rags between the first and second rows of cutting tables in the hundred- foot-by-hundred-foot floor. Triangle employee William Bernstein grabbed pails of water and vainly attempted to put the fire out. As a line of hanging patterns began to burn, cries of "fire" erupted from all over the floor. In the thickening smoke, as several men continued to fling water at the flames, the fire spread everywhere--to the tables, the wooden floor trim, the partitions, the ceiling... The bodies of seamstresses, who jumped from the factory floors of the Triangle Shirtwaist Company to avoid being burned alive, lie outside the building. By Douglas Linder The girl in the centre of this photograph is 9 year olf Kim Phúc. She is running from a napalm attack which caused serious burns on her back. The boy is her older brother. Both survived. This photo (by Huynh Cong Ut) became one of the most published of the Vietnam war. The news that Richard Nixon was sending troops to Cambodia caused a chain of protests in the U.S. colleges. At Kent State the protest seemed more violent, some students even throwing rocks. In consequence, The Ohio National Guard was called to calm things down, but the events got out of hand and they started shooting. Some of the victims were simply walking to school. The photo shows 14-year-old Mary Ann Vecchio kneeling over the body of Jeffrey Miller who had been shot by the Ohio National Guard moments earlier. Twelve years ago the Chinese Government lost patience with a student movement calling for democracy in Tiananmen square. They ordered the peoples army to turn their weapons on the people. The bloody suppression of the students effectively smashed the pro- democracy movement and drove dissent underground. Photo by Stuart Franklin Thích Quảng Ðức was protesting against the way that the administration of South Vietnam’s President, Ngô Đình Diệm, was oppressing the Buddhist religion.The act itself occurred at the intersection of Phan Dinh Phung and Le Van Duyet streets in Sai Gon. After 1975, the street names were changed to Nguyen Dinh Chieu and Cach Mang Thang Tam. After his death, his body was properly cremated. During the cremation, his shrunken heart remained intact. Therefore, it is considered holy and has been placed in the care of the Reserve Bank of Vietnam. Photo by Malcolm Browne This photograph was taken by Yousuf Karsh, a Canadian photographer, when Winston Churchill came to Ottawa. The portrait of Churchill brought Karsh international fame. It is claimed to be the most reproduced photographic portrait in history. It also appeared on the cover of Life magazine. Einstein achieved world recognition for his general theory of relativity and won the Nobel prize for physics in 1921. As a Jew, Einstein suffered a great deal of prejudice in Germany and after being involved in a memorial service for the assassinated German politician, Walther Rathenau, he was warned that he was likely to be murdered by the Freikorps. By Arthur Sasse Sixty Years Ago, the United States military dropped atomic bombs on the cities of Hiroshima and Nagasaki, Japan on August 6 and August 9, 1945 respectively, killing at least 120,000 people, and around twice as many over time. Haunting photograph of a beach in Papua New Guinea on September 20, 1943, the magazine felt compelled to ask in an adjacent full-page editorial, "Why print this picture, anyway, of three American boys dead upon an alien shore?" Among the reasons: "words are never enough . . ." Photo by George Strock. Over 56,000 people of all nationalities were murdered at Buchenwald between 1935 & 1945. In fact the guards of Buchenwald were still in the process of attempting additional executions even as the American army was literally at the gates to the camp. Battle hardened veterans of nine months combat were aghast at the sights they found and some reduced to tears. Anne Frank was one of over one million Jewish children who died in the Holocaust. She was born Annelies Marie Frank on June 12, 1929 in Frankfurt, Germany, to Otto and Edith Frank. While in hiding, Anne kept a diary in which she recorded her fears, hopes, and experiences. Found in the secret apartment after the family was arrested, the diary was kept for Anne by Miep Gies, one of the people who had helped hide the Franks. It was published after the war in many languages and is used in thousands of middle school and high school curricula in Europe and the Americas. Anne Frank has become a symbol for the lost promise of the children who died in the Holocaust. After more than 62 years, it would appear that Glenn McDuffie, an 80-year old Navy veteran, has been firmly identified as the kissing Sailor photographed on Aug. 14, 1945, kissing a nurse on Times Square. Photo by Alfred Eisenstaedt Image of a young US sergeant at the moment he learns that the body bag next to him contains the body of his friend, killed by "friendly fire". The widely published photo became an iconic image of the 1991 Gulf war - a war in which media access was limited by Pentagon restrictions. The powerful and controversial photograph provoked feelings of anger, particularly in the United States, in the immediate aftermath of the September 11 attacks. The photo ran only once in many American newspapers because they received critical and angry letters from readers who felt the photo was exploitative, voyeuristic, and disrespectful of the dead. This led to the media's self-censorship of the photograph, preferring instead to print photos of acts of heroism and sacrifice. Drew commented about the varying reactions, saying, "This is how it affected people's lives at that time, and I think that is why it's an important picture. I didn't capture this person's death. I captured part of his life. This is what he decided to do, and I think I preserved that."9/11: The Falling Man ends suggesting that this picture was not a matter of the identity behind the man, but how he symbolized the events of 9/11. This photo of Marines raising the American flag at the summit of Mt. Suribachi during the battle for Iwo Jima has become an enduring image of bravery and heroism. However, this was actually the second flag raised on the mountain's summit that day. The first flag-raising occurred a couple of hours earlier - shortly after Marines had gained the top of the mountain after hard fighting. This flag was deemed too small to be easily seen from the base of the mountain so a second, larger flag was raised. By Joe Rosenthal 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. By Charles C. Ebbets The image of a worn, weather-beaten woman, a look of desperation on her face, two children leaning on her shoulders, an infant in her lap; has become a photographic icon of the Great Depression in America. The photo was taken in March 1936 at a camp for seasonal agricultural workers 175 miles north of Los Angeles by Dorothea Lange. Lange was working for the Farm Security Administration as part of a team of photographers documenting the impact of federal programs in improving rural conditions. The tragic image of 13-year-old Omayra Sanchez trapped in debris caused by a mudslide following the eruption of a volcano in Colombia in 1985. Red Cross rescue workers had apparently repeatedly appealed to the government for a pump to lower the water level and for other help to free the girl. Finally rescuers gave up and spent their remaining time with her, comforting her and praying with her. She died of exposure after about 60 hours. The picture had tremendous impact when it was published. Television cameras had already relayed Omayra's agony into homes around the world. When the photo was published, many were appalled at witnessing so intimately what transpired to be the last few hours of Omayra's life. They pointed out that technology had been able to capture her image for all time and transmit it around the globe, but was unable to save her life. The prize-winning image: A vulture watches a starving child in southern Sudan, March 1, 1993. Carter's winning photo shows a heart-breaking scene of a starving child collapsed on the ground, struggling to get to a food center during a famine in the Sudan in 1993. In the background, a vulture stalks the emaciated child. Carter was part of a group of four fearless photojournalists known as the "Bang Bang Club" who traveled throughout South Africa capturing the atrocities committed during apartheid. Haunted by the horrific images from Sudan, Carter committed suicide in 1994 soon after receiving the award. When the Igbos of eastern Nigeria declared themselves independent in 1967, Nigeria blockaded their fledgling country-Biafra. In three years of war, more than one million people died, mainly of hunger. In famine, children who lack protein often get the disease kwashiorkor, which causes their muscles to waste away and their bellies to protrude. War photographer Don McCullin drew attention to the tragedy. "I was devastated by the sight of 900 children living in one camp in utter squalor at the point of death," he said. "I lost all interest in photographing soldiers in action." The world community intervened to help Biafra, and learned key lessons about dealing with massive hunger exacerbated by war-a problem that still defies simple solutions. It's an image which depicts a depressed, shoulders-down figure of a child in a cluster of what remains of her family. The very weather-beaten arm of her mother goes over her left shoulder and there are the very small weather-beaten hands of the child, who is about five or six, clinging on to this one piece of security that she has, which is the weather-beaten hand of her mother. The mother is not in the image, she's in the background. But then slightly further in the background you see the other hands of her brothers and sisters as they wait in this village. It was a picture that seized passions and gripped hearts -- a lone firefighter holding the lifeless body of a baby. The picture, without any words, tells the story of the tragedy that hit the nation that day. More than any other photo, even the image of the blown-up building, it was flashed around the world on television and published in newspapers and magazines. "I think the picture was used because it had more of an effect on people because of the innocence of a baby caught up in the tragedy," said pictured firefighter Chris Fields. 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. On December 17, 1903, Orville Wright piloted the first powered airplane 20 feet above a wind-swept beach in North Carolina. The flight lasted 12 seconds and covered 120 feet. Three more flights were made that day. The brothers began their experimentation in flight in 1896 at their bicycle shop in Dayton, Ohio. They selected the beach at Kitty Hawk as their proving ground because of the constant wind that added lift to their craft. In 1902 they came to the beach with their glider and made more than 700 successful flights. Thirty-five years ago this Christmas, a turbulent world looked to the heavens for a unique view of our home planet. This photo of "Earthrise" over the lunar horizon was taken by the Apollo 8 crew in December 1968, showing Earth for the first time as it appears from deep space. Astronauts Frank Borman, Jim Lovell and William Anders had become the first humans to leave Earth orbit, entering lunar orbit on Christmas Eve. In a historic live broadcast that night, the crew took turns reading from the Book of Genesis, closing with a holiday wish from Commander Borman: "We close with good night, good luck, a Merry Christmas, and God bless all of you -- all of you on the good Earth."
Last Updated ( Sep 25, 2007 at 06:32 PM )

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