World's Most Famous Photos

Afghan Girl [1984]

This Photo taken by the Afghan girl National Geographic photographer Steve McCurry. Sharbat Gula was one of the students in an informal school in the refugee camp; McCurry, rarely given the opportunity to photograph Afghan women, seized the opportunity and captured her image. She was about 12 years at the time. She made the cover of National Geographic next year, but her identity was discovered in 1992.

Child crawling towards a food camp [1994]

The photo is the Pulitzer Prize winning photo taken in 1994 during the famine in Sudan. The photo shows a child crawling towards a United Nations camp for food, located one kilometer and Vulture waiting for the child to die,so it can eat. This picture shocked the world. Nobody knows what happened to the child, including the photographer Kevin Carter who left the place as soon as the photograph was taken.

Three months later Kevin committed suicide due to depression.

Omayra Sánchez [1985]

Omayra Sánchez was one of 25,000 victims of the Nevado del Ruiz (Colombia) volcano which erupted 14 November 1985.13 years old, was trapped in water and cement to 3 days. The photo was taken shortly before her death but caused controversy because of the work of the photographer and the Colombian government's inaction in the midst of tragedy, when it was published worldwide after the death of the girl.

The plight of Kosovo refugees [1999]

Washington Post's Pulitzer winning photo entry part of the Rise (2000) shows a Kosovar refugee Agim Shala,2, through a barbed wire fence in the hands of grandparents Kukes, in Albania,The camp was run by United Arab Emirates.

Burning Monk – The Self-Immolation [1963]

11 June 1963, Thich Quang Duc, a Buddhist monk from Vietnam, killed himself at a busy intersection in downtown Saigon while protesting against the South Vietnamese government control and to bring attention to its repressive policies. Buddhist monks asked the regime to lift its ban on flying the traditional Buddhist flag to Buddhism, the same rights as Catholicism, and to stop hindering the practice and spread their religion.

The Triangle Shirtwaist Fire [1911]

Triangle Shirtwaist Company rules were to keep doors closed to the factory workers (mostly immigrant women) so they may not skip or steal anything.When a fire ignited, disaster struck.146 people died that day.

Murder of a vietcong by Saigon police chief 1968

The Photograph That Ended a War But Ruined a Life

"Still photographs are the most powerful weapon in the world," AP photojournalist Eddie Adams once wrote. A fitting quote for Adams, because his 1968 photograph of an officer shooting a handcuffed prisoner in the head at point-blank range not only earned him a Pulitzer Prize in 1969, but also went a long way toward souring Americans’ attitudes about the Vietnam War.

For all the image’s political impact, though, the situation wasn’t as black-and-white as it’s rendered. What Adams’ photograph doesn’t reveal is that the man being shot was the captain of a Vietcong "revenge squad" that had executed dozens of unarmed civilians earlier the same day. Regardless, it instantly became an icon of the war’s savagery and made the official pulling the trigger – General Nguyen Ngoc Loan – its iconic villain.

Sadly, the photograph’s legacy would haunt Loan for the rest of his life. Following the war, he was reviled where ever he went. After an Australian VA hospital refused to treat him, he was transferred to the United States, where he was met with a massive (though unsuccessful) campaign to deport him. He eventually settled in Virginia and opened a restaurant but was forced to close it down as soon as his past caught up with him. Vandals scrawled "we know who you are" on his walls, and business dried up.

Adams felt so bad for Loan that he apologized for having taken the photo at all, admitting, "The general killed the Vietcong; I killed the general with my camera."

Lunch Atop a Skyscaper [1932]

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.

Tourist Guy [2001]

 The tourist guy, is an Internet phenomenon consisting of a photograph of a tourist Photoshopped pictures after the September 11, 2001 attacks. The tourist was identified as Peter Guzli.
Soon after 9/11 an image showing a tourist while an airliner was about to hit the building beneath him circulated on the Internet. It was claimed that the picture came from a camera found in the debris at Ground Zero. The picture won a best 9/11 Photoshopped picture contest.

Albert Einstein [1951]

 Albert Einstein is probably one of the most popular figures of all times. He is considered a genius because he created the Theory of Relativity, and so, challenged Newtona's laws, that were the basis of everything known in physics until the beginning of the 20^th century. But, as a person, he was considered a beatnik, and this picture, taken on March 14, 1951 proves that.

The last Jew in Vinnitsa [1941]

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.

Burial Of an Unknown Child

This unknown child has become the icon of the world's worst industrial disaster, caused by the U.S. chemical company, Union Carbide. No one knows his parents, and no one has ever come forward to 'claim' this photograph.

Palestinian Father saving Son

 
Images from the video footage of 12-year-old Muhammad al-Durrah being shot dead in the Gaza Strip. The scene was filmed by a French cameraman.

Starving Boy

Wells was outraged that the same publication that sat on his picture for five months without publishing it, while people were dying, entered a competition. He was embarrassed to win as he has never participated in the contest itself, and was against winning prizes with pictures of people dying of hunger.

Lynching Of Young Blacks

This is a famous photo, taken in 1930 showing a black youth accused of raping a white woman and killing her boyfriend, hanged by a mob of 10,000 white men. The crowd was taken by force from the house of the county jail. Another black man was left behind and ends up being saved from lynching. Even if lynching photos were designed to strengthen white supremacy, the crowd and grotesquely tortured body finally rebelling pleased many.

Biafra

When the Igbo of eastern Nigeria declared themselves independent in 1967, Nigeria blockaded their fledgling country-Biafra. In three years of war, more than a million people died, mainly of hunger. In famine, children who lack protein often disease kwashiorkor, which causes the muscles to consume and their bellies to protrude.

The Falling Man- 9/11

The Falling Man refers to a photograph taken by Associated Press photographer Richard Drew, depicting a man falling from the North Tower of the World Trade Center at 9:41:15 a.m. during the September 11 attacks in New York City.

The subject of the image – whose identity remains uncertain, although attempts have been made to identify him – was one of the people trapped on the upper floors of the skyscraper who apparently chose to jump rather than die from the fire and smoke.

Hindenburg

The famous picture of the airship Hindenburg as it exploded and crashed spectacularly while docking at Lakehurst, NJ  May 6, 1937 and 35 people died.

Titanic

On April 10, 1912, the Titanic, the largest ship afloat, left Southampton, England on its maiden voyage to New York. The White Star Line had spared no expense in luxury. A legend even before she left, her passengers were a mix of rich pilgrims around the elegance of first class accommodations and immigrants packed in third class.