8 Images That Changed Our World

http://www.hrc.utexas.edu/exhibitions/permanent/wfp/

This the first photo ever taken. It depicts the tops of some buildings outside of the photographer’s window. Grainy, colorless and altogether un-symbolic of the things to come, it was taken by Joseph Nicephore Niepce in 1826.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wright_Brothers

The picture of the Wright brothers’ first flight on December 17, 1903 which took place in Kitty Hawk, North Carolina.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dorothea_Lange

Migrant Mother taken by Dorothea Lange in 1936. This photo, taken in a California picker’s camp, became the face of the Great depression. It is a masterpiece that carries all of the emotions that survivors of the Depressions felt.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Atom_bomb

The mushroom cloud over Hiroshima, Japan. This photo shows the terrifying might and power of the atom bomb. Even though this is the most well known image, it was the images taken on the ground, of the stiffened black corpses of children and innocent civilians covered in burns, that would bring home the reality of what man had wrought upon himself.

Here is a site that documents the ground devastation on Hiroshima.

http://www.gensuikin.org/english/photo.html

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Holocaust

Jehovah’s Witness, homosexuals, the so-called ‘gypsy’ or Roma people, the mentally retarded and mentally ill. All of these groups and more were targeted by Hitler, in brutal and terrifying ways.

But the concentration camps were his most evil inventions. Hitler created a nearly perfect killing machine: efficient, well-disguised . If it weren’t for the American soldiers, the civilian eyewitnessess, Nazi confessions and the pictures of the bodies-stacked like so many piles of cordwood- no one would have ever believed the sheer numbers and the absolute disregard for human life.

 About 6 million Jews died. 

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Birmingham_campaign

This is a still of the Children’s Crusade  in Birmingham, Alabama, when the racist police force turned hoses and dogs on children. This image opened people’s eyes in a way that only photography can- before people held a rather sanitized image of discrimination as a simple “whites only” sign hanging in a diner. The video from this incident went around the world. Americans in the North were horrified and for many years afterward, even today,  pictures of the Birmingham march color much of the world’s perceptions of America as a racist country.

http://www.princeton.edu/~willman/Earthrise.jpg

Taken from the Apollo 11 space craft in 1968, ‘Earthrise’ shows a beautiful, vibrant sphere of blue bathed in blackness. It is our home, in an angle we had never seen before.  All that we know and all that we are is in this photograph.

Taken June 5, 1989 by photographer Stuart Franklin , this photograph depicts a student standing in front of the tanks in Tiananmen Square. The protests of 1989 (called the June Fourth Incident by the Chinese) took place in the people’s Republic of China. One man, a student, stands in defiance demanding the liberation of the Chinese people. The man’s identity is unknown, but he was led away by the anxious crowd. Since the Chinese government carried out widespread executions after the protests, it is believed this unknown protester was killed.

http://livo.files.wordpress.com/2008/05/stuart-franklin-tianamen-square.jpg