Photographs that captured history in the making.
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- NORTH CAROLINA—DECEMBER 17, 1903: The Wright brothers’ first flight. Wilbur was running alongside the plane; Orville was flying it. No one would have believed their achievement if it hadn’t been photographed.
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- INDIANA—AUGUST 7, 1930: Lawrence Beitler captured the lynching of two black men, Thomas Shipp and Abram Smith, who were accused of raping a white girl. Thousands of copies of Beitler’s photo were sold and became postcards to encourage white supremacy.
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- CALIFORNIA—MARCH, 1936: Dorothea Lange captured an immigrant mother, Florence Owens Thompson, with her seven children. Called “Migrant Mother,” Thompson became the face of America’s resilience and the Great Depression.
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- NAGASAKI—AUGUST 9, 1945: The U.S. Air Force took this photo of a mushroom cloud caused by its atomic bomb, Fat Man. It, along with another bomb dropped on Hiroshima, caused 150,000 deaths. The public had never seen an atomic bomb’s destruction before, and this picture made the world fearful of another World War.
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- IWO JIMA—FEBRUARY 23, 1945: Six U.S. marines raised a flag during the battle of Iwo Jima. Three of the men later died in battle, but the picture represented the end of World War II and inspired the famous memorial in Washington D.C.
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- VIETNAM—FEBRUARY 1, 1968: Eddie Adams snapped Nguyen Ngoc Loan executing Viet Cong Captain Nguyen Van Lem. The picture turned the public against the war.
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- APOLLO 8—DECEMBER 24, 1968: Astronaut Bill Anders took this shot of the earth “rising” over the moon. The earth can’t be seen like this standing on the moon — only while orbiting it. The shot made people consider their “fragile place in the cosmos,” writes Life.
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- APOLLO 11—1969: Neil Armstrong took this picture of fellow astronaut Buzz Aldrin taking man’s first steps on the moon. “That’s one small step for man, one giant leap for mankind,” Armstrong said.
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- BOSTON—JULY 22, 1975: Stanley J. Forman witnessed two women plunging from a faulty fire escape in Boston. Their apartment was on fire and it gave way when they were yelling for help. The mother died upon impact; the daughter survived. Forman’s photo changed fire safety regulations in Boston.
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- AFGHANISTAN—1984: Steve McCurry’s shot of a 12-year-old Afghan girl became one of the most popular National Geographic covers of all time, and a face for refugees.
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- BEIJING—JUNE 5, 1989: Jeff Widener famously captured “Tank Man,” an anonymous protester in Beijing’s Tiananmen Square. The picture symbolized the end of the Cold War era and civilians’ courage.
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- SUDAN—1994: Kevin Carter shot this Pulitzer Prize-winner of a child crawling to a UN food camp half a mile away in Sedan. Depressed, Carter committed suicide three months after taking this picture. The image brought the Sudan tragedy to the world.
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- NEW YORK—SEPTEMBER 11, 2001: Richard Drew took this of a man falling (or leaping) to his death from one of the twin towers on September 11. It depicted one of the most devastating days in American history and ushered in a new era of terror and war.
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- ABU GHARIB PRISON—2004: Horrific pictures taken by the U.S. Army were unveiled in The New Yorker and in a 60 Minutes episode. They showed American soldiers torturing Iraq prisoners. After the images were made public, 17 American soldiers were removed from duty; 11 were convicted and dishonorably discharged. The pictures showed Americas’ hypocrisy; their soldiers were as inhumane as those they were fighting in the War on Terror.
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- WASHINGTON, D.C—May 1, 2011: President Obama, Secretary of State Hillary Clinton, Admiral Mike Mullen and others were photographed getting an update on the raid that would lead to Osama bin Laden’s death. The raid was successful, and a few months later, Obama announced all U.S. troops would leave Iraq by year-end.
