Discuss.
Sudan, 1994.
The picture depicts stricken child crawling towards an United Nations food camp, located a kilometer away.
The vulture is waiting for the child to die so that it can eat him. This picture shocked the whole world. No one 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 he committed suicide due to depression.
Picture of cover of The Beatles album, Abbey Road, showing John, Ringo, Paul and George crossing the street. The view really is Abbey Road, London, NW8 looking north. The gates of the Abbey Road Studios are behind the white VW Beetle on the left.
Black and white photo by H Roger-Viollet of a train accident at the Montparnasse station in Paris on 22 October, 1895 when engine 120-721 failed to stop at the platform, went through a first-floor window and crashed down onto the street.
The girl in the picture is Phan Thị Kim Phúc also known as Kim Phuc (born in 1963), a nine-year old running naked and severely burned on her back by a napalm atack.
Photographer Huynh Cong Ut, known by his colleagues as Nick, was working there as a photo journalist for Associated Press at the time and took a number of photographs of the villagers trying to escape the napalm. This one, epitomising the savagery and tragedy of the conflict, won him the coveted Pulitzer Prize and became one of the most published photos of the Vietnam war.
The boy is her older brother Tam who survived the attack but lost an eye. Ut (the photographer) poured water onto the young girl and took her and some of the other children to a hospital near Saigon where she spent fourteen months recovering from the horrific burns to her skin.
Raising the Flag on Iwo Jima is a historic photograph taken on February 23, 1945, by Joe Rosenthal. It depicts five United States Marines and a U.S. Navy corpsman raising the flag of the United States atop Mount Suribachi during the Battle of Iwo Jima in World War II.
A lone protester stops tanks in the 1989 Tianamen Square Uprising.
Star forming pillars in the Eagle Nebula, as seen by the Hubble Space Telescope’s FPC2. These eerie, dark pillar-like structures are actually columns of cool interstellar hydrogen gas and dust that are also incubators for new stars. The pillars protrude from the interior wall of a dark molecular cloud like stalagmites from the floor of a cavern.
Picture of segregated water fountains in North Carolina taken in 1950 by Elliott Erwitt.
The ‘Second Great Fire of London is commemorated in a famous photograph taken from the roof of the Daily Mail building by Herbert Mason, in which the dome of St Paul’s Cathedral rises above clouds of black smoke. Taken in 1940.
This picture was shot by Eddie Adams who won the Pulitzer prize with it. The picture shows Nguyen Ngoc Loan, South Vietnam’s national police chief executing a prisoner who was said to be a Viet Cong captain.
Wide range of pictures, but most memorable ones seem to involve violence and death, others that stick in the mind are Albert Einstein in 1951 sticking his tongue out,
Marylin Monroe with her billowing skirt,
The mouse with the ear grafted on,
HMS Antelope exploding in 1982 (hint, hint, see my Falklands history pages)
Go on then - if you could have taken one picture - and only one that would define your photographic career, which would it be?
V.
