20 Photos that changed the world

1) Burning Monk by Malcolm Browne,1963

As a protest to the Diem slow and unreliable reforms in Vietnam, the Buddhist monks have resorted to immolation, such as this Mahayana Buddhist monk, Thich Quang Ðuc. Ðuc burned himself alive across the outskirts of Saigon, mainly because of the harshness done by the South Vietnam government to his fellow Buddhist monks.

Ðuc was re-cremated after he burned himself; his heart meanwhile remained in one piece, and because of this he was regarded as a Bodhisattva by the other Buddhist monks and followers. His act of self-immolation increased the pressure on the Diem administration to implement their reform laws in South Vietnam.More monks followed Ðuc’s footsteps as well, and later on in November 1963, Di?m was killed by an army coup. More 19 photos after the jump.

2) Napalm Girl by Nick/Ut Associated Press 

Kim Phúc was a resident in the village of Trang Bang, South Vietnam. On June 8, 1972, South Vietnamese planes, in coordination with the American military, dropped a napalm bomb on Trang Bang, which was under attack from and occupied by North Vietnamese forces. She joined a group of civilians and South Vietnamese soldiers fleeing from the Cao Dai Temple, located in the village along the road, to safe South Vietnamese positions. A South Vietnamese pilot mistook the group as a threat and diverted to attack it. Along with other villagers, two of Kim Phúc’s cousins were killed.

Associated Press photographer Nick Út earned a Pulitzer Prize for the photograph. It was also the World Press Photo of the Year 1972. The image of her running naked amidst the chaotic background became one of the most remembered images of the Vietnam War. In an interview many years later, she remembers yelling “Nong qua, nong qua” (”too hot, too hot”) in the picture.

3) Starving Cild Vulture by Kevin Carte, 1994 

One photograph that has helped awaken the world about the effects of poverty in Africa is the one above showing a Sudanese child being stalked by a vulture nearby. It is quite obvious that the child was starving to death, while the vulture was patiently waiting for the toddler to die so he can have a good meal.

Nobody knows what happened to the child, who crawled his way to a United Nations food camp. Photographer Kevin Carter won a Pulitzer Prize for this shocking picture, but he eventually committed suicide three months after he took the shot.

4) The Baby Hand by  Michael Clancy, 1999  

Some of us may be familiar with a picture called “The Baby Hand,” taken on Aug. 19, 1999, by photojournalist Michael Clancy for USA Today, which first published the picture. Clancy was assigned to document a spina bifida operation performed in utero on a 21-week unborn baby named Samuel Armas by Dr. Joseph Bruner, a surgeon at Nashville’s Vanderbuilt University Medical Center.

The picture and its story have been circulated on the internet so often that some question whether they are authentic. They are.Samuel was born on Dec. 2, 1999, weighing 5 pounds 11 ounces–four weeks premature. By all indications, he appeared healthy. Today, he’s a “chattering, brown-eyed 3½-year-old.”

Photo Suggested By Holly Steel

5) 5 Year Old Mother, 1939  

One of the photographs meanwhile that changed medical history is that of Lina Medina, the youngest mother who gave birth at the age of five. Born in Peru in 1933, Lina was brought to the local hospital by her parents because of an increasingly enlarged belly, which they first thought of a tumor. After a series of tests however, the doctors confirmed that she was seven months pregnant. A month later Lina gave birth to a baby boy whom she named Gerardo, after her doctor.

Lina Medina is the first known case of precocious pregnancy, and based on studies it was shown that she had an advanced menarche development resulting to menstruation at the age of 8 months, prominent breasts upon turning four, and bone maturation at age 5.

Her son Gerardo was first raised knowing that Lina was his sister, but eventually he found out that she was his mother at the age of 10. In 1972, Lina married and gave birth to her second son, 33 years after Gerardo was born. Gerardo soon died seven years later at the age of 40, due to a bone marrow disease. Lina, who is now aged 74, continues to live with her husband in Chicago, Chico, in Lima, Peru.

6) Tsuname Floating Bodies, 2004  

The Boxing Day Tsunami that struck Thailand in 2004 caused approximately 350,000 deaths and many more injuries.

7) The Falling Man, 2001

8) Man Walks On Moon by NASA, 1969 

In one of the most famous photographs of the 20th Century, Apollo 11 astronaut Buzz Aldrin walks on the surface of the moon near the leg of the lunar module Eagle. Apollo 11 Commander Neil Armstrong took this photograph with a 70mm lunar surface camera. Armstrong and Aldrin explored the Sea of Tranquility for two and a half hours while crewmate Michael Collins orbited above in the command module Columbia.

As the world remembers the thrilling Apollo 11 mission 35 years later, NASA’s newVision calls for a return to the moon, followed by journeys of discovery to Mars and beyond.

9) Nagasaki Mushroom Cloud, 1945 

This is the picture of the “mushroom cloud” showing the enormous quantity of energy. The first atomic bomb was released on August 6 in Hiroshima (Japan) and killed about 80,000 people. On August 9 another bomb was released above Nagasaki. The effects of the second bomb were even more devastating - 150,000 people were killed or injured. But the powerful wind, the extremely high temperature and radiation caused enormous long term damage.

10) Execution of Viet Cong by Eddie Adams, 1968 

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. Once again the public opinion was turned against the war.

11) First Black Student by Douglas Martin, 1958  

World Press Photo of the Year: 1957 Douglas Martin, USA, The Associated Press. Charlotte, North Carolina, USA, 4 September 1957. Dorothy Counts, one of the first black students to enter the newly desegregated Harry Harding High School. About the image Reporters and photographers bore witness and recorded the violence that erupted when Dorothy Counts showed up for her first day at an all-white school. People threw rocks and screamed “Go back where you came from”. They got their way - after a string of abuses, Dorothy’s family withdrew her from the school after only four days.

12) Loch Ness Monster by Ian Wetherell, 1934

13) Lunchtime atop a Skyscraper by Charles C. Ebbets, 1932 

Rare image by the same photographer showing the workers sleeping on the crossbeam.

14) Earthrise by William Anders, 1968 

The late adventure photographer Galen Rowell called it “the most influential environmental photograph ever taken.” Captured on Christmas Eve, 1968, near the end of one of the most tumultuous years the U.S. had ever known, the Earthrise photograph inspired contemplation of our fragile existence and our place in the cosmos. For years, Frank Borman and Bill Anders of the Apollo 8 mission each thought that he was the one who took the picture. An investigation of two rolls of film seemed to prove Borman had taken an earlier, black-and-white frame, and the iconic color photograph, which later graced a U.S. postage stamp and several book covers, was by Anders.

15) The First Photograph by Joseph Nicephore Niepce, 1826  

Known as the World’s First Photograph but actually this is the earliest surviving photograph, c. 1826. It required an eight-hour exposure, which resulted in sunlight on both sides of the buildings.

It represents the view of the courtyard of Niépce’s house at Gras, France, taken from the window of his workroom. On the left side of the image is the pigeon-house (an upper loft in the Niépce family house), to the right of it is a pear-tree with a patch of sky showing through an opening in the branches. In the center of the image is the slanting roof of the barn; the long building behind it is the bake house, with chimney. On the right side of the image is another wing of the house.

16) 9/11 Attacks 

In the morning September 11, 2001, two hijacked passenger jets crashed into the Twin Towers of the World Trade Center in New York City. This was no accident, but rather a series of attacks done by suicide bombers engaged with the Al-Qaeda terrorist group.

The attacks killed all the passengers on board the hijacked planes, and took away 2,974 innocent lives at the World Trade Center. More than 90 countries lost citizens in the attack, and the stock market was closed for a week. In response to the attacks, the United States government declared a War on Terror, while many other nations strengthened their law enforcement powers to fight terrorism. However, the suicide attacks done by the Al Qaeda terrorists have forever marked a sense of fear not just in America, but in the whole world.

17) Flag Raising at Ground Zero, 2001 

18) Saddam Hussein Execution, 2007 

19) First Pic on the Internet, 1992 

Back in 1992, after their show at the CERN Hardronic Festival, my colleague Tim Berners-Lee asked me for a few scanned photos of “the CERN girls” to publish them on some sort of information system he had just invented, called the “World Wide Web”. I had only a vague idea of what that was, but I scanned some photos on my Mac and FTPed them to Tim’s now famous “info.cern.ch”. How was I to know that I was passing an historical milestone, as the one above was the first picture ever to be clicked on in a web browser!”

Silvano de Gennaro

20) Starving Boy and Missionary by Mike Wells, 1980 

World Press Photo of the Year: 1980 Mike Wells, United Kingdom. Karamoja district, Uganda, April 1980. Starving boy and a missionary. About the image Wells felt indignant that the same publication that sat on his picture for five months without publishing it, while people were dying, entered it into a competition. He was embarrassed to win as he never entered the competition himself, and was against winning prizes with pictures of people starving to death. 

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