Moments that Mattered - A Collection of Photos that Defined our Time

A first for the general public, the picture of the “mushroom cloud”? is a very accurate approximation of the enormous quantity of energy spread below. The first atomic bomb, released on August 6 in Hiroshima(Japan) killed about 80,000 people, but it didn’t seem enough because the Japanese didn’t surrender right away. Therefore, 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.

1983 James B. Dickman Dallas Times Herald
For his telling photographs of life and death in El Salvador.

1984 Anthony Suau The Denver Post

For a series of photographs which depict the tragic effects of starvation in Ethiopia and for a single photograph of a woman at her husband's gravesite on Memorial Day.

1997: Annie Wells, The Press Democrat, Santa Rosa, CA - For her dramatic photograph of a local firefighter rescuing a teenager from raging floodwaters

For his memorable array of pictures deftly capturing multiple facets of Barack Obama’s presidential campaign.

Photographic staff of the Denver Rocky Mountain News, “for its photographic coverage of students following the shooting at Columbine High School near Denver.”

2002: Staff of The New York Times, “for its coverage of the September 11 attack on the World Trade Center.”

2001: Alan Diaz, Associated Press, “for his photograph of federal agents removing Elián González from his uncle's home.”

The Afghan girl, a picture shot by National Geographic photographer Steve McCurry. Sharbat Gula was one of the students in an informal school within the refugee camp; McCurry, rarely given the opportunity to photograph Afghan women, seized the opportunity and captured her image. She was approximately 12 years old at the time. She made it on the cover of National Geographic next year, and her identity was discovered in 1992.

Today we break a little the site’s pattern showing you not a photo but an image captured from a film showing the Palestinian father, Jamil ad-Durra, trying to protect his son from Israeli gunfire moments before the boy was shot dead, the father wounded and a Palestinian ambulance driver who came to rescue them, also killed.

The Tank Man is the picture of a student who tries to stop the tanks in Tiananmen Square standing in front of them. The tank driver didn’t crush the man with the bags but shortly after, the square filled with blood. The photo showed the Chinese that there is hope. However, China is still controlled by a communist regime.

The Hindenburg disaster took place on Thursday, May 6, 1937, as the German passenger airship LZ 129 Hindenburg caught fire and was destroyed during its attempt to dock with its mooring mast at the Lakehurst Naval Air Station, which is located near by the borough of Lakehurst, New Jersey.

June 11, 1963, Thich Quang Duc, a Buddhist monk from Vietnam, burned himself to death at a busy intersection in downtown Saigon to bring attention to the repressive policies of the Catholic Diem regime that controlled the South Vietnamese government at the time. Buddhist monks asked the regime to lift its ban on flying the traditional Buddhist flag, to grant Buddhism the same rights as Catholicism, to stop detaining Buddhists and to give Buddhist monks and nuns the right to practice and spread their religion. While burning Thich Quang Duc never moved a muscle.

After capturing and executing Che in 1967, before bury him in a secret tomb, the executioners made a group photo with the body, to demonstrate the people that EL GRAN CHE is dead. The picture actually made him a legend, his admirers said he had a forgiving look on his face and compared him with Jesus.

Adolf Hitler visits Paris with architect Albert Speer (left) June 23, 1940

Award winning photo showing a Iraqi man comforts his son at a holding center for prisoners of war in An Najaf, Iraq, 31 March 2003. AP photographer Jean-Marc Bouju has won the 2003 World Press Photo of the Year competition. Jean-Marc won also the 1995 Pulitzer Prize in Feature Photography and the 1999 Pulitzer Prize in Spot News Photography. With barbed-wire in the foreground, the picture shows a father who has been detained by the Army’s 101st Airborne division. The man wears a bag over his head, and he clutches his son in his lap.

This photo shows one of the 200+ people who fell to their deaths during the September 11 terrorist attacks in New York City. The individual has been unofficially identified as 43-year-old Jonathan Briley, an employee of the Windows on the World restaurant.

As early as 1793, Frenchman Nicéphore Niépce and his brother Claude imagined a photographic process, and over the next several years, Nicéphore experimented with various light-sensitive substances and cameras. In 1824 he produced a view from his window on a metal plate covered with asphalt. That and most other pictures fashioned by Niépce in the 1820s no longer exist, but the fuzzy image of a pigeon house and a barn roof taken in the summer of 1827 is a good representation of Niépce’s art. To make what he called a “heliograph,” or sun drawing, Niépce employed an exposure time of more than eight hours. Photography, if not yet practical, had been invented.

Six million Jews died in the Holocaust. For many throughout the world, one teenage girl gave them a story and a face. She was Anne Frank, the adolescent who, according to her diary, retained her hope and humanity as she hid with her family in an Amsterdam attic. In 1944 the Nazis, acting on a tip, arrested the Franks; Anne and her sister died of typhus at Bergen-Belsen only a month before the camp was liberated. The world came to know her through her words and through this ordinary portrait of a girl of 14. She stares with big eyes, wearing an enigmatic expression, gazing at a future that the viewer knows will never come.

This photo was taken as the Space Shuttle Challenger was destroyed about a minute after lift-off. All seven crew members were killed, including Christa McAuliffe, who was to be the first teacher in space. One of the fastest-spreading news stories ever, it is estimated that 85% of Americans had heard about the accident within one hour.

Earthrise 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.

Hillary and Tenzing return from the summit of Everest.

This picture won the Pulitzer Breaking News Photography 2007 award. Photo’s citation reads, “Awarded to Oded Balilty of The Associated Press for his powerful photograph of a lone Jewish woman defying Israeli security forces as they remove illegal settlers in the West Bank.

The fall of the Berlin Wall paved the way for German reunification, which was formally concluded on 3 October 1990.

Assassin of Mahatma Gandhi by

Nathuram Vinayak Godse at point blank range on 30 January 1948 in New Delhi. Godse, a Hindu nationalist activist from Pune, Maharashtra who resented what he considered was Gandhi's partiality to India's Muslims, plotted the assassination with Narayan Apte and six others. After a trial that lasted over a year, Godse was sentenced to death on 8 November, 1949.

This is probably Canada’s most famous picture. The Oka Crisis was a land dispute between the Mohawk nation and the town of Oka, Quebec which began on March 11 1990, and lasted until September 26 1990. It resulted in three deaths, and would be the first of a number of violent conflicts between Indigenous people and the Canadian Government in the late 20th century.

Soviet Union soldiers Raqymzhan Qoshqarbaev and Georgij Bulatov raising the flag on the roof of Reichstag building in Berlin, Germany in May, 1945.

Picture of segregated water in walfountains in North Carolina taken by Elliott Erwitt.

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.

Source: The Pulitzer

Source: BuzzFeed, Inc.