This picture is widely considered the photo that changed the face of AIDS. It showed AIDS victims as humans and people with families. The biggest opponents of doing anything about AIDS, anything at all, were conservatives trumpeting family values. This …
This is believed to be the earliest photograph from the ground, 15 minutes after the plutonium bomb detonated over Nagasaki. The destruction was so incredible that there is no count on how many people died that day. The atomic bombings of Hiroshima and …
The Kayan Lahwi people, also known as Padaung, are an ethnic group with populations in Myanmar (Burma) and Thailand. Padaung women are well-known for wearing neck rings, brass coils that are placed around the neck, appearing to lengthen it. The women we…
Guardian Angels first made an appearance on the New York subway in 1979 in an attempt to quell rising levels of violence. As in all of New York, crime was rampant in the subway in the 1970s. Thefts, robberies, shootings, and killings became more frequen…
During World War II there were many different forms of propaganda to support the war effort in Japan. Sometimes the Japanese used sexual images in order to influence Allied soldiers to pick up surrender leaflets. The leaflet above depicts a bare-breaste…
Among the Kwakwaka'wakw people of the Pacific Northwest, the Hamatsa were a secret society. This society exercised a ritual often called a "cannibal" ritual, and some debate has arisen as to whether the Kwakwaka'wakw do or do not practice ritual canniba…
In June of 1963, Vietnamese Mahayana Buddhist monk Thích Quang Duc burned himself to death at a busy intersection in Saigon. He was attempting to show that to fight all forms of oppression on equal terms, Buddhism too, needed to have its martyrs. …
As the Red Army and the Western Allies pressed closer and closer to Berlin suicides grew. Thousands of Germans committed suicide in the spring of 1945, rather than face occupation and the expected abuse by their victors. 3,881 people were recorded as co…
A lone soldier surrounded by a mountain of empty shell cases, France. This lone British soldier up to his knees in spent shell cases offers a striking impression of the destruction that took place on the Western Front. However, this picture only tells h…
An American corporal aims a Colt M1895 atop a Sri Lankan elephant. The reason why the corporal is atop the elephant is a mystery but elephants were never a weapons platform adopted by the US Army. It’s probably a publicity picture, not something the arm…
The picture/poster shows five men representing five different cultural spheres: an American Indian, an Australian Aborigine, an African, an Asian, and a European. The European, standing in the center, dominates the scene and thus shows the Eurocentric w…
The Falling Soldier became famous for the way it seems to capture, with terrifying immediacy, the moment when a bullet fatally strikes a Spanish Loyalist militiaman; later, it became famous for allegations that the photograph was "faked", or at least (thou…
Mankind's road to the stars had its unsung heroes. One of them was the Soviet cosmonaut Vladimir Komarov. His spaceflight on Soyuz 1 made him the first Soviet cosmonaut to fly into outer space more than once, and he became the first human to die on a sp…
Members of the French Resistance are photographed in the midst of a battle against German troops during the Liberation of Paris. We see a man in makeshift army fatigues to the left and a young man on the right. Then, most strikingly, we see a woman in s…
Japanese marines landed north and south of Shanghai. This picture may have been taken on the Jiangsu coast, which is north of the city. Despite the fact that chemical weapons were prohibited by international laws, the Imperial Japanese Army frequently u…
A shell shocked soldier in a trench during the Battle of Flers-Courcelette during the Somme Offensive in September 1916. His eyes express the madness of the war. The soldier looks like he has gone insane from what he has seen. At that moment in time eve…
At the end of World War II, the city of Dresden was in ruins, all its buildings destroyed and thousands of civilians dead. The scale of the death and destruction, coming so late in the war, along with significant questions about the legitimacy of the ta…
This image might be one of the most impressive photographs of all time. While it might just look like a regular Polaroid of some industrial sludge in a rundown warehouse, you’re looking at the epicenter of the Chernobyl nuclear disaster. Known as “the E…
The Trooper is black. Standing in front of him and touching his shield is a curious little boy dressed in a KKK hood and robe. In this picture, innocence is mixed with hate, the irony of a black man protecting the right of white people to assemble in pr…
Frenchman crying as the flags of fallen France were marched through the streets of Marseilles on their way to Africa. The man’s face conveys a sense of grief so profound as to transcend our expectations. The photo is nicknamed "The weeping Frenchman" an…