In 1945, Todd Webb was discharged from the U.S. Navy following World War II, and landed in New York. With a keen fascination for the bustling humanity of Manhattan, he took his large-format camera out to the streets, capturing its people and places in all w…
These haunting mugshots show Victorian child criminals, some as young as 12, who faced cruel punishments for the most petty crimes. The pictures are taken in the 1870s and originate from Oxford Gaol, a prison that later became HMP Oxford. During this time…
These pictures show Les Halles, Paris' former fresh food market, which sprawled haphazardly over the center of the city and was known as "the Belly of Paris." Once alive with the cries of fruit-sellers, fish-vendors, butchers, and florists, the scent of bri…
The term "burlesque" means a literary, dramatic, or musical work intended to cause laughter by caricaturing the manner or spirit of serious works, or by ludicrous treatment of their subjects. It’s a form of theatrical entertainment featuring parodic humor, …
These pictures are not staged and show Tippi Hedren, star of Alfred Hitchcock’s The Birds, with her husband, Noel Marshall, her daughter, actress Melanie Griffith, and their lion, Neil. In 1969, Hedren and Marshall were filming in Africa and came across…
These photographs show Chicago's African-American community, primarily the South Side, and are taken by photographer John H. White, who went on to win the Pulitzer Prize for Photojournalism in 1982. His portraits of everyday life stand the test of time,…
These photographs taken in early and mid-20th century Germany show anonymous people posing alongside actors dressed as polar bears. The pictures, part of a TeddyBär collection, were compiled between the end of the First World War and the late 1960s by Jean-…
In 1908, photographer Lewis Hine was hired by the American Child Protection Council to report and document the working conditions and exploitation of children (or as they were called: underage laborers) across the United States. He traveled around the c…
The pictures in this collection are some of the earliest known portrait photographs to ever be taken. The subjects in the photos are older and no doubt wealthy, as photography was expensive and only accessible to those in a good financial position. T…
There are several accounts from the 1850s describing the unexplained appearance in photographs of translucent figures representing the departed. According to Owen Davies in The Haunted: A Social History of Ghosts, ghost photography started with photographic…
In October 1937, Farm Security Administration photographer Arthur Rothstein visited the small city of Hagerstown in Maryland. He spent a whole afternoon, strolling the streets of the town, taking pictures of residents, documenting their everyday life. In a …
During the Second World War, propaganda posters in the United States were commonly seen on a walk or commute to work, a trip to the store, in a newspaper or magazine, and any other time one went around town. Posters were not the only form of propaganda used…
Spirit photography began in the late 19th century, around the time that the spiritualism movement was gaining traction across Europe and the United States. The photographers who practiced it claimed that they could capture images of portrait subjects and th…
During World War II, America’s railroads were an important part of the war effort and it’s estimated that from 1941 to 1945 trains transported close to 44 million American troops. Between the war years of 1942 and 1944, trains carried 98 percent of mili…
Fitness, as we know it today, may seem to be a relatively modern invention, but physical exercise obviously goes back much further than that. Starting from the early 20th century, people used elaborate contraptions, painful machinery, bizarre devices, a…
In the early years of the 20th century, a number of circuses toured Northern Ireland providing entertainment, tricks, and a lot of excitement for the crowds. Though the dim lighting condition inside the circus’ tent prevented images from being made of t…
No one expected the 1969 Woodstock concert and festival to draw a crowd estimated at half-million — nor that the gathering would become a legendary touchstone for the counterculture of the 1960s and a unique event in the history of music. Held in the open a…
Stereographs were a very popular form of photography in the 19th century. Photographers would take two nearly identical images which, when printed side by side, would appear as a three-dimensional image when viewed through a set of special lenses called a ster…
Nobody could tell exactly when it began and nobody could predict when it would end. At the outset, they didn’t even call it a depression. At worst it was a recession, a brief slump, a “correction” in the market, a glitch in the rising curve of prosperit…
These stunning photos of the Hollywood icon Marilyn Monroe were captured by photographer John Florea during the 1950s. The mere name of Marilyn Monroe represents different images for different people. For some, it suggests the absolute standard of female se…