Iconic Photos

The afghan girl, 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.

The photo is the “Pulitzer Prize” winning photo taken in 1994 during the Sudan Famine.
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, which, according to some proponents of the “Paul Is Dead” conspiracy theory, was parked there intentionally as a rebus.

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.

The photograph was extremely popular, being reprinted in thousands of publications. Later, it became the only photograph to win the Pulitzer Prize for Photography in the same year as its publication, and ultimately came to be regarded as one of the most significant and recognizable images of the war, and possibly the most reproduced photograph of all times.

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

Albert Einstein is probably one of the most popular figures of all times. He is considered a genius because he created the Theory of Relativity, and so, challenged Newton’s laws, that were the basis of everything known in physics until the beginning of the 20th century. But, as a person, he was considered a beatnik, and this picture, taken on March 14, 1951 proves that.

Although Doisneau worked in Paris as a street photographer and stole many an intimate moment of Parisian couples, this classic shot was staged. However, this fact didn’t prevent the picture from gracing the walls of many freshman dorm rooms since its first production in 1986. More than 500,000 posters and 400,000 postcards have been reprinted from the original.

Guerrillero Heroico (English: "Heroic Guerrilla") is an iconic photo of Marxist revolutionary Che Guevara wearing his black beret taken by Alberto Korda. It was taken on March 5, 1960, in Havana, Cuba, at a memorial service for victims of the La Coubre explosion and by the end of the 1960s turned the charismatic and controversial leader into a cultural icon.

This is a picture that need no caption. However, very few people know or care about the exact details of the events that transpired on June 5th, 1989. The day after Chinese troops expelled thousands of demonstrators from Tiananmen Square in Beijing (in a process that left thousands dead), the tank returning from their mission at the Square were confronted with a lone rebel. The rebel’s identity is never revealed nor that of the commander in the lead tank.

In 1963, the monks showed their anger by a rally in Saigon. A 73-year old Thich Quang Duc sat crossed legged in the centre of a human circle. A monk poured gasoline on him. With a look of serenity, Quang Duc struck a match at 9:22 AM. As flames engulfed his body, he made not a single cry or a muscle. In his will he wrote to President asking him to be kind and tolerant towards his people.

Journalist Malcolm Browne’s photographs of his self-immolation were seen on the front pages of newspapers worldwide — except on the New York Times, whose editors deemed the photos too graphic to be put on the front page. John F. Kennedy noted that “no news picture in history has generated so much emotion around the world as that one”. One won the 1963 World Press Photo of the Year.

In Adams’s photograph, we see Loan firing a bullet point blank into Hop’s head; Hop, wincing, appears to be receiving the bullet. Ironically enough, it has been argued that Ngoc Loan was only interested in publicly assassinating the Viet Cong prisoner because there were AP press corps there to capture the image. For him, the photographic evidence of the execution was meant to teach the Vietcong what would happen to their forces if caught.

This is a famous photograph by Alfred Eisenstaedt that portrays an American sailor kissing a young woman in a white dress on VJ Day in Times Square on August 14, 1945. The photograph was originally published one week after Life magazine, among many photographs of the celebrations around the country that were presented in a twelve-page section called Victory. The pose was kissing a favorite of photographers covering the war at the time and encouraged many people to do this pose, but Eisenstaedt was photographing a spontaneous event, which took place in Times Square as the announcement of the end of the war against Japan made ​​by President Truman.