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These are indeed world’s most famous photos. Every single one of them has a great story behind, we’re trying to bring you the pictures that changed mankind. If the change was good or bad, that is for you to judge.

V-J Day, Times Square, [1945]

or “The Kiss”, at the end of World War II, in US cities everybody went to the streets to salute the end of combat. Friendship and unity were everywhere. This picture shows a sailor kissing a young nurse in Times Square. The fact is he was kissing every girl he encountered and for that kiss, this particular nurse slapped him.

Photographer: Alfred Eisenstaedt

Source: wikipedia.org

U.S. Marines raising the flag on Iwo Jima [1945]


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.

Photograp from: Joe Rosenthal

Source: wikipedia.org

Tourist Guy [2001]


The tourist guy, is an Internet phenomenon consisting of a photograph of a touristPhotoshopped pictures after the September 11, 2001 attacks. The tourist was identified as Péter Guzli.

Soon after 9/11 an image showing a tourist while an airliner was about to hit the building beneath him circulated on the Internet. It was claimed that the picture came from a camera found in the debris at Ground Zero. The picture won a best 9/11 Photoshopped picture contest.

The Power of One [2007]


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.?

Photographer:Oded Balilty (Associated Press)

Source: http://www.photojournalism.org/

Stricken child crawling towards a food camp [1994]

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.

Photographer: Kevin Carter

Source: Wikipedia.org

St. Paul’s Cathedral during the Blitz [1940]


The ‘Second Great Fire of London is commemorated in a famous photograph taken from the roof of the Daily Mail building by Herbert Mason, in which the dome of St Paul’s Cathedral rises above clouds of black smoke.

Photographer: Herbert Mason

Source: wikipedia.org

Reichstag flag [1945]


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

Photographer: Yevgeny Khaldei (1917-1997)

Source: wikipedia.org

Portrait of Winston Churchill [1941]


This photograph was taken by Yousuf Karsh, a Canadian photographer, when Winston Churchill came to Ottawa. The portrait of Churchill brought Karsh international fame. It is claimed to be the most reproduced photographic portrait in history. It also appeared on the cover of Life magazine.

Photograp from: Yousuf Karsh

Omayra Sánchez [1985]


Omayra Sánchez was one of the 25,000 victims of the Nevado del Ruiz (Colombia) volcano which erupted on November 14, 1985. The 13-year old had been trapped in water and concrete for 3 days. The picture was taken shortly before she died and it caused controversy due to the photographer’s work and the Colombian government’s inaction in the midst of the tragedy, when it was published worldwide after the young girl’s death.

Nagasaki [1945]


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.

Photographer: U.S. Air Force

Source: japaneselifestyle.com.au

Muhammad Ali versus Sonny Liston [1965]


This picture is one of the most famous moments in sporting history! It shows Cassius Clay knocking out Sonny Liston (former heavy weight champion) in the first minute of the first round, in a rematch (Muhammad won the match the year before after Sonny resigned to defeat complaining of a shoulder injury).

Speculations circulated about Liston’s fall, many spectators considered the bout fixed, even the FBI investigated the case. Some say while preparing for the fight, Liston was visited by Black Muslims who threatened to kill his daughter Eleanor if he should win the rematch, others say Liston lay down for money.

Migrant Mother [1936]


For many, this picture of Florence Owens Thompson (age 32) represents the Great Depression. She was the mother of 7 and she struggled to survive with her kids catching birds and picking fruits. Dorothea Lange took the picture after Florence sold her tent to buy food for her children. She made the first page of major newspapers all over the country and changed people’s conception about migrants.

Photographer: Dorothea Lange

Source: life.com

Michael Dukakis [1988]


Michael Dukakis was the Democrat’s proposal for Presidency and so, George Bush’s opponent in the 1988 elections. The picture below was taken at a General Dynamics plant in Michigan, hoping that it would consolidate the Democrat’s public image, but he was no match for the World War II pilot George Bush, so his plan didn’t quite work.

Photographer: AP

Looking Down Sacramento Street [1906]


Picture was taken April 18, 1906. It is the most famous photo of the destruction of San Francisco by earthquake and fire on April 18, 1906. After his camera was damaged during the earthquake, Arnold Genthe borrowed a hand-held camera from George Kahn, his dealer, and started taking pictures of the disaster. The most memorable is this one, showing enormous clouds of smoke ominously approach, buildings’ facades collapsed from the quake, and residents standing and sitting in the street…

Photographer: Arnold Genthe

Loch Ness Monster [1934]


Stories about a monster in Loch Ness have been around since 565, but only when this picture was taken and showed to the world in 1934, “Nessie” began to be the object of contradiction, research and turism.

The interest for the creature ended in 1994 when Christian Spurling, admited it was a fake made by

his father, Marmaduke Wetherell. They made a wooden monster, Ian took the picture and they convinced Robert Kenneth Wilson (the village doctor), to tell the world he shot the picture.

Photographer: Ian Wetherell

Source: wikipedia.org

Lenna [1972]


Lenna is the name given to a standard test image cropped from a Playboy magazine centerfold picture of Lena S?derberg who posed for the November 1972 issue. The image is the most widely used test image for all sorts of image processing algorithms.

The picture’s history was described in the May 2001 newsletter of the IEEE Professional Communication Society:

“Alexander Sawchuk estimates that it was in June or July of 1973 when he, then an assistant professor of electrical engineering at the University of Southern California Signal and Image Processing Institute (SIPI), along with a graduate student and the SIPI lab manager, was hurriedly searching the lab for a good image to scan for a colleague’s conference paper. They got tired of their stock of usual test images, dull stuff dating back to television standards work in the early 1960s. They wanted something glossy to ensure good output dynamic range, and they wanted a human face. Just then, somebody happened to walk in with a recent issue of Playboy.

The engineers tore away the top third of the centerfold so they could wrap it around the drum of their Muirhead wirephoto scanner, which they had outfitted with analog-to-digital converters (one each for the red, green, and blue channels) and a Hewlett Packard 2100 minicomputer. The Muirhead had a fixed resolution of 100 lines per inch and the engineers wanted a 512 × 512 image, so they limited the scan to the top 5.12 inches of the picture, effectively cropping it at the subject’s shoulders.”

Photographer: Playboy

Source: wikipedia.org

Kim Phúc - The napalm girl [1972]


The girl in the picture is Phan Th? Kim Phúc also known as Kim Phuc (born in 1963), a nine-year old running naked and severely burned on her back by a napalm atack.

Photographer Huynh Cong Ut, known by his colleagues as Nick, was working there as a photo journalist for Associated Press at the time and took a number of photographs of the villagers trying to escape the napalm. This one, epitomising the savagery and tragedy of the conflict, won him the coveted Pulitzer Prize and became one of the most published photos of the Vietnam war.

The boy is her older brother Tam who survived the attack but lost an eye. Ut (the photographer) poured water onto the young girl and took her and some of the other children to a hospital near Saigon where she spent fourteen months recovering from the horrific burns to her skin.

Later, the girl studied medicine and now she; a UNESCO member living in Canada.

Photographer: Huynh Cong Ut (Associated Press)

Source: wikipedia.org

Kent State [1970]



The news that Richard Nixon was sending troops to Cambodia caused a chain of protests in the U.S. colleges. At Kent State the protest seemed more violent, some students even throwing rocks. In consequence, The Ohio National Guard was called to calm things down, but the events got out of hand and they started shooting. Some of the victims were simply walking to school, and, more dramatically, one wasn’t even a student, but a 14 year old runaway. Mary Ann Vecchio was sent to her family in Florida and her death was commemorated in a TV movie and a Neil Young song.

Photographer: John Paul Filo

Source: sinomania.com

How Life Begins [1965]


One of the first pictures taken with the endoscope. It shows a fetus in a pregnant woman. The picture was taken by Lennart Nilsson and showed to LIFE’s editors, they demanded that witnesses confirm that they were seeing what they thought they were seeing. The picture was considered many years the symbol of humanity.

Photographer: Lennart Nilsson

Source: life.com