On the night of January 24, 1950, one of the most amazing photographs (right figure) of all time was taken in the Sam Houston Coliseum, Houston, Texas. As William Branham (an influential Bible minister sometimes credited with founding the Latter Rain Movement within American Pentecostal churches) stood at the podium, a halo of fire appeared above his head. This picture was the only one that turned out on the entire film! George J. Lacy, Investigator of Questioned Documents, and often hired by the FBI in that capacity, subjected the negative to every scientific test available. At a news conference, he stated, “To my knowledge, this is the first time in all the world’s history that a supernatural being has been photographed and scientifically vindicated.” The original of this photograph is kept in the archives of the Religious Department of the Smithsonian Institute, Washington, D.C.

Photographer: Unknown
Source: wikipedia

East German border guard Conrad Schumann leaps into the French Sector of West Berlin over barbed wire on August 15, 1961.

Born in Leutewitz near Riesa, Schumann served as a soldier in the East German Bereitschaftspolizei. After three months’ training in Dresden, he was posted to a non-commissioned officers’ college in Potsdam, after which he volunteered for service in Berlin.

On 15 August 1961 he found himself, aged 19, guarding the Berlin Wall, then in its third day of construction, at the corner of Ruppinerstraße and Bernauerstraße. At that stage of construction, the Berlin Wall was only a low barbed wire fence. As the people on the Western side shouted Komm rüber! (”come over”), Schumann jumped the barbed wire and was driven away at high speeds by a waiting West Berlin police car. Photographer Peter Leibing captured a photograph of his escape on film and it became a well-known image of the Cold War.

Photographer: Peter Leibing
Source: wikipedia

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.

Photographer: Ian MacMillan (thanx Marino)
Source: beatles.com

Picture of bullet casings carpet a street in Monrovia (the capital of Liberia), at the heart of the battlefield between government and rebel soldiers. Businesses closed for weeks as the battle raged. Carolyn won pulitzer prize in 2004 with the set of pictures containing this one.

Photographer: Carolyn Cole
Source: Pulitzer.org

Picture of an infant in the AIDS ward of Victor Babes Hospital shot in Bucharest 1990, after the fall of Ceausescu. Press said then that 25% of all orphan kids from Romania’s orphanages were HIV positive. Truth is there were a lot of infected kids but no way a quarter of them.

Anyway, for his photographs of ill and orphaned children living in subhuman conditions in Romania William Snyder received a Pulitzer in 1991.

Photographer: William Snyder (The Dallas Morning News)
Source: nppa.org

Picture of senator Alben W. Barkley of Kentucky, a member of a congressional committee investigating Nazi atrocities, views the evidence at first hand at Buchenwald concentration camp. Weimar, Germany. Americans even marched german civilians through the camp so they could see with their own eyes what their nation had wrought.

Photographer: Unknown
Source: wikipedia

» UPDATE: mathausen film

Picture from an Einsatzgruppen soldier’s personal album, labelled on the back as “Last Jew of Vinnitsa, it shows a member of Einsatzgruppe D is just about to shoot a Jewish man kneeling before a filled mass grave in Vinnitsa, Ukraine, in 1941. All 28,000 Jews from Vinnitsa and its surrounding areas were massacred at the time.

Photographer: Unknown
Source: USHMM