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

Photographer: Elliott Erwitt, Magnum Photos
Source: wikipedia.org

And of course 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.

Photographer: Steve McCurry
Source: nationalgeographic.com

Photo taken by Catherine Leroy portraying U.S. Marine corpsman Vernon Wike during the battle for Hill 881 near Khe Sanh while he is cradling his comrade who has been shot while smoke from the battle rises into the air behind them. From the set of pictures, in “Corpsman In Anguish” he has just realised the man is dead.

In 1968, during the Tet Offensive, Leroy was captured by the North Vietnamese Army. She managed to talk her way out with images of the North Vietnamese Army in action.

Photographer: Catherine Leroy
Source: pieceuniquegallery.com

Picture of bodies at the Triangle Shirtwaist Company. Company rules were to keep doors closed to the factory so workers (mostly immigrant women) couldn’t leave or steal. When a fire ignited, disaster struck. 146 people died that day. The whole story here.

Photographer: International Ladies Garmet workers Union ?!
Source: wikipedia.org

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

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

Picture was taken in 1946 in India by Margaret Bourke-White who was sent there to cover a story about India’s independence. In order to let her take the picture, Mahatma Gandhi asked her to learn to use the spinning wheel first. Frustrated at the beginning, she learned to use it in the end.

Photographer: Margaret Bourke-White
Source: life.com

On July 22, 1975, photograph Stanley J. Forman working for the Boston Herald American newspaper when a police scanner picked up an emergency: “Fire on Marlborough Street!”
Climbed on a the fire truck, Forman shot the picture of a young woman, Diana Bryant, and a very young girl, Tiare Jones when they fell helplessly. Diana Bryant was pronounced dead at the scene. The young girl lived. Despite a heroic effort, the fireman who tried to grab them had been just seconds away from saving the lives of both.

Photo coverage from the tragic event garnered Stanley Forman a Pulitzer Prize. But more important, his work paved the way for Boston and other states to mandate tougher fire safety codes.

Photographer: Stanley J. Forman
Source: bbc.co.uk