Auteur: pdbfoto

“This is what I was waiting for 1,400 days,” the Ukrainian-born Yevgeny Khaldei said as he gazed at the ruins of Berlin on May 2, 1945.

After four years of fighting and photographing across Eastern Europe, the Red Army soldier arrived in the heart of the Nazis’ homeland armed with his ­Leica III rangefinder and a massive Soviet flag that his uncle, a tailor, had fashioned for him from three red tablecloths.

Adolf Hitler had committed suicide two days before, yet the war still raged as Khaldei made his way to the Reichstag.

There he told three soldiers to join him, and they clambered up broken stairs onto the parliament building’s blood-soaked parapet. Gazing through his camera, Khaldei knew he had the shot he had hoped for: “I was euphoric.”

In printing, Khaldei dramatized the image by intensifying the smoke and darkening the sky—even scratching out part of the negative—to craft a romanticized scene that was part reality, part artifice, and all patriotism. Published in the Russian magazine Ogonek, the image became an instant propaganda icon.

And no wonder. The flag jutting from the heart of the enemy exalted the nobility of communism proclaimed the Soviets the new overlords and hinted that by lowering the curtain of war, Premier Joseph Stalin would soon hoist a cold new iron one across the land.

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When the British held Mohandas Gandhi prisoner at Yeravda prison in Pune, India, from 1932 to 1933, the nationalist leader made his own thread with a charkha, a portable spinning wheel.

The practice evolved from a source of personal comfort during captivity into a touchstone of the campaign for independence, with Gandhi encouraging his countrymen to make their own homespun cloth instead of buying British goods.

By the time Margaret Bourke-White came to Gandhi’s compound for a life article on India’s leaders, spinning was so bound up with Gandhi’s identity that his secretary, Pyarelal Nayyar, told Bourke-White that she had to learn the craft before photographing the leader.

Bourke-White’s picture of ­Gandhi reading the news alongside his charkha never appeared in the article for which it was taken, but less than two years later life featured the photo prominently in a tribute published after ­Gandhi’s assassination.

It soon became an indelible image, the slain civil-­disobedience crusader with his most potent symbol, and helped solidify the perception of Gandhi outside the subcontinent as a saintly man of peace.

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Working as an investigative photographer for the National Child Labor Committee, Lewis Hine believed that images of child labor would force citizens to demand change.

The muckraker conned his way into mills and factories from Massachusetts to South Carolina by posing as a Bible seller, insurance agent, or industrial photographer in order to tell the plight of nearly 2 million children.

Carting around a large-format camera and jotting down information in a hidden notebook, Hine recorded children laboring in meatpacking houses, coal mines, and canneries, and in November 1908 he came upon Sadie Pfeifer, who embodied the world he exposed.

A 48-inch-tall wisp of a girl, she was “one of the many small children at work” manning a gargantuan cotton-­spinning machine in ­Lancaster, S.C. Since Hine often had to lie to get his shots, he made “double-sure that my photo data was 100% pure—no retouching or fakery of any kind.”

His images of children as young as 8 dwarfed by the cogs of a cold, mechanized universe squarely set the horrors of child labor before the public, leading to regulatory legislation and cutting the number of child laborers nearly in half from 1910 to 1920.

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It’s the most perilous yet playful lunch break ever captured: 11 men casually eating, chatting and sneaking a smoke as if they weren’t 840 feet above Manhattan with nothing but a thin beam keeping them aloft. That comfort is real; the men are among the construction workers who helped build Rockefeller Center.

But the picture, taken on the 69th floor of the flagship RCA Building (now the GE Building), was staged as part of a promotional campaign for the massive skyscraper complex.

While the photographer and the identities of most of the subjects remain a mystery—the photographers Charles C. Ebbets, Thomas Kelley and William Leftwich were all present that day, and it’s not known which one took it—there isn’t an ironworker in New York City who doesn’t see the picture as a badge of their bold tribe. In that way, they are not alone.

By thumbing its nose at both danger and the Depression, Lunch Atop a Skyscraper came to symbolize American resilience and ambition at a time when both were desperately needed.

It has since become an iconic emblem of the city in which it was taken, affirming the romantic belief that New York is a place unafraid to tackle projects that would cow less brazen cities.

And like all symbols in a city built on hustle, Lunch Atop a Skyscraper has spawned its own economy. It is the Corbis photo agency’s most reproduced image. And good luck walking through Times Square without someone hawking it on a mug, magnet or T-shirt.

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On April 17, 1912, Europeans stopped what they were doing and looked skyward for one of the strangest eclipses of the 20th century. In the Netherlands, the event lasted roughly 2.7 hours, with the Moon eventually obscuring about 96 percent of the Sun’s surface.

The eclipse was unusual because it was a hybrid, an eclipse that shifts between annular and total as the Moon’s shadow crosses Earth. The geometry that day was extraordinarily precise. At the point of greatest eclipse, the Moon’s apparent size exceeded the Sun’s by only a tiny fraction, producing a central path just 1.3 kilometers wide and maximum totality of approximately two seconds.

For people in Rotterdam, protective eclipse glasses were decades away. Observers improvised with smoked glass, photographic plates and other darkened materials, methods that were common at the time but that modern astronomers would consider unsafe.

Added Fact: In southern Netherlands, observers reported a spectacular “string of pearls” effect as sunlight streamed through valleys along the Moon’s irregular edge. Today these brilliant points of light are known as Baily’s beads.

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