The Only Film Footage of Anne Frank was from July 22, 1941, when a neighbor filmed a wedding outside, capturing Anne leaning out of a second-floor window at Merwedeplein 37 to look at the bride.
The Loch Ness Monster, 1934
If the giraffe never existed, we’d have to invent it. It’s our nature to grow bored with the improbable but real and look for the impossible. So it is with the photo of what was said to be the Loch Ness monster, purportedly taken by British doctor Robert Wilson in April 1934.
Wilson, however, had simply been enlisted to cover up an earlier fraud by wild-game hunter Marmaduke Wetherell, who had been sent to Scotland by London’s Daily Mail to bag the monster.
There being no monster to bag, Wetherell brought home photos of hippo prints that he said belonged to Nessie.
The Mail caught wise and discredited Wetherell, who then returned to the loch with a monster made out of a toy submarine. He and his son used Wilson, a respected physician, to lend the hoax credibility.
The Mail endures; Wilson’s reputation doesn’t. The Loch Ness image is something of a lodestone for conspiracy theorists and fable seekers, as is the absolutely authentic picture of the famous face on Mars taken by the Viking probe in 1976.
The thrill of that find lasted only until 1998, when the Mars Global Surveyor proved the face was, as NASA said, a topographic formation, one that by that time had been nearly windblown away. We were innocents in those sweet, pre-Photoshop days.
Now we know better—and we trust nothing. The art of the fake has advanced, but the charm of it, like the Martian face, is all but gone.
Bandit’s Roost, Mulberry Street, circa 1888
Late 19th-century New York City was a magnet for the world’s immigrants, and the vast majority of them found not streets paved with gold but nearly subhuman squalor.
While polite society turned a blind eye, brave reporters like the Danish-born Jacob Riis documented this shame of the Gilded Age.
Riis did this by venturing into the city’s most ominous neighborhoods with his blinding magnesium flash powder lights, capturing the casual crime, grinding poverty and frightful overcrowding.
Most famous of these was Riis’ image of a Lower East Side street gang, which conveys the danger that lurked around every bend.
Such work became the basis of his revelatory book How the Other Half Lives, which forced Americans to confront what they had long ignored and galvanized reformers like the young New York politician Theodore Roosevelt, who wrote to the photographer, “I have read your book, and I have come to help.”
Riis’ work was instrumental in bringing about New York State’s landmark Tenement House Act of 1901, which improved conditions for the poor. And his crusading approach and direct, confrontational style ushered in the age of documentary and muckraking photojournalism.
The Horse In Motion, 1878
When a horse trots or gallops, does it ever become fully airborne? This was the question photographer Eadweard Muybridge set out to answer in 1878. Railroad tycoon and former California governor Leland Stanford was convinced the answer was yes and commissioned Muybridge to provide proof.
Muybridge developed a way to take photos with an exposure lasting a fraction of a second and, with reporters as witnesses, arranged 12 cameras along a track on Stanford’s estate.
As a horse sped by, it tripped wires connected to the cameras, which took 12 photos in rapid succession. Muybridge developed the images on site and, in the frames, revealed that a horse is completely aloft with its hooves tucked underneath it for a brief moment during a stride.
The revelation, imperceptible to the naked eye but apparent through photography, marked a new purpose for the medium. It could capture truth through technology. Muybridge’s stop-motion technique was an early form of animation that helped pave the way for the motion-picture industry, born a short decade later.
Black Power Salute, 1968
The Olympics are intended to be a celebration of global unity. But when the American sprinters Tommie Smith and John Carlos ascended the medal stand at the 1968 Games in Mexico City, they were determined to shatter the illusion that all was right in the world.
Just before “The Star-Spangled Banner” began to play, Smith, the gold medalist, and Carlos, the bronze winner, bowed their heads and raised black-gloved fists in the air.
Their message could not have been clearer: Before we salute America, America must treat blacks as equal. “We knew that what we were going to do was far greater than any athletic feat,” Carlos later said.
John Dominis, a quick-fingered life photographer known for capturing unexpected moments, shot a close-up that revealed another layer: Smith in black socks, his running shoes off, in a gesture meant to symbolize black poverty. Published in life, Dominis’ image turned the somber protest into an iconic emblem of the turbulent 1960s.
Muhammad Ali Vs. Sonny Liston, 1965
So much of great photography is being in the right spot at the right moment. That was what it was like for sports illustrated photographer Neil Leifer when he shot perhaps the greatest sports photo of the century. “I was obviously in the right seat, but what matters is I didn’t miss,” he later said.
Leifer had taken that ringside spot in Lewiston, Maine, on May 25, 1965, as 23-year-old heavyweight boxing champion Muhammad Ali squared off against 34-year-old Sonny Liston, the man he’d snatched the title from the previous year. One minute and 44 seconds into the first round, Ali’s right fist connected with Liston’s chin and Liston went down.
Leifer snapped the photo of the champ towering over his vanquished opponent and taunting him, “Get up and fight, sucker!” Powerful overhead lights and thick clouds of cigar smoke had turned the ring into the perfect studio, and Leifer took full advantage.
His perfectly composed image captures Ali radiating the strength and poetic brashness that made him the nation’s most beloved and reviled athlete, at a moment when sports, politics and popular culture were being squarely battered in the tumult of the ’60s.
Raising A Flag Over The Reichstag, 1945
“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.
Gandhi And The Spinning Wheel, 1946
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.
Cotton Mill Girl, 1908
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.
Lunch atop a Skyscraper in 1932
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.
People observing the solar eclipse of 17 April 1912. Rotterdam, The Netherlands.
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.
First and only time it snowed in Miami, 1977
A woman driving a 1944 Brogan Doodlebug10 HP. The Doodlebug could achieve a top speed of 45 MPH and travel almost 70 miles on one gallon of gas.
A top-of-the-line computer setup in the mid-1990s
West Side Highway, New York City, 1977. A sunbather rests on an empty patch of Manhattan, with traffic, the World Trade Center, and the city rising behind him. Photo by Mitch Epstein
In ’77, New York was emerging from the fiscal crisis of 1975, when the city came dangerously close to bankruptcy. Crime rates were high, many neighborhoods were losing population, and large tracts of waterfront and industrial land sat vacant or underused.
The recently completed World Trade Center towers dominate the skyline. At the time, they were among the tallest buildings in the world, standing 1,368 and 1,362 feet tall. Yet despite their immense scale, the surrounding area still contained vast stretches of undeveloped land, parking lots, warehouses, and decaying piers.
The photograph also highlights a forgotten aspect of Manhattan’s history: before luxury towers, waterfront parks, and billion-dollar real estate developments transformed the West Side, parts of Lower Manhattan retained an almost industrial frontier atmosphere. Land that would be worth millions of dollars today could sit nearly empty.
Added Fact: In the late 1970s, New York City’s population had fallen below 7.1 million after peaking at nearly 7.9 million in 1950. Many experts believed the city’s best days were behind it. Instead, New York would experience one of the most dramatic urban revivals in modern history, growing to more than 8.8 million residents and becoming one of the world’s most valuable real estate markets.
The Erbil Citadel, in Iraqi Kurdistan, is indeed one of the world’s oldest continuously inhabited cities, boasting a history spanning over 6,000 years.
The Erbil Citadel is one of the most remarkable urban sites in the world. Rising about 100 feet (30 meters) above the surrounding city on a large artificial mound, the citadel occupies a strategic position that has attracted settlers for millennia.
Located in Erbil, the site has yielded evidence of occupation dating back at least to the 5th millennium BC, and possibly earlier. Over its long history, it has been ruled by or associated with the Sumerians, Akkadians, Assyrians, Babylonians, Persians, Greeks under Alexander the Great, Parthians, Romans, Arabs, Mongols, Ottomans, and modern Iraq.
The city’s ancient name, Arbela, appears in cuneiform records more than 4,000 years old. It was an important religious center of the Assyrian Empire, particularly for the worship of the goddess Ishtar. In 331 BC, the nearby Battle of Gaugamela effectively ended the Achaemenid Persian Empire and opened the way for Alexander’s conquest of the Near East.
In 2014, the citadel was designated a UNESCO World Heritage Site, recognizing its extraordinary historical significance.
Added Fact: Unlike many famous ancient cities that were abandoned and later rediscovered, Erbil remained inhabited through nearly every major era of Middle Eastern history. This continuity makes it one of the strongest contenders for the title of the world’s oldest continuously inhabited urban settlement, alongside places such as Jericho and Damascus.
Outdoor baby car seat (1950’s)
The “car-mounted baby seat” shown here is a good reminder that automotive safety standards were dramatically different in the 1950s. At the time, many parents viewed cars as relatively safe environments, and the primary concern was often keeping children occupied or allowing them a better view of the road rather than protecting them during a collision.
During the 1950s, seat belts were rare in American cars. Most vehicles did not include them as standard equipment, and there were no federal crash-test requirements. Child restraints, when used at all, were often designed to elevate children rather than secure them. Some manufacturers and inventors marketed external or door-mounted seats, believing fresh air and visibility would make travel more enjoyable.
Modern child passenger safety research eventually transformed these practices. The widespread adoption of crash testing, mandatory seat belts, child safety seats, and later airbags contributed to a dramatic reduction in vehicle fatalities. Today, properly installed child restraints are estimated to reduce the risk of fatal injury for infants by more than 70% in passenger vehicles.
Added Fact: The first modern three-point seat belt was developed by Nils Bohlin for Volvo Cars in 1959. Volvo made the patent available to other manufacturers, a decision credited with helping save millions of lives worldwide.
Sadako Sasaki in 1955.
She had survived the Hiroshima bombing but was heavily irradiated, which gave her leukemia a decade later. She died on October 25, 1955 at age 12, becoming a symbol of the effects of nuclear war. In the hospital before her death she folded more than 1,000 paper cranes.
On August 6, 1945, when the United States dropped the atomic bomb on Hiroshima, Sadako was just two years old. She survived the initial blast, which killed an estimated 70,000–80,000 people instantly. However, like many survivors, she was exposed to radiation. Nearly a decade later, in 1954, she was diagnosed with leukemia, often called the “atomic bomb disease” in postwar Japan.
While hospitalized, Sadako learned of a Japanese legend that anyone who folds 1,000 paper cranes will be granted a wish. She began folding cranes and hoping for recovery. Accounts differ on the exact number she completed before her death, some say she exceeded 1,000, while others suggest friends and family helped finish the total after she died, but the crane became inseparably linked to her story.
Sadako died on October 25, 1955, at age 12. Her classmates later helped raise funds for a memorial to all children affected by the atomic bomb.
Added Fact: In 1958, the Children’s Peace Monument was unveiled in Hiroshima. At its top stands a statue of Sadako holding a golden crane. Every year, children from around the world send millions of folded paper cranes to the monument as messages of peace, making her one of the most recognized symbols of the global anti-nuclear movement.
US Marine Charles Lindberg of Richfield from Minnesota, shown on Mount Suribachi on Iwo Jima during World War II.
Lindberg is carrying an M2 flamethrower near the summit of Mount Suribachi. Flamethrower operators had one of the most dangerous jobs in the U.S. military. Japanese defenders often fought from heavily fortified bunkers, tunnels, and caves that were difficult to destroy with conventional weapons. Flamethrowers could force defenders out of these positions or destroy them outright, making the weapon a critical tool in the island campaigns of the Pacific.
The Battle of Iwo Jima lasted from February 19 to March 26, 1945. Although Mount Suribachi was secured within the first week, the majority of the fighting occurred in the island’s northern sectors, where thousands of Japanese troops continued resisting from an elaborate underground defense network.
Flamethrower operators faced exceptionally high casualty rates. The fuel tanks they carried made them highly visible targets, and enemy soldiers often prioritized them for elimination. Despite the danger, Marines repeatedly credited flamethrower teams with helping reduce fortified positions that would otherwise have cost many more lives.
Added Fact: The U.S. military used approximately 6,500 flamethrowers in the Pacific Theater during World War II. On Iwo Jima alone, flamethrowers were so effective against cave defenses that some were mounted on specially modified Sherman tanks, known as “Zippo Tanks.” These armored flamethrowers could project burning fuel more than 100 yards and played a major role in overcoming Japan’s underground fortifications.
A living United States flag, formed by 10,000 Navy Sailors in Illinois, 1917
