Sometimes a single photograph can tell you much more than all those dry paragraphs of historical references. These images will tell you better than books and lectures about those significant people or events you wish you knew more about. Images once taken for the sole purpose of documenting the present now help us to witness the past.
Harold Whittles first hearing, 1974.
Dorothy Counts became one of the first African American students at a white school, 1957. The photograph shows students at Charlotte’s Harry Harding High School teasing Dorothy.
First morning in Sweden after the change from left-handed to right-handed traffic, 1967.
West Berlin residents show their children to their grandparents who live on the east side, 1961.
Acrobats practising on the roof of the Empire State Building skyscraper, 1934.
Graves of a Catholic woman and her Protestant husband, Holland, 1888.
Austrian boy rejoicing over a new pair of boots, World War II.
A strip club dancer arrested in Florida shows a judge her underwear to prove that the panties sufficiently covered her intimate parts and she was not completely nude.
The hand with the ace of spades belongs to mob boss Joe Masseria, who was murdered in a Brooklyn restaurant in 1931.
A same-sex couple, Paris, 1932.
‘The Most Beautiful Suicide’ – 23-year-old Evelyn McHale jumped off the Empire State Building after breaking up with her fiancé. The girl fell from a height of 344 metres onto the roof of a limousine parked at the curb. 1947.
Bolaji Badejo is a 2.18 metre tall Nigerian student in an Alien costume, 1978. For Bolaji, this role was his first and last.
The remains of cosmonaut Vladimir Komarov after the descent vehicle crash of the first Soviet manned spacecraft, 1967.
A German child meets his father, a World War II soldier he last saw when he was one year old, 1956.
Frida Kahlo in men’s clothing, 1924.
Orote Peninsula, 1944 – a wounded dog receives medical attention.
A woman shows a photograph of her son to returning prisoners of war, 1947.
A Scottish piper in a kilt on the battlefield, World War I.
‘Mona Lisa’ being returned to the Louvre after World War II.
Rescued Titanic passengers board the Carpathia, 1912.
The first bananas in Norway, 1905.
Physicist Robert Williams Wood, the founder of quantum physics Max Planck and Albert Einstein sit in the front row at a meeting of the Berlin Physical Society, 1931.
A man carves the eye of one of the sculptures, Mount Rushmore, 1930s.
Footage of the legendary film scene with Marilyn Monroe, The Itch of the Seventh Year, 1954.
Bob Dylan and Keith Richards at Mick Jagger’s 29th birthday party, 1972.
Last public execution by guillotine, France, 1939.
Soviet soldiers’ inscriptions inside the Reichstag, 1945.
Nazis select Hungarian Jews for Auschwitz, 1944.
The last photo of Vladimir Lenin – he had already suffered three strokes and could not speak, 1923.
Eduard Bloch, a Jew and Hitler’s personal physician until 1907, was under his special protection. Hitler himself referred to Bloch as a ‘noble Jew’.
Jenny McGregor arrested for distributing alcoholic beverages, Minneapolis, 1924.
The crew of the Japanese aircraft carrier Zuikaku salutes the lowered flag before the ship’s sinking, 1944.
An American punches a Vietnamese man in the face as he fights for a seat in the last helicopter to leave the U.S. Embassy during the evacuation in Saigon, 1975.
A young Hitler greets the news of the outbreak of World War I, 1914.
