Pictures that say a thousand words
 

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Starving Child Vulture

One photograph that has helped awaken the world about the effects of poverty in Africa is the one above showing a Sudanese child being stalked by a vulture nearby. It is quite obvious that the child was starving to death, while the vulture was patiently waiting for the toddler to die so he can have a good meal.

Nobody knows what happened to the child, who crawled his way to a United Nations food camp. Photographer Kevin Carter won a Pulitzer Prize for this shocking picture, but he eventually committed suicide three months after he took the shot.


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Tiananmen Square 1989 A hunger strike by 3,000 students in Beijing had grown to a protest of more than a million as the injustices of a nation cried for reform. For seven weeks the people and the People’s Republic, in the person of soldiers dispatched by a riven Communist Party, warily eyed each other as the world waited. When this young man simply would not move, standing with his meager bags before a line of tanks, a hero was born. A second hero emerged as the tank driver refused to crush the man, and instead drove his killing machine around him. Soon this dream would end, and blood would fill Tiananmen. But this picture had shown a billion Chinese that there is hope.


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9/11 Attacks

In the morning September 11, 2001, two hijacked passenger jets crashed into the Twin Towers of the World Trade Center in New York City. This was no accident, but rather a series of attacks done by suicide bombers engaged with the Al-Qaeda terrorist group.

The attacks killed all the passengers on board the hijacked planes, and took away 2,974 innocent lives at the World Trade Center. More than 90 countries lost citizens in the attack, and the stock market was closed for a week. In response to the attacks, the United States government declared a War on Terror, while many other nations strengthened their law enforcement powers to fight terrorism. However, the suicide attacks done by the Al Qaeda terrorists have forever marked a sense of fear not just in America, but in the whole world.


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Che Guevara
Photograph of Che Guevara was taken on March 5, 1960 by Alberto Korda at a funeral service for victims of the La Coubre explosion, it was published seven years later. Che Guevara was 31 at the time of the photo.


I did not write these descriptions. Posts limit you to 4 pictures so this is just skimming the surface of what's out there. Feel free to add your contributions.

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The First Photograph
Known as the World’s First Photograph but actually this is the earliest surviving photograph, c. 1826. It required an eight-hour exposure, which resulted in sunlight on both sides of the buildings.

It represents the view of the courtyard of Niépce’s house at Gras, France, taken from the window of his workroom. On the left side of the image is the pigeon-house (an upper loft in the Niépce family house), to the right of it is a pear-tree with a patch of sky showing through an opening in the branches. In the center of the image is the slanting roof of the barn; the long building behind it is the bake house, with chimney. On the right side of the image is another wing of the house.


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Omayra Sánchez [1985]

Red Cross rescue workers had apparently repeatedly appealed to the government for a pump to lower the water level and for other help to free the girl. Finally rescuers gave up and spent their remaining time with her, comforting her and praying with her. She died of exposure after about 60 hours.


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U.S. Marines raising the flag on Iwo Jima [1945]

Raising the Flag on Iwo Jima is a historic photograph taken on February 23, 1945, by Joe Rosenthal. It depicts five United States Marines and a U.S. Navy corpsman raising the flag of the United States atop Mount Suribachi during the Battle of Iwo Jima in World War II.

The photograph was extremely popular, being reprinted in thousands of publications. Later, it became the only photograph to win the Pulitzer Prize for Photography in the same year as its publication, and ultimately came to be regarded as one of the most significant and recognizable images of the war, and possibly the most reproduced photograph of all times.


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Burning Monk

As a protest to the Di?m slow and unreliable reforms in Vietnam, the Buddhist monks have resorted to immolation, such as this Mahayana Buddhist monk, Th?ch Qu?ng Ð?c. Ð?c burned himself alive across the outskirts of Saigon, mainly because of the harshness done by the South Vietnam government to his fellow Buddhist monks.

Ð?c was re-cremated after he burned himself; his heart meanwhile remained in one piece, and because of this he was regarded as a Bodhisattva by the other Buddhist monks and followers. His act of self-immolation increased the pressure on the Di?m administration to implement their reform laws in South Vietnam.

More monks followed Ð?c’s footsteps as well, and later on in November 1963, Di?m was killed by an army coup.

This is one of my favourite pictures/ videos of all time. It really moves me in a way that I cannot really describe... that this one man halted these huge tanks, even if it were only for a fleeting moment, and showed that there is hope and you can resist.

Video footage:

Wow. I'd seen that pic before of course, but watching the video was even more powerful. Watching that guy get up on the tank...yelling inside to the driver gave me chills. Jeez...

Um, regarding Che......

^link's not working bud

Not so much a pinnacle point in history, but a very emotional and powerful picture nonetheless.

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It shows Miklós Fehér on the field right after he had suffered a heart attack and died.

If it's some loony conspiracy theory about how Che did this or that, I'm not interested. I posted that pic because it's the most reproduced photograph in history and because he was one of the great visionary revolutionaries of the 20th century.

Okay, I understand why you posted it. And it was a great post. Che was still a murderer.