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Alexander Gardner (photographer)
Born
The Dead of Antietam, 1862
Alexander Gardner and his assistant James Gibson photographed the bodies still lying on the field after Antietam, and the pictures went on show at Mathew Brady's gallery in New York that October, where they drew crowds. The New York Times wrote that Brady had brought home the terrible reality and earnestness of war. Press shorthand credited the series to Brady, whose name was on the gallery, though Gardner and Gibson made the exposures. The pictures belong here as the first photographs of American battlefield dead to go on public show, putting the war's cost in front of people who had only read about it.
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William Henry Jackson
Born
The Yellowstone survey photographs, 1871
Few photographs have a clearer route to a law. William Henry Jackson travelled with Ferdinand Hayden's federal survey of the Yellowstone region in 1871, and Hayden then lobbied members of Congress with an album of Jackson's pictures. The act creating Yellowstone National Park was signed on 1 March 1872. Jackson's photographs worked alongside Thomas Moran's paintings, and historians differ on how much weight the pictures carried, so the fair claim is that they helped persuade lawmakers that the place was real and worth keeping, not that they did it alone.
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Jacob Riis
Born
How the Other Half Lives, 1890
Jacob Riis took a camera into the tenements of Lower Manhattan, and his 1890 book How the Other Half Lives was illustrated chiefly from his own photographs, Bandit's Roost in Mulberry Bend being the best known. The clearest documented effect came through Theodore Roosevelt: as New York police commissioner he closed the police lodging houses the book exposed, and Riis was active in bringing about tenement and anti-child labour laws. Accounts differ on how directly the book moved Roosevelt, but it made slum conditions hard for comfortable New Yorkers to ignore.
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Lewis Hine
Born
Child labour photographs
Lewis Hine photographed working children in mills, mines, fields and factories, and his pictures were put to work as evidence rather than sentiment. They provided evidence to support legislation limiting child labour, and, influenced in part by them, Congress passed the Keating-Owen Act in 1916, the first federal attempt to regulate it, though the Supreme Court struck the act down two years later. That route from camera to statute makes them a model for photography used as documentation, and the faces in them still carry the argument better than any statistic.
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Dorothea Lange
Born
Migrant Mother, 1936
Dorothea Lange's portrait of a mother and her children at a pea pickers' camp in Nipomo, California, became the face of the Depression. Federal authorities sent food to the camp after the pictures ran, commonly reported at around 20,000 pounds. The family had already left by then; her son Troy Owens later said they were long gone from Nipomo by the time any food was sent. Lange never asked the woman's name, and she stayed anonymous for more than 40 years until she was identified in 1978 as Florence Owens Thompson, who resented the picture. It earns its place both for what it achieved and for the questions of consent it raises.
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Joe Rosenthal
Born
Raising the Flag on Iwo Jima, 1945
Joe Rosenthal's picture shows the second flag raised on Mount Suribachi, a larger one brought up after Marines had planted a smaller flag earlier that day. It became the picture through which Americans saw the Pacific war, and its history shows how a famous image collects myths. Rosenthal also took a posed group shot under the flag, and when later asked whether he had staged his photograph he thought the question meant that one and said yes, which fed decades of suspicion. Marine cameraman Bill Genaust's film of the raising helped show the famous frame was not staged. Even the men in it have been revised: the Marine Corps has corrected two of the identifications, in 2016 and again in 2019.
More about Joe Rosenthal7
Emmett Till
Born
The open-casket photographs in Jet, 1955
This influence began with a decision, not a photographer. Mamie Till-Mobley insisted on an open casket for her 14-year-old son so that people could see what had been done to him, and Jet published David Jackson's photographs of his face in its 15 September 1955 issue. The pictures ran in Black publications, not the mainstream white press, and that audience is where their effect is documented: Rosa Parks and John Lewis both spoke of the pictures, and historians credit them with helping to start the modern civil rights movement. Jet was not quite first; another Black magazine had already printed a photograph of the body.
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Malcolm Browne
Born
The Burning Monk, 1963
On 11 June 1963 the Buddhist monk Thich Quang Duc set himself on fire in a Saigon street in protest at the South Vietnamese government of Ngo Dinh Diem, and the Associated Press correspondent Malcolm Browne photographed it. The picture put the Buddhist crisis on front pages around the world and won the World Press Photo of the Year; President Kennedy reportedly exclaimed on seeing it. What it changed is genuinely disputed. Some accounts say it pushed Washington to reassess its support for Diem; others note that neither Kennedy nor Johnson rethought American involvement in Vietnam because of it. Its certain effect was on how the world saw the Diem government.
More about Malcolm Browne9
Bill Hudson (photographer)
Police dog attack in Birmingham, 1963
On 3 May 1963 the Associated Press photographer Bill Hudson caught a police officer holding a Black teenager by his sweater while a German shepherd lunged at him during the Birmingham campaign. The next morning it ran above the fold across three columns of The New York Times front page. President Kennedy reportedly said the picture made him sick, and spoke of scenes reported more eloquently by the news camera than by any number of words. The details are less settled than the image: the boy is usually named as Walter Gadsden, his age is given as 15 or 17, and some have argued he was bracing his knee against the dog rather than standing passive.
More about Bill Hudson (photographer)10
Eddie Adams (photographer)
Born
Saigon Execution, 1968
During the Tet Offensive, Eddie Adams of the Associated Press photographed South Vietnam's national police chief, Nguyen Ngoc Loan, shooting a handcuffed Viet Cong prisoner, Nguyen Van Lem, in a Saigon street on 1 February 1968. It won the 1969 Pulitzer Prize and helped galvanise the anti-war movement in the United States. It is here as much for its afterlife as its impact. Adams came to regret it, believing the single frame could never explain the circumstances and had ruined Loan's life; in a 1998 eulogy he wrote that two people died in that photograph. Anyone judging the power of a news picture should know both halves of this story.
More about Eddie Adams (photographer)11
William Anders
Born
Earthrise, 1968
The only photograph here taken from beyond the Earth. Bill Anders took it from lunar orbit on Christmas Eve 1968 during Apollo 8, on the spur of the moment rather than as a planned shot. Seeing the whole planet small and alone above the Moon's horizon gave the young environmental movement an emblem, and it is widely credited with helping build the momentum that led to the first Earth Day on 22 April 1970. The photographer Galen Rowell called it the most influential environmental photograph ever taken. Influence here is a matter of mood rather than a single law, so "helped spark" is the honest verb.
More about William Anders12
John Filo
Born
Kent State, 1970
John Filo was a photojournalism student when Ohio National Guardsmen fired on protesters at Kent State University on 4 May 1970. His picture of Mary Ann Vecchio kneeling and crying out over the body of the student Jeffrey Miller became the image by which the shootings were remembered, and it won the 1971 Pulitzer Prize. Two details matter for anyone who uses it. Vecchio was not a student but a 14-year-old runaway from Florida passing through the campus. And a widely published version had a fence post above her head removed in the darkroom, an early, much-discussed case of a news picture altered after the fact.
More about John Filo13
Phan Thi Kim Phuc
Born
The Terror of War, 1972
The picture of the young Kim Phuc running naked down a road after a napalm strike near Trang Bang on 8 June 1972 is the Vietnam War's best-known photograph, and it won a Pulitzer Prize. For half a century it was credited to the AP photographer Nick Ut. That credit is now contested: the 2025 documentary The Stringer argues that a local freelancer, Nguyen Thanh Nghe, took it, and World Press Photo has suspended its attribution to Ut, while AP has stood by its credit. The question is unresolved, which is why this entry is linked to the girl in the picture rather than to either man.
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Tank Man
Tank Man, Beijing, 1989
The day after the crackdown in Tiananmen Square, a lone man stood in front of a column of tanks, and several photographers on hotel balconies caught him. Jeff Widener's frame for the Associated Press was the one used most widely, on front pages around the world; Stuart Franklin's wider view for Time and Charlie Cole's for Newsweek survived only because their film was hidden or smuggled out. The man's identity and fate remain unknown. Its influence runs in two directions: abroad it became the emblem of the protests, while inside China the image is censored, so far that a camera brand's name was blocked on Weibo after an advertisement alluded to it.
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Abu Ghraib torture and prisoner abuse
The Abu Ghraib photographs, 2004
Unlike every other picture here, these were taken by the perpetrators: American soldiers photographed their own abuse of Iraqi prisoners. Reports of abuse had surfaced in January, but the public did not see it until CBS's 60 Minutes II broadcast the pictures on 28 April 2004, among them a prisoner draped in a cloak with wires attached to his hands. The images shocked the American public and badly tarnished the Bush administration and its war, and in the weeks that followed polls found a majority saying the United States should leave Iraq, up from April. How much of that shift the photographs caused, rather than a war already going badly, is still argued over.
More about Abu Ghraib torture and prisoner abuse16
Death of Alan Kurdi
Alan Kurdi, 2015
The photograph of a Syrian toddler, usually reported as three years old, found drowned on a Turkish beach in September 2015 is the one entry whose effect was measured almost day by day. A study led by Paul Slovic found that the average daily amount given to the Swedish Red Cross fund for Syrian refugees was 55 times higher in the week after the picture than the week before, and searches for Syria and refugees spiked. The same research found that the new empathy faded quickly, with giving back to normal within about a year, after a war that had already killed around 250,000 people had failed to move donors. It is the clearest evidence here of both the power and the limits of a single image.
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