(Warning: this article contains graphic historical photographs, including an execution, a burned child fleeing a napalm attack, a starving child and a man falling from the World Trade Center, and it mentions suicide.)
Some photographs become shorthand for an entire event. The eight pictures below are among the most famous of the last eighty years. Each has a story more complicated than the image suggests. Here is what each photograph shows, how it was made, and what we know about it today.
1945: two pictures of victory
Yevgeny Khaldei: Raising a Flag over the Reichstag
Yevgeny Khaldei, a photographer for the Soviet news agency TASS, had seen Joe Rosenthal's picture of US Marines raising the flag on Iwo Jima in early 1945 and wanted a Soviet equivalent. He persuaded his uncle to help make a large red flag, reportedly from tablecloths, and carried it to Berlin. On 2 May 1945, as the battle for the city ended, he climbed onto the Reichstag with a few soldiers he had recruited on the spot and shot a roll of film. Soldiers had actually raised flags on the building two nights earlier, in darkness, but no one had photographed it, so this was a staged re-enactment.
Before publication in the magazine Ogonyok on 13 May 1945, the image was retouched. An editor noticed that one soldier, Abdulkhakim Ismailov, appeared to wear a watch on each wrist, which could suggest looting, so Khaldei scratched one out of the negative (some later accounts say the second object was a compass). He also darkened the sky and added smoke from another frame to make the scene more dramatic. The identities of the men in the picture are still debated.
Alfred Eisenstaedt: V-J Day in Times Square
On 14 August 1945, crowds poured into Times Square in New York as news spread that Japan had surrendered. Alfred Eisenstaedt, a Life photographer, caught a sailor grabbing a woman in a white uniform and kissing her. The picture ran in Life on 27 August 1945 and became the defining image of the war's end in America.
Who the two people were has been argued over ever since. Edith Shain, a nurse, wrote to Eisenstaedt in 1980 saying she was the woman, and Glenn McDuffie claimed in 2007 to be the sailor; both stories were widely reported, and older versions of this article repeated them. A 2012 book, The Kissing Sailor by Lawrence Verria and George Galdorisi, used photo analysis and interviews to conclude that the couple were George Mendonsa and Greta Zimmer Friedman, a dental assistant. Most researchers now accept Friedman as the woman, though some still dispute the sailor's identity. Friedman later said she did not know the man and that the kiss was not her choice, which has changed how many people see the photograph.
Vietnam: the war on camera
(Warning: the next image shows the moment a prisoner is shot in the head.)
Eddie Adams: Saigon Execution, 1968
On 1 February 1968, in the first days of the Tet Offensive, Associated Press photographer Eddie Adams was in Saigon's Chợ Lớn district when South Vietnamese police chief Nguyễn Ngọc Loan raised a pistol and shot a captured Viet Cong fighter, Nguyễn Văn Lém (also recorded as Lê Công Nà), at point-blank range. Adams pressed the shutter at the same instant.
The photograph won the 1969 Pulitzer Prize for Spot News Photography and World Press Photo of the Year, and it became a symbol of the war's brutality for many Americans. Adams himself came to regret its effect on Loan, who had argued the prisoner had just been involved in killing civilians and police. Adams later said he had killed the general with my camera
, and he apologised to Loan's family. Loan moved to the United States after 1975, ran a restaurant in Virginia, and died in 1998.
(Warning: the next image shows badly burned, naked children fleeing a napalm attack.)
The Terror of War ("Napalm Girl"), 1972
On 8 June 1972, a South Vietnamese Air Force plane mistakenly dropped napalm on civilians and soldiers near the village of Trảng Bàng. Nine-year-old Phan Thị Kim Phúc tore off her burning clothes and ran down the road screaming, with other children around her. She suffered third-degree burns over roughly a third of her body. After the picture was taken she was driven to hospital, where she survived months of treatment.
The photograph won the 1973 Pulitzer Prize and World Press Photo of the Year and is one of the most powerful anti-war images ever published. Kim Phúc later studied in Cuba, and in 1992 she and her husband sought asylum in Canada during a refuelling stop in Gander, Newfoundland. She became a UNESCO Goodwill Ambassador in 1994, founded a charity for child victims of war in 1997, and her life story was told in Denise Chong's 1999 book The Girl in the Picture.
The picture has long been credited to AP photographer Nick Ut. In 2025 the documentary The Stringer argued that a freelance Vietnamese photographer may have taken it, and World Press Photo suspended its attribution to Ut. The Associated Press, after its own review, still credits Ut, and in March 2026 he filed a defamation suit in France against the film's makers, with a trial expected in 2027. The authorship dispute is unresolved; what happened to Kim Phúc that day is not in question.
1990: the photograph that changed the face of AIDS
Therese Frare: David Kirby on his deathbed
In 1990 Therese Frare was a graduate student at Ohio University volunteering at Pater Noster House, a hospice for people with AIDS in Ohio. There she photographed David Kirby, a 32-year-old gay activist who had come home to be with his family, in the final hours before his death on 5 May 1990. His father holds him as relatives gather around the bed. Kirby had agreed to be photographed because he wanted people to see what AIDS really did.
Life published the image in November 1990, describing it as the picture that changed the face of AIDS, and it took second prize in the World Press Photo general news category in 1991. In 1992 the Kirby family allowed the clothing brand Benetton to use a colourised version in an advertising campaign, a decision that drew heavy criticism, though the family reportedly felt it carried David's message to an even wider audience.
1993: famine in Sudan
(Warning: the next image shows a starving child collapsed on the ground.)
Kevin Carter: The Vulture and the Little Girl
In March 1993 South African photographer Kevin Carter, a member of the group of conflict photographers known as the Bang-Bang Club, flew to Ayod in southern Sudan (now South Sudan) with colleague João Silva to document a famine. Near a food distribution centre he photographed an emaciated child slumped on the ground with a vulture standing behind. The New York Times published the picture on 26 March 1993, and so many readers asked what had happened to the child that the paper printed a note saying it was not known.
The photograph won the 1994 Pulitzer Prize for Feature Photography, but Carter was also bitterly criticised for not doing more to help; the writer Susan Sontag later observed of distant viewers of such images that the rest of us are voyeurs, whether or not we mean to be
. Carter, who struggled with depression, debt and drug use and had recently lost his close friend Ken Oosterbroek, took his own life on 27 July 1994, aged 33. In 2011 the newspaper El Mundo reported that the child was a boy, Kong Nyong, who had survived the famine; his family said he died around 2007 of fevers.
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2001: The Falling Man
(Warning: the next image shows a man falling to his death on 11 September 2001.)
Richard Drew: The Falling Man
At 9:41:15 a.m. on 11 September 2001, AP photographer Richard Drew, standing near West and Vesey Streets, photographed a man falling headfirst from the North Tower of the World Trade Center. In the frame he looks almost composed, though Drew's full sequence shows him tumbling. The New York Times printed it on page seven the next day; readers protested, and the paper and most other US outlets avoided it for years. By some estimates, around 200 people fell or jumped from the towers that morning.
Who the man was has never been officially confirmed. Weeks after the attacks, Canadian journalist Peter Cheney suggested in The Globe and Mail that he might be Norberto Hernandez, a pastry chef at the Windows on the World restaurant, but Hernandez's family ultimately rejected that. In a 2003 Esquire article titled "The Falling Man", Tom Junod proposed Jonathan Briley, a sound engineer at the same restaurant, whose brother believed the clothes and build matched. Briley is widely considered the likeliest match, but it remains unproven.
2011: a kiss in the middle of a riot
Rich Lam: The Vancouver Riot Kiss
On 15 June 2011 the Boston Bruins beat the Vancouver Canucks 4-0 in Game 7 of the Stanley Cup Final, and parts of downtown Vancouver erupted into rioting. About 140 people were injured. Amid the chaos, local photographer Rich Lam, shooting for Getty Images, captured a young couple lying on the street, kissing, as riot police advanced behind them.
The image went viral within hours, and many people assumed it was staged. The couple were identified as Alexandra Thomas of Coquitlam, British Columbia, and her boyfriend Scott Jones, from Perth in Australia. They explained that police shields had knocked them to the ground, Thomas was upset and hurt, and Jones kissed her to calm her down; video posted online later supported their account. The couple were still together years later and raising a family.
What these photographs teach us
Seen together, these eight stories show how much a single frame leaves out:
- Staging and retouching are old. The Reichstag flag was re-enacted and altered by hand decades before digital editing existed.
- Identities get lost and contested. The Times Square couple, the Falling Man and even the photographer of Napalm Girl have all been disputed, sometimes for decades.
- The people in the picture live with it. Kim Phúc spent years trying to escape her image before turning it into a mission; Greta Friedman's account changed how a celebrated kiss is understood.
- Photographers carry a cost too. Eddie Adams regretted his most famous picture, and Kevin Carter's story is a reminder of the toll of witnessing suffering.
- The caption matters. Context, dates and names turn a striking image into reliable history. When you meet a famous photograph online, it is worth asking who took it, when, and what the people in it later said.
Sources: Wikipedia: Raising a Flag over the Reichstag; Wikipedia: Yevgeny Khaldei; Wikipedia: V-J Day in Times Square; Wikipedia: Saigon Execution; Wikipedia: The Terror of War; Wikipedia: Phan Thị Kim Phúc; Wikipedia: David Kirby; Wikipedia: The Vulture and the Little Girl; Wikipedia: The Falling Man; Wikipedia: 2011 Vancouver Stanley Cup riot. Photographs by Yevgeny Khaldei (TASS), Alfred Eisenstaedt (Life), Eddie Adams (AP), the AP (credited to Nick Ut), Therese Frare, Kevin Carter, Richard Drew (AP) and Rich Lam (Getty Images).
For a historical photographic collection with a clearly identified mission context, explore Inside the Project Apollo Archive’s Remarkable Photos.
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