6-year old Ruby Bridges walking to school.
This picture was always so powerful to me. I think I had that one famous illustrated storybook about Ruby Bridges.
Yury Gagarin and Gina Lollobrigida. First man into space and one of the most famous actresses back then.
Margaret Hamilton standing next to listings of the software that she and her MIT team produced for the Apollo Project.
Great post and I really enjoyed the replies. Mine is of Chavez visiting Castro in 2006 in Havanna, as Castro was dying of cancer. Both men were imprisoned for a failed coup but later rose to power (Chavez democratically and Castro by revolutionary liberation of the country), and both men died in a hospital bed in their respective countries in 2013.
This one always makes me melancholic:
Such a big turning point in time, captured on a photograph.
Is that Batman on a horse?
The Socialist Fraternal Kiss
OP’s photo is my favorite, so I will have to mention my second favorite (though calling it a “favorite” feels off).
This photo was taken in 2003 in Iraq. This man is comforting his son. They are being held in an American camp. IIRC to this day we don’t know what happened to these two.
I think if I had to explain the last 25 years to a time-traveler, this would be the one photo I would choose.
Malcolm X holding an M2, looking cool as hell
Bad trigger discipline though
this portrait of Frederick Douglass—an escaped slave who had become a lauded speaker, writer, and abolitionist agitator—is a striking exception. Northeastern Ohio was a center of abolitionism prior to the Civil War, and Douglass knew that this picture, one of an astonishing number that he commissioned or posed for, would be seen by ardent supporters of his campaign to end slavery. Douglass was an intelligent manager of his public image and likely guided Miller in projecting his intensity and sheer force of character. As a result, this portrait demonstrates that Douglass truly appeared “majestic in his wrath,” as the nineteenth-century feminist Elizabeth Cady Stanton observed.
Deepwater Horizon sinking in the Gulf of Mexico on April 22, 2010.
It caused an equivalent oil spill of 4.9 million barrels and exposed the surrounding wildlife to toxic materials, covering thousands of animals in oil. The cleanup efforts took years.
A prime example of humans messing up this planet for their own gains.
This one really affected me. It’s one of the first images from the surface of Mars. I was quite young, and it clicked in me that other planets actually exists and are out there in space.
Communists defeated fascism. We won 20th century. We will win 21st century.
100million have died in the name of communist utopia. But your saying…why stop there!
Seeing how things are now, I don’t think communists can take much more of this winning
The terror of war.
Nobody wins in war, and I hate how angry this photo makes me feel.
Nobody wins in war
The Vietnamese won, as a matter of fact, and liberated themselves from colonialism as a consequence
True, and admirable. But the cost of winning, even if losing isn’t an option, is still loss.
So many people lost.
Yeah but I’d shift the phrasing from “nobody wins from war” to “carpet bombing of civilians by an imperialist power is evil”
Yeah true. It’s fucking sick. Can’t really say it any other way.
Don’t forget napalm and defoliants.
The first photo of a black hole is the most historically significant “first photo of x” that happened in my life time and that I actually understood its historical significance when it came out. So I’d say that’s probably my favourite.
Not a photo.
It’s the output of an AI model trained on simulations of black holes being asked to fill in the gaps from sparse observations.
Someone: takes a selfie with their phone under low lighting conditions
You: "not a photo, it’s the output of an algorithm taking the luminosity from an array of light detectors, giving information of the colour and modifying it according to lighting conditions, and then using specific software to sharpen the original capture*
Its not hard to find that there are legitimate academic criticism of this ‘photo’. For example here. The comparison you made is not correct, more like I gave a blurry photo to an AI trained on paintings of Donald Trump and asked it to make an image of him. Even if the original image was not of Trump, the chances are the output will be because that’s all the model was trained on.
This is the trouble with using this as ‘proof’ that the. Theory and the simulations are correct, because while that is still likely, there is a feedback loop causing confirmation bias here, especially when people refer to this image as a ‘photo’.
It hasn’t happened yet. Not much longer though maybe 10 years at most.
