Most powerful images in history [content warning: distressing images]

[DebbieTheCat]

Marking 23 years since the collapse of the Twin Towers at the World Trade Centre in NYC.
This has some personal significance to us as now DH, then fiancé was due to fly out on the Friday before but couldn't due to not having the requisite number of months left on his passport by a matter of days...
Still feel queasy thinking about it 😥

There was a common myth around spontaneous human combustion. This picture was of an armchair (I remember a red one) in a 1960s style room with a charred "body" in and fur lined boot type slippers where there would have been the feet. It was from a time where Fortean Times and similar programmes were on the TV and in the printed press.

If you search for spontaneous human combustion there are images, they're fairly distressing.

I'm not sure how to post pics but if you Google "Death of Mary Reeser" it should come up re Spontaneous human combustion photo.

This one?

No. I've not seen that one before 😱It's a black and white photo with half a leg with the black slipper still attached.

I wasn't aware of the story surrounding Ruby Bridges. In such relatively recent history too. Thanks for posting. So shocking and sad. Also depressing to know that integration hasn’t ultimately been achieved in that school either, even after all those struggles.

It's the first one on Google, black and white with a foot and a walking frame

Another haunting but striking one is the "most beautiful suicide" which is the body of Evelyn McHale after she completed suicide by falling from a high rise in America.

This one then?

and I agree about the “beautiful suicide one” especially since it wasn’t supposed to be posted

Even more grim is that people buy posters of it as wall art.🙁

Yes

They do? Disgusting

God aren't humans an awful species. So much violence, terror, grief. And we never learn. We just carry on killing/destroying each other and subjecting children to terrible, untimely deaths. So we're also stupid to boot.

Not sure I feel much faith or empathy in the human race anymore.

An image I find powerful is the National Geographic picture of the whale approaching the diver on the sea bed.

It shows how far we have come and yet how fragile we are, and the world because of us.

I came on to say exactly this. The picture haunted me for ages afterwards. Sadly if you Google about this you will find hundreds of other photos of dead babies, abandoned and dead in gutters and rivers and elsewhere in China, some for being girls and others as a consequence of their "one child" policy.

Nature has found a way to deal with dumped glass, but is working on the plastic problem.

That's it 😱

5 year old Harold Whittles, who was born deaf, his little face captured at the actual moment he hears sound for the very first time...

An absolute tragedy 😓

This tragedy really affected the late Queen Elizabeth.
I had only come across and read this article a couple of weeks ago

Link -
www.bbc.co.uk/news/uk-wales-42101460

I remember reading... somewhere that they did take a photo the first time but the arms of the soviet soldiers were covered in (looted) watches so they re-did it for that reason. But that might not be true, because I cant even remember where I read it. Either way not the worst thing the USSR soldiers did.

That is true - the soldier at the front had 2 watches on his wrist

Lange’s Migrant Mother

This is what straight to my mind when I read the OP

George Floyd being pinned down pic

@OrwellianTimes there is a very moving book about Aberfan called A Terrible Kindness. It's worth reading as brings home the horror of the event and helplessness of the community.

Thanks, I’ll look that up, I’d never heard about Aberfan until I moved to wales (it happened before I was born)