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 😥

The Ethiopian famine

I was pregnant at the time of this image and found it unbearable to look at.

From my post at 21.09.

The little Sudanese girl who is emaciated and very thin, with a vulture hovering around waiting for her to day, is making me feel like crying.

I mean waiting for her to die sorry. (I didn't notice my error til it was too late.)

Omayra Sanchez. 13 years old and trapped in water after a volcanic eruption.

Haunts me.

Mushroom cloud image from the Nagasaki atomic bombing

9/11 brought a new evil to the world and because of that I would say the images from that day. Life has never been the same again.
In the same vein the photo of the Pan Am jet nose cone at Lockerbie preceded this. It is such an isolated little place and for that to happen. Images of bodies hanging off their roofs and still strapped to seats are shocking. Nature is bad but man is capable of so much worse.

Lockerbie

Starving children during the Biafra war in the late 1960s. Both TV and newspapers where in black and white in those days, but the pictures were heart-rending.

Flowers for Diana...

Really moving yet harrowing pictures. I agree with all of them, but will add (although not as shocking, but one which stayed with me)

• the shellshocked WW2 soldier (b&w image)
• the nurses arriving on Normandy beach after what is basically the opening scene of Saving Private Ryan (D-day landings)- they all look so smart, tidy and unphased - though I can imagine their fresh look didn't last long.
• I for some reason vividly remember Muammar Gadafi's dead body on the back of an open truck with all the civilians celebrating and cheering, all armed with guns. It was on the news and I remember thinking that none of this was going to end well- and it didn't.
• Any picture of children in Victorian slums - I just cannot fathom that people were just so poor!

The assassination of JFK

Photo's of the Romanian orphans in the early 90s, totally heartbreaking.

Oh little Aylan Kurdi - my eldest was his age and when I saw that photo of him washed up on the beach I had to leave work (I was also post partum and very hormonal).

I sobbed for a day. His little lifeless body absolutely broke me, my heart was sore for days thinking of his poor father and the loss of his older brother and mother too.

He was a baby trapped in the horror of war, his parents fleeing to give him a better life.

Aberfan. A whole coal slurry heap on top of a school.

Those poor kids paid with their lives for the incompetence of the government

Yes i thought of the photo of Aylan too, his little shoes still on. There was a second photo of a policeman carrying his body away, like a dad carrying his child. I'm welling up thinking of it.

I remember people saying the images were horrible and shouldn't be in the newspaper bur I felt that people should see so they wouldn't forget.

"Buzz Aldrin on the Moon in a photograph taken by Neil Armstrong, who can be seen in the visor reflection along with Earth,[1] the Lunar Module Eagle, and the U.S. flag"
~ taken from Wiki

A picture of a woman holding her baby, both naked, the second before they are shot by a Nazi soldier. I think she's standing at the edge of a pit of bodies. I saw this image as a young teen and remember realising what evil is.

Nelson Mandela walks free.

The painting of the bombing of Guernicka by Picasso

Some of the images from Hillsborough....I won't post them but they are just horrific

A Ukrainian woman lifting her child in a pushchair over a barrier to someone else in a queue of people about to leave the country when she wasn’t going

This is the one I was going to say. I saw it in an exhibition in Normandy, it will stay with me to the moment I die.

There was one of two parents sobbing on the beach after their kid had just been swept away. I think about it genuinely every time my children swim. Makes me so much more cautious than I would be (which is already quite cautious!)

The men trying to stop a woman running a marathon in Boston ... 1967 I think it was.

VJ day in time square - the kiss (though I guess there's a consent element to consider!)

That was terrible. Like something I learned in school not something I was witnessing live as an adult.

Fire Escape Collapse has always stayed with me. It's not directly political like some of these but it's a) and incredible photo and b) a statement about poverty and poor living conditions

Likewise also the line of Russian tanks approaching Kiev. Wasn't it 40miles long?