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 😥

Why couldn’t the photographer take the pic of the child and vulture and then help?

If you've ever been to the twin towers museum the pictures of people jumping out the offices.

The rest I feel I have become really numb too as the news is so graphic and was during my childhood ( famine, war) in Ukraine on BBC the reporter walking around the dead bodies of Russian soldiers just boys of 19,20. They are someone's kids, all the hopes and dream left in the street to rot. That's when I stopped watching the news.

I do wonder how much further we will go? They show up the second before someone is shot or kicked to death. Do you need to see that? Again I wasn't shocked to see that politician seconds before he shot, or him being dragged away by security, or his blood on the pavement. Nothings off limits. There's no dignity for these victims. That's what upsets me. Total lack of dignity

The aftermath of the Dresden fire bombing in WWII

https://www.theguardian.com/world/2013/aug/09/martin-luther-king-dream-speech-history

What could they do, realistically? It was a brutal famine, one of the worst in history, if you help one you have to help them all. Journalists are also in a precarious position of having to be neutral observers especially in times of war. If an American journalist helps them that can be seen as America helping. It's horrible.

The babies in the incubator in Gaza. Then when they went back during the ceasefire and found them dead and rotting. I won’t post that picture but you can read it in news articles.

The kidnapping of Naama Levy. Lots of terrible images from October 7 but this one stayed with me most.

https://www.aljazeera.com/news/longform/2024/4/18/satellite-images-reveal-israeli-destruction-of-hospitals-in-gaza

Gaza hospitals - before and after

I always feel sad when I see the happy photo of Gwen Mayor and her class at Dunblane - as you just know what horrors unfolded later.

From this distant vantage point, the Earth might not seem of any particular interest. But for us, it's different. Consider again that dot. That's here. That's home. That's us. On it everyone you love, everyone you know, everyone you ever heard of, every human being who ever was, lived out their lives. The aggregate of our joy and suffering, thousands of confident religions, ideologies, and economic doctrines, every hunter and forager, every hero and coward, every creator and destroyer of civilization, every king and peasant, every young couple in love, every mother and father, hopeful child, inventor and explorer, every teacher of morals, every corrupt politician, every "superstar," every "supreme leader," every saint and sinner in the history of our species lived there – on a mote of dust suspended in a sunbeam.

Cpl David Howes and Cpl Derek Woods lying in the road after being dragged from their car in Belfast by the IRA, they were kicked almost to death before being taken away to be shot and dumped. Their names will be remembered but the names of those that killed them will lie in the mud forever.

Another one; Patrick Ireland being rescued out of a library window after he had been badly injured in the Columbine school shooting. I was in my late teens at the time so a similar age to the kids involved and it was really my first awareness of school shootings in America.

Why on earth couldn't he do both?

Sometimes they're too late. Kurdish victims of Sadam Hussein's gas attack on their city.

I'm not sure of the circumstances around the Kevin Carter photo, but Nick Ut, the Associated Press photographer who took the picture of Phan Thi Kim Phuc immediately took her and the other injured children to hospital. Unsurprisingly, she wasn't expected to live, but she did.

What exactly was he supposed to do? There were starving children everywhere, and he was there under supervision of rebel soldiers.

the Photo of Emmett Till in his casket.

i cannot adequately put into words what I felt when I first saw it and read what had happened to him, nor the words to accurately reflect the courage and bravery of his Mother’s decision (Mamie Elizabeth Till-Mobley) to have an open casket because, in her words, "I wanted the world to see what they did to my baby."

The Baltic way. So many people, families, women and men. All peaceful, quiet, united in a line of more than 600 km

Thanks for posting this. I'd never heard of Emmett Till until you posted so thank you - shocking but very educational. Thank you.

There's a good film about him, it will probably be on a streaming channel

He was able to help. He just choose not to.

🤣🤣

Yes, this picture stayed with me too.

If anyone here knows the name of the man in the picture can they private message me please?