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 😥

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Christ. I had no idea about this. That's sickening. I can't comprehend what goes on inside the minds of the people (mainly men?) who decide and enforce something so barbaric.

Saffiyah Khan

I used to teach media studies and I used to use this picture as the basis for a class. I'd show snippets of the image and get students to use their imagination to write a paragraph about what might be happening in the image snippet. Then I'd show the whole photo and open the floor for discussion. It was always a really powerful and moving class.
Somehow I'd totally forgotten about that image.

Edited to add link.

I’ve seen this photo many times and you’re right it’s extremely powerful.

No child should be forced to live with that sort of hate. They aren’t born with it. They are taught it

I used to show a snippet of the image which had the child's face in the middle, half the hat at the top of the picture and then the child's chest at the bottom. So many students would write about the child being dressed up for a birthday party which was a gut-punch contrast to what was actually going on.

needingadviceandthoughts · Today 09:08

It was just an observation that it was scarcely "a new evil in the world." So many people seem to think that September the 11th was the worst thing ever, when in terms of casualties, it barely registers, compared to other events.

That's not to minimise the victims and their families.

Images from the 2004 Tsunami https://www.theatlantic.com/photo/2014/12/ten-years-since-the-2004-indian-ocean-tsunami/100878/

Sycamore Gap tree after it had been chopped down.

King Leopold's Ghost is a brilliant book about the Belgian Congo. It is utterly horrifying

As soon as I saw this thread I thought of the Hillsborough disaster where so many people were crushed to death at a football match. Still haunts me as I remember watching it all unfold on TV. The photos in the press the next day were horrific. I still remember a young woman whose hand was gripping the high fence as she was crushed and she had beautiful long fingernails.

I actually can't bring myself to post a photo just in case anyone who lost a family member there sees it but there are images on Google. So terrible.

People asking that is a large part of what resulted in him committing suicide.

Personally I’d have picked the kid up, but it was a different time and era. Workers were warned of kids carrying diseases. Who knows.

Yes I remember seeing pictures of this years ago on Google when I looked into the Hillsborough disaster. I remember seeing pictures of people pushed right up against the blue wired fence and wish I hadn't seen that. Those poor people.

Also after 9-11 I saw pictures of people jumping and someone taking pictures when they landed, just awful. Makes me weep what our species has done to one another.

I worked in fireproof (non combustible) cladding at the time. We’d been long campaigning. I’ll never forget sitting there in horror knowing instantly the wrong materials had been used and that all of it could have been prevented.

That's a whole part of history that I'm totally ignorant of. I need to do some reading.

For me, many that have been mentioned already but more recently

Eden Yerushalmi. Her face has haunted me

And the poor man in Lviv whose wife and three daughters were slaughtered by russian savages.

The photo of him staring at the rubble moved me to tears

The horses in Hyde Park.
The priest on Bloody Sunday.
The man holding his dead daughter's hand in the aftermath of the earthquake in Eastern Turkey in 2023.

Manic street Preachers had a song in the charts about the story. Kevin Carter

Yeah they also had one called Orwellian.

Continuing with the racism and ignorance theme, there are also the photos of the black American girl who shields a white supremacist

https://www.google.com/amp/s/www.bbc.com/news/magazine-24653643.amp

Also if we are talking about the Manics one thing I’ll never get out of my memory is seeing them playing a Design for Life live - the videos behind it were of miners riots.

One of the videos is of policemen on horseback trampling miners protesting to keep their jobs. The battle of Orgreave I believe. Same police force was brought down that were involved in Hillsborough.

Battle of Orgreave (Welsh miners striking)

That's not the one I was thinking of.

It was this one.

I read an article on this and it said that they were told at the time not to touch any locals to stop disease spreading. The child who many thought was a girl was a little boy and his parents were close by queuing up to get food. He did survive.

@Ineedwinenow @newrubylane have you seen the film Zone of Interest? No images shown but lots of sounds about living next to the camps and the banality of evil. One of the final scenes shows all the footwear collected at Austwitz - so harrowing.

Today's photo of the first commercial spacewalk