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 😥

I think to say that Kevin Carter killed himself because of the guilt of leaving the child is very simplistic. I read the book 'The Bang Bang Club' and he was a very damaged drug addicted man who'd lost his best friend (another South African photographer) in a shooting incident.

A lot of the photos in the book are horrific and all the photographers must have been traumatised. I think the photo probably did ruin his life because all anyone wanted to talk about was that photo and why he did what he did and he felt he could not live up to people's expectations of him as a photographer. It was all a bit sad really.

I haven’t no, that sounds like something I should watch, thank you! I studied the war and the propaganda behind it, I’ve seen a lot of video footage, books , eye witnesses accounts but the photos for me are as I mentioned in my post, those gates and tracks are where suffering started and where hope ended, all wars ( past and present) show the worst of humanity and what we are capable of

The Bradford football fire. I remember watching on tv and seeing a tiny orange glow in the stand. The commentator saying something like “oh, what’s that?” And the next minute an inferno ☹️ it was so shocking.

I have a wonderful photo of.my 10 month old daughter waving a GB flag as we watched the Olympics in 2012. It was the happiest year of my life and was taken the day I handed in my notice to stay home with her for another couple of years. I was so full of hope and positivity for her and the future, that 2012 summer was wonderful for me. The love is totally still there but the naivete of both me and her has so totally gone; looking at it is bittersweet.

I also want to add, on a far lighter note, the photo of Beyonce in Vogue when announcing her pregnancy. Iconic, ridiculous, beautiful, powerful and joyful all at once.👑

@Ineedwinenow it's on Prime. I watched it the other night and it has stayed with me. I recommend everyone watch this, a holocaust film like no other I've watched. It's all filmed from the perspective of family living next to the camp. So ordinary and yet so callous.

yes. There was footage of people on fire running onto the pitch that was not shown. The Kings Cross fire was a couple of years later, for many years I thought about it when I used escalators on the tube.

They were both started by dropped cigarettes/matches igniting accumulations of rubbish I believe.

https://commons.m.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:C-17_carrying_passengers_out_of_Afghanistan.jpg#mw-jump-to-license

No, that's not the photo I saw. I won't post it here.

That’s one of the most awful things I’ve ever seen. I can’t imagine how that poor mother must have felt.

That is extraordinary, I've never seen that before.

From the train, not for it! They wouldn't do that would they! Sorry!

Margaret Thatcher said that for her this picture crystallised the horror of the Holocaust and although I disagreed with pretty much everything she said and did otherwise, I don't here.

Felix Baumgartner

Ruby Bridges: the six-year-old who defied a mob and desegregated her school
In 1960, she walked past hateful protesters to become the first Black child at a Louisiana school – and was then taught alone for a year.

~ The Guardian

I made the mistake of looking at the man in the drain photo and it has haunted me since ...

I’ve actually seen the picture people behind the baracades as the girl was coming out. The look of fury and hatred on their faces is shocking

Elizabeth II lying in state:

Here you go. How crap are they though. To throw so much hatred on a little girl

Thanks @Soubriquet
I was just reading the full article but got pulled away doing something else.
Here's the extract which ties in with the image you posted, which I've never seen before

Awaiting her at the school gates was a phalanx of rabidly hostile protesters, mostly white parents and children, plus photographers and reporters. They yelled names and racial slurs, chanted, and waved placards. One sign read: “All I want for Christmas is a clean white school.” One woman held up a miniature coffin with a black doll in it.

Link -www.theguardian.com/society/2021/may/06/ruby-bridges-the-six-year-old-who-defied-a-mob-and-desegregated-her-school

Not as heartbreaking as others mentioned but I always thought this was pretty iconic!
images.app.goo.gl/BVRwrhT8PgrjFSyc6

I hadn't seen the Kevin Carter photograph before. It is truly impactful.

A quick google tells you this:

Carter shot an image of a child who appeared to be a little girl, fallen to the ground from hunger, while a vulture lurked on the ground nearby. He told Silva he was shocked by the situation he had just photographed, and had chased the vulture away.

And this:

Sold to The New York Timess^, the photograph first appeared on 26 March 1993, and syndicated worldwide. Hundreds of people contacted the newspaper to ask the fate of the girl. The paper said that according to Carter, "she recovered enough to resume her trek after the vulture was chased away" but that it was unknown whether she reached the UN food center.[14] In April 1994, the photograph won the Pulitzer Prize for Feature Photography.[15][16]
In 2011, the child's father revealed the child was actually a boy, Kong Nyong, and had been taken care of by the UN food aid station. Nyong had died four years prior, c. 2007, of "fevers", according to his family.[17]

and this:

I'm really, really sorry. The pain of life overrides the joy to the point that joy does not exist. …depressed … without phone … money for rent … money for child support … money for debts … money!!! … I am haunted by the vivid memories of killings & corpses & anger & pain … of starving or wounded children, of trigger-happy madmen, often police, of killer executioners … I have gone to join Ken if I am that lucky.
— Kevin Carter, [Suicide letter]

The final line is a reference to his recently deceased colleague Ken Oosterbroek.[23]

There's no need to spread false information/your interpretation of what happened/what someone told you. Fact check!

https://www.theguardian.com/world/2020/jun/14/blm-supporter-speaks-out-after-carrying-counter-protester-to-safety

The photograph of the parents of Emmett Till standing by his open coffin after he had been brutally attacked and murdered by white people.

The mortician suggested a closed casket but the parents said that they wanted people to see what had happened to their son, so they left his body untouched and not made up.
Until that point I don't believe that anyone had actually seen the aftermath of a lynching or the brutality of the race riots.

Add to that the supposed reason he was lynched was on the word of a white woman who, it was later learned, lied about it. He was entirely innocent. She, managed to live until she was in her late 80's but she made the allegation up and that poor innocent child was brutally murdered because of it.

All I can think of when I watch that footage is the sound of all of the sirens, all of the first responders who ran towards danger and ended up losing their lives. So many sirens.

What is the slipper photo people keep mentioning? Google reveals nothing!