The famous mantra goes; ‘a picture is worth a thousand words’.
Over the past century, photography has emerged as perhaps the most accessible and influential art form, allowing us to bear witness to some of our planet’s most formative moments in recent time.
Whether it be the the scenes of devastation on 9/11 or the aftermath of nuclear fallout in Vietnam, many of us are able to instantly recognise the most iconic and controversial photographs ever taken.
But what do we know of the person looking through the lens at the time and their motives – or even the subjects themselves?
Whatever happened to the sailor pictured kissing a stranger on V-J Day in Times Square, or the photographer who captured a vulture as it waited for a starving child to die?
Here, MailOnline takes a look into the history and circumstance that led to the capturing of the most iconic images of the past 100 years.
Starving Child and Vulture, Kevin Carter (1993). Mr Carter took this controversial photograph of a starving toddler in Sudan and the image sparked an international debate regarding the role of photographers and intervention
The story of Carter’s photograph is considered among the most tragic and controversial in the history of Pulitzer Prize winners.
While documenting the famine of 1993 in Sudan, Carter was walking through the bush when he heard whimpering. He came across a starving toddler, who had collapsed in a heap while walking to a feeding centre.
As the photographer took his photos, a vulture landed behind the child, resulting in this iconic photo. Instructed not to touch people due to potential diseases, he anxiously waited for 20 minutes in the hope that the vulture would fly off.
His instincts not to interfere were finally beaten as he scared the bird off, before watching on as the toddler crawled on.
The image was published in the New York Times and would lead to international debate surrounding the role of photographers and intervention.
It would go on to win the Pulitzer Prize, but Carter struggled to cope. In July 1994, a year after taking the image, he took his own life. He wrote: ‘I am haunted by the vivid memories of killings and corpses and danger and pain’.
Pulitzer Prize-winning snapper Nick Ut was just 21 when he took this heart-breaking photograph.
He had just finished photographing four planes flying low to drop napalm over the village of Trang Bang on June 8, 1972, when he saw a terrified group of men, women and children running for their lives from a pagoda.
Among them was nine-year-old Phan Thi Kim Phuc, whose clothes had been burned away by the flammable liquid.
After getting that perfectly framed photo, he set aside his camera, gave the badly burned girl water, poured more on her wounds, then loaded her and others into his van to take them to a hospital.
When doctors refused to admit her, saying she was too badly burned to be saved, he angrily flashed his press pass. The next day, he told them, pictures of her would be displayed all over the world, along with an explanation of how the hospital refused to help.
Now a 53-year-old wife and mother-of-two who lives in Canada, Ms Phuc remains Mr Ut’s close friend. ‘That picture changed my life. It changed Kim’s life,’ he said.
‘I cried when I saw her running. If I don’t help her – if something happened and she died – I think I’d kill myself after that.’
The Falling Man, Richard Drew (2001). The moment a man was seen falling from the north tower of New York’s World Trade Center was captured on camera by Mr Drew. His photograph stood out among others due to the supposed stillness and serenity of his descent, as if the jumper had made peace with his fate
Almost all of them jumped alone, although eyewitnesses talked of a couple who held hands as they fell. One woman, in a final act of modesty, appeared to be holding down her skirt.
Others tried to make parachutes out of curtains or tablecloths, only to have them wrenched from their grip by the force of their descent.
The fall was said to take about ten seconds. It would vary according to the body position and how long it took to reach terminal velocity — around 125mph in most cases, but if someone fell head down with their body straight, as if in a dive, it could be 200mph.
Nothing more graphically spells out the horror of the 9/11 attacks on the Twin Towers than the grainy pictures of those poor souls frozen in mid-air as they fell to their deaths, tumbling in all manner of positions, after choosing to escape the suffocating smoke and dust, the flames and the steel-bending heat in the highest floors of the World Trade Centre.
And yet, tragically, they are in many ways the forgotten victims of September 11. Even now, nobody knows for certain who they were or exactly how many they numbered.
Among them is ‘the falling man’, whose photograph stood out among others due to the supposed stillness and serenity of his descent, as if the jumper had made peace with his fate.
However the set of images taken by Richard Drew show the man flailing through the air, just like any other who fell to their deaths that day.
His identity is still unknown, with the best guess being that he was an employee of the Windows on the World restaurant at the top of the North Tower.
His lack of a name only adds to the haunting nature of the image. Journalist Tom Junod, who embarked on a desperate search for his identity, said: ‘The falling man is falling through more than the blank blue sky; he is falling through the vast spaces of memory and picking up speed.’
Perhaps the most famous and reproduced image of the 20th century was taken in Times Square, New York City on the day that the Second World War ended on August 14.
LIFE snapper Alfred Eisenstaedt had been sent out by his editor on a mission to capture a moment that perfectly represented the national mood of joy and relief. As he wandered around the city he saw thousands of people celebrating the news of Japan’s surrender.
George Mendonsa, 22, was on leave from the USS The Sullivans, where he watched nurses care for wounded sailors in the Pacific.
Mr Mendonsa had been on a date with his future wife, Rita, when upon leaving the cinema he heard people screaming in the street that the war was over.
After setting his eyes on Greta Zimmer Friedman, a dentist hygienist, he grabbed her and gave her a kiss right in front of a primed Eisenstaedt.
LIFE launched a bid in 1980 to identify the couple, and a flood of war veterans and nurses came forward to claim their kisses were recorded, until the pair were finally identified.
While Greta and George have reunited several times in the last six decades, they have never once reenacted the kiss.
He and Rita, now married for more than 70 years, live in Rhode Island, where a copy of the famous photo hangs in their hallway and another downstairs.
Jeff Widener’s powerful photograph of a lone protester standing defiantly in front of four threatening military tanks became one of the most iconic images of the 21st century.
The photographer was standing on the sixth-floor of the Beijing Hotel, the day after hundreds of civilians were killed by soldiers as they protested for democracy and freedom of speech in Tiananmen Square.
As tanks made its way down the city’s Cangan Boulevard, a Chinese man carrying two shopping bags stepped out in front of the procession, bringing it to a halt.
As they tried to manoeuvre their way around the man, but he stepped back into their path while waving his arms, at one point even climbing on top and speaking to a soldier inside.
Eventually bystanders, worried he would become another victim of the army, dragged the man away from the road, and the tanks continued on their way.
The photograph of Tank Man would quickly travel across the world, but despite repeated attempts he has never been identified, adding to his reputation as a global symbol of resistance against oppressive regimes.
The next morning, June 11, 1963, an elderly monk named Thich Quang Duc, clad in a brown robe and sandals, assumed the lotus position on a cushion in a blocked-off street intersection.
He had planned a deadly, in not spectacular, form of protest against the persecution of Buddhists by the South Vietnamese Government, which was backed by the U.S. Aides drenched him with aviation fuel, and the monk calmly lit a match and set himself ablaze.
Of the foreign journalists who had been alerted to the shocking political protest, only one, Malcolm Browne of The Associated Press, showed up.
The photos he took appeared on front pages around the globe and sent shudders all the way to the White House, prompting John F. Kennedy to order a re-evaluation of his administration’s Vietnam policy.
Referencing the impact of Browne’s photograph, the President said: ‘No news picture in history has generated so much emotion around the world as that one.’
The photograph of Tommie Smith and John Carlos performing the Black Power salute turned the pair from sporting heroes to civil rights icons.
As the world watched on, two black men brought the U.S. treatment of ethnic minorities to forefront of worldwide politics.
The story of the gold and bronze medallists is forever ingrained in Olympic folklore, however that of silver medallist Peter Norman, and the part he played in the defiant act, is less known.
The Australian wore a human rights pin in support of his American counterparts at the medals presentation. For his act of unity, Norman was officially ‘cautioned’ by team management, but the fallout continued long after.
Despite running countless qualifying times, including being the fifth fastest runner in the world in 1972, he was not selected for the Munich Olympics, and became ostracised figure back home in Australia.
He died of a heart attack in 2006, before his country could apologise for its treatment of him. Smith and Carlos both read eulogies and were pallbearers at his funeral.
The pair have revealed that it was Norman’s idea that they share a pair of black gloves on the podium – shown by Smith and Carlos wearing their glove on different hands – in order to intensify their political statement.
Speaking about that day, Carlos said: ‘We knew that what we were going to do was far greater than any athletic feat, and he said “I’ll stand with you”. I expected to see fear in Norman’s eyes, but instead we saw love.’
During street fighting in Saigon, Nguyen Van Lem was captured and brought to Brigadier General Nguyen Ngoc Loan, who served as South Vietnam’s chief of national police.
Lem, in his role as the leader of a Viet Cong insurgent team, had earlier killed a colonel, his wife and six children, as well as his 80-year-old mother, by cutting their throats.
Associated Press photographer Eddie James was stood in the street following Lem’s arrest and approached the scene.
It was then that Loan pulled out his personal .38 revolver and shot and executed Lem with a close-range headshot.
While NBC cameraman Vo Suu caught the entire execution on camera, it is Loan’s single frame showing Lem in the milliseconds before his death that has endured.
Speaking about the photo, for which he was awarded the Pulitzer Prize, Adams said: ‘Still photographs are the most powerful weapon in the world.’
Between 1949 to 1961, somewhere in the region of 2.5 million people would escape out of the Soviet-ruled East Berlin and into the British, American and French-occupied west.
In 1961, a cinder block and barbed wire barrier had been put up by the Soviets to extend the blockade and dry up the flow out of the east.
Among those stationed at the border was German NCO Conrad Schumann, who would later sat that he had become angered by seeing East German children being dragged back from the West, and did not want to ‘live enclosed’.
As the 19-year-old stood beside the low wall of barbed wire, a crowd on the other side gestured to him to jump across, shouting ‘come on over!’ Schumann suddenly broke into a run and leaped over the barrier in front of waiting photographer Peter Leibing, whose famous shot made the youthful soldier a Cold War pin-up.
He was quickly bundled into a car on the other side and driven away, later settling down in West Germany. However Schumann never truly escaped; he struggled with depression and felt hesitant about visiting family members in the east.
The shy and retiring man was also troubled with the fame that came with the famous image, stating: ‘As lawyers explained, because I am a historical figure, the picture can be published everywhere without my consent.’
Nine years after the fall out the Berlin Wall in 1989, Schumann committed suicide by hanging himself in his orchard in Bavaria.
This photograph was taken by the White House’s official photographer Pete Souza as members of the U.S. national security team watched on as a raid was carried out on Osama bin Laden’s hideout.
While special forces did record footage of the mission being carried out and photos were snapped of bin Laden’s dead body to confirm his demise, none of the imagery has ever been released for public consumption.
Instead, we are left with Souza’s intimate portrayal of the Situation Room, as high-ranking figures witnessed the raid executed in real time.
Fascinating aspects of the image include a visibly shocked Hillary Clinton, then serving as Secretary of State, and an informal Barack Obama, watching intently while wearing a polo shirt and jacket.
Somewhat surprisingly, the President is not the focal point of the photograph, which would have been an extremely unique occurrence in the catalog of snaps Souza took during Obama’s eight years in office.
Instead, Brigadier General Marshall B. Webb, the Assistant Commanding General of the Joint Special Operations Command sits in the hot seat.
Obama later said he believed the image had been taken when the group were realized that one of the U.S. force’s helicopters had crashed.
Speaking about the image, Souza said: ‘I was jammed into a corner of the room with no room to move. During the mission itself, I made approximately 100 photographs, almost all from this cramped spot in the corner.’
The Pulitzer Prize winner for 1971 captured the moment that the violence of the ongoing conflict in Vietnam arrived back home.
Students at Kent State University has assembled on the campus as part of a weekend-long nationwide protest against the war and the introduction of U.S. troops in Cambodia.
The Ohio National Guard was dispatched following public disturbances and reports of violence over the weekend, with business owners claiming to have received threats that their shops would be burned down if they did not display anti-war slogans.
On the Monday, May 4, about 2,000 students gathered on the Kent State campus against the wishes of University officials. The National Guard arrived on site and attempted to disperse the crowd, first with threats of arrest and later tear gas.
In response, students threw rocks and shouted ‘pigs off campus’. The guard, with bayonets attached to their rifles, then began to advance on the group of unarmed students, forcing many to flee.
It is still debated as to why the first shot was fired, but twenty-nine guardsmen would go on to fire approximately 67 rounds over a period of 13 seconds, killing four students and wounding nine others.
John Paul Filo, a photojournalism student at the University, captured the grief of the aftermath, as protester Mary Ann Vecchio screamed while kneeling beside the body of Jeffrey Miller, 20, who died instantly after a bullet entered his open mouth and exited through his spine.
Remembering the moment, Filo said: ‘I dropped my camera in the realization that it was live ammunition. I don’t know what gave me the combination of innocence and stupidity… I started to flee -run down the hill and stopped myself. “Where are you going?” I said to myself, “This is why you are here!” I started to take pictures again.’
