I can’t think of a great historical photo right now but I’m loving this thread
The self-immolation of Thich Quang Duc never fails to amaze me. It’s just unreal.
And Antonio Turok’s photograph of the 1991 total eclipse of the sun in Chiapas, Mexico. This one because even when I know what an eclipse is and how does it happen, there’s a moment in my head when I think “What if it never ends? What if everything stays like this forever?” I see that instant of terror in this photo.
First time I’m seeing the second one, that’s amazing, thanks for sharing.
Believe me, that photograph can’t be unseen, it’s like the Sun itself is watching you, mad at you. Sorry I couldn’t find something of better quality to upload.
The “Pale Blue Dot” image of earth taken by Voyager 1. Carl Sagan pushed to have Voyager take a parting shot before they turned off the camera. The earth is about one pixel in size.
Called “Earthrise”, taken during the Apollo 8 mission in December 1968. Always tried to imagine what it was like to have had that view IRL.
Because it’s a nice innocent photo of a man walking with nobody on his left side.
It doesn’t look like anything to me, comrade.
Just a random man, no one important in particular.
This is the hubble Deep Field and is part of a series of deep field images. It was taken by directing the hubble telescope on a tiny dark spot of space. Every single light in this image is a galaxy, many of them as large or larger than our own. It truly shows the immensity of our universe and shows how insignifcant all our problems really are in the grand scheme of things.
It’s especially crazy that this is like .001% of the sky.
Oh, it’s much, much, much less than that.
0.0000416%, 1/24 millionth of the sky.
Here, a .gif on Reddit
It confirmed the cosmic insignificance of Earth, the profound vastness of space and time, and — at the same time — the rarity, beauty, and fragility of life. Human perception, memory, and understanding is tiny. But, it reaches toward infinity.
Margaret Hamilton standing next to listings of the software that she and her MIT team produced for the Apollo Project.
I love her, and the code she used is adorable:
“LOL Memory” (Core Rope): The code was literally woven into hardware by women in factories, dubbed “Little Old Lady” memory.
6-year old Ruby Bridges walking to school.
This picture was always so powerful to me. I think I had that one famous illustrated storybook about Ruby Bridges.
When federal agents were actually protecting minorities.
Pretty much only the federal agents who were directly ordered to though, most of the rest of them were busy putting the boot on minorities here and everywhere else in the world.
yeah this is the era of COINTELPRO, they were only helping minorities while on camera
I read about Ruby Bridges when I was a child in NZ, it made a huge impression on me.
On the one hand, very important photo to understand the context of the time.
On the other hand, monstrous that a child going to school was such a big deal and so much attention was focused on her. Can’t imagine that making a positive impression on a child.
What’s the context for this? What country?
This is in the United States, during segregation.
The little girl in the picture is Ruby Bridges. In 1960, she was one of the first Black kids to integrate a school. In this picture, she is walking to an all-Whites school and the guards are protecting her because the racist white adults wanted to harm her just for wanting to go to school.
Ruby Bridges is still alive today.
Cheers. 1960… it blows my mind.
Thanks. Did you just expect everyone to just know this when you posted the photo?
You guys have such a crazy history. And present.
It’s a very famous photo here.
Not here
wouldn’t really expect it to be
Oooh that’s a good one!
Yury Gagarin and Gina Lollobrigida. First man into space and one of the most famous actresses back then.
This one always makes me melancholic:
Such a big turning point in time, captured on a photograph.
Similar ones:
WW1 cavalry soldiers who still carried a lance, for charging against infantry.
(Even in the later stage of the war, when they already had steel helmets and gas masks)Is that Batman on a horse?
Batman on his bathorse
What’s an orse and why does it need a bath?
I’d have guessed emperor Wilhelm II, but it seems to just be a German officer.
New Year in a police station in Havana, January 1st, 1959.Great post and I really enjoyed the replies. Mine is of Chavez visiting Castro in 2006 in Havanna, as Castro was dying of cancer. Both men were imprisoned for a failed coup but later rose to power (Chavez democratically and Castro by revolutionary liberation of the country), and both men died in a hospital bed in their respective countries in 2013.
and both men died in a hospital bed in their respective countries in 2013.
A fact the US bitterly weeps about still
Indeed! Castro famously opted for a moral vest over kevlar when visiting the US.
There’s a good chance the US actually did kill Chavez with a slow-acting poison of some kind. You can find a lot of articles about his rapid deterioration.
They still would have preferred him rotting at Guantanamo, isolated of his loved ones, with Juan Guaido as president of Venezuela, giving away all the oil he could to American companies. I’ll take it like a win.
There’s a good chance the US actually did kill Chavez with a slow-acting poison of some kind.
Well that fucking sucks.
OP’s photo is my favorite, so I will have to mention my second favorite (though calling it a “favorite” feels off).
This photo was taken in 2003 in Iraq. This man is comforting his son. They are being held in an American camp. IIRC to this day we don’t know what happened to these two.
I think if I had to explain the last 25 years to a time-traveler, this would be the one photo I would choose.
Neocons have been dehumanising Arabs for a very long time.
US Liberals are still doing it to this day. One of their heroes, Obama, dropped an average of 80 bombs per day on the ME and North Africa.
After winning the Nobel peace prize, he dropped an average of 30k bombs / year (80 per day) during his presidency, mostly on Muslim countries, 2, 3. In 2016 alone, dropped 26,171 bombs in the Middle East and North Africa, up 3000 from the previous year. The countries bombed include Syria, Iraq, Yemen, Afghanistan, Pakistan, Libya, and Somalia.
Had never seen that one. Powerful.
Malcolm X holding an M2, looking cool as hell
Bad trigger discipline though
Deepwater Horizon sinking in the Gulf of Mexico on April 22, 2010.
It caused an equivalent oil spill of 4.9 million barrels and exposed the surrounding wildlife to toxic materials, covering thousands of animals in oil. The cleanup efforts took years.
A prime example of humans messing up this planet for their own gains.
Oil executives aren’t humans
dehumanizing people never leads to something good.
Looks like a screencap from District 9 or some other Sci-Fi movie
