Iconic Photographs

Before he went all  luvy  sell out

Unable to breathe, patients entered iron lungs, which made use of negative pressure ventilation to compress and depress the chest, simulating respiration.
In the early 20th century, polio was one of the most feared diseases in industrialized countries, paralysing hundreds of thousands of children every year. A highly infectious disease, polio attacks the nervous system and can lead to paralysis, disability and even death. The symptoms – pain and weakness, fatigue and muscle loss – can strike any time from 15 to 50 years after the initial disease. In 1952, more than 21,000 Americans contracted a paralyzing form of polio, and 3,000 died from it. Once infected, there was no treatment besides time and tending to the symptoms.

No device is more associated with polio than the tank respirator, better known as the iron lung. Before its invention, children with polio died frequently. Physicians who treated people in the acute, early stage of polio saw that many patients were unable to breathe when the virus’s action paralyzed muscle groups in the chest.

Think I would prefer to die rather than that

Pope John Paul II visits his would-be assassin Mehmet Ali Ağca in prison. On Wednesday, May 13, 1981, Mehmet Ali Agca pulled a gun and shot Pope John Paul II during a procession in St. Peter’s Square, Vatican City, Italy. Though critically wounded, the Pope survived four gunshot wounds to his abdomen. Following the shooting, Pope John Paul II asked people to “pray for my brother…whom I have sincerely forgiven”.

In 1983, Pope John Paul II and Agca met and spoke privately at the prison where Agca was being held. The Pope brought the photographer and the cameramen because he wanted the image in that cell to be shown around a world filled witt unforgiving hatreds, with hostile superpowers and smaller, implacable fanaticism. When the Pope arrived in his cell, Agca was dressed in a blue crewneck sweater, jeans and blue-and-white running shoes from which the laces had been removed. He was unshaved. Agca kissed John Paul’s hand. “Do you speak Italian?” the Pope asked. Agca nodded. For 21 minutes, the two men seated themselves, close together, on molded-plastic chairs in a corner of the cell, out of earshot.

As John Paul rose to leave, the two men shook hands. The Pope gave Agca a small gift in a white box, a rosary in silver and mother-of-pearl. The Pope walked out. Agca was left standing alone, and the camera recorded a sudden look of uncertainty on his face. Perhaps he was thinking about the prospect of spending the rest of his life in jail for attempting to kill a man he did not know, a man who now came to him as a friend.

And the small box exploded after he left blowing the kents head off, dont mess with the pope 

Exploding rosary! Love it!

Nah, it was a box of popefury...

Fire Escape Collapse, also known as Fire on Marlborough Street, is a black-and-white photograph by Stanley Forman which received the Pulitzer Prize for Spot News Photography in 1976.
A nineteen-year-old and her two-year-old niece and goddaughter are hurled off a collapsing fire escape during an apartment fire on Marlborough Street. The two waited with firefighter Robert O’Neil for a rescue ladder to reach them. As the firefighter climbed onto the rescue ladder, the fire escape collapsed under their feet and they fell to the ground five floors below. The woman was killed but the child survived, her fall cushioned by the woman’s body. It’s tragic, going from the hope of immediate rescue to a deadly fall in seconds.

The photograph, which is part of a series, shows 19-year-old Diana Bryant and her 2-year-old goddaughter Tiare Jones falling from the collapsed fire escape of a burning apartment building on Marlborough Street in Boston on July 22, 1975. The fire escape at the fifth floor collapsed as a turntable ladder on a fire engine was being extended to pick up the two at the height of approximately 50 feet (15 meters). The photo was taken with a motorized camera and also shows falling potted plants. Other photos of the series show Bryant and Jones waiting for a turntable ladder and the moment of fire escape’s collapse with both victims on it.

The picture/poster shows five men representing five different cultural spheres: an American Indian, an Australian Aborigine, an African, an Asian and an European. The European, standing in the center, dominates the scene and thus shows the Eurocentric world view of the time (early 20th century). This poster was printed as an illustration on a Dresden-based German magazine.

It’s widely accepted that race originated in Europe in the early modern period. After that it was exported to the rest of the world like many other aspects of European culture during the Age of Imperialism. Prior to the 1400s, the concept of race didn’t really exist, and was created mostly by slave traders along the Mediterranean as a means of describing their captives to prospective buyers. Prior to this, the people were generally grouped according to their culture.

Rat-catchers were employed in Europe to control rat populations. Keeping the rat population under control was practiced in Europe to prevent the spread of diseases to man, most notoriously the Black Plague and to prevent damage to food supplies. Today this job no longer exists.

Anecdotal reports suggest that some rat-catchers would raise rats instead of catching them in order to increase their eventual payment from the town or city they were employed by. This, and the practice of rat-fights, could have led to rat-breeding and the adoption of the rat as a pet—the fancy rat.

Rat-catchers ran high risks of suffering bites and infections, but helped prevent these from spreading to the public. They would capture rats by hand, often with specially-bred vermin terriers, or with traps. Rats are rarely seen in the open, preferring to hide in holes, haystacks and dark locations. Payment would be high for catching and selling rats to breeders. A rat-catcher’s risk of being bitten is high, as is the risk of acquiring a disease from a rat bite.



Liverpool Port Sanitary Authority rat-catchers dipping rats in buckets of petrol to kill fleas for plague control. 1900s.


Professional rat-catchers. The lower class and uneducated men would have been most likely to do this job as they needed to support themselves and their families.


Sydney, Australia, 1900. In this photograph features a group of men are shown standing behind a pile of rats. One of them is holding a cage and many others are holding bucket-like utilities. These rat catchers were supposedly disinfecting Sydney in 1900 of rats to prevent the spread of the bubonic plague in the city.

Cabinet ministers lined up for execution after a coup d'état in Liberia, 1980.
On April 12, 1980, Samuel Doe led a military coup, killing President William R. Tolbert, Jr., in the Executive Mansion. Twenty-six of Tolbert’s supporters were also killed in the fighting. Shortly after the coup, government ministers were walked publicly around Monrovia in the nude and then summarily executed by a firing squad on the beach.

The military coup is still surrounded by mystery. Apparently, the preparations for it went unnoticed, which is astonishing, given the fact that there was considerable political tension and also in light of the well-staffed U.S. Embassy in Monrovia (over 500 people). The events had taken them all by surprise. Samuel Doe was not a publicly known figure in Liberia before April 12, 1980. That soon changed after that date.

The military take-over was a bloody one, labeled ‘a revolution’ by the 18 enlisted men of the Armed Forces of Liberia who toppled the Government of William R. Tolbert. The 66-year old president was savagely murdered by private soldier Harrison Pennoh, who later proved mentally unstable. Before the end of the month the entire Cabinet had been put on trial and sentenced to death – with no right to be defended by a lawyer and no right to appeal to the verdict.

A Liberian army soldier stands ready to execute a former cabinet minister following the 1980 coup. The minister in the photo: Cecil Dennis.


A Liberian execution squad fires a volley of shots, killing cabinet ministers of Liberia.

A crowd gathers to view the bodies of 13 former cabinet members.


Cecil Dennis faced death very bravely, staring at his killers while awaiting his fate. When he mouthed a prayer before being shot, a soldier loudly shouted, “You lie! You don’t know God!”. After the order to fire was given, a drunken executioner may have winged him but the other bullets missed altogether, splashing into the Atlantic Ocean behind him. He was the only person still alive after the first barrage of gunfire. Two more soldiers finally approached and sprayed Cecil with a Uzi and pistol at point-blank range, hitting him in the face, body and head, until he was dead. Each man was later hit with 50 or 60 extra bullets by the drunken soldiers.

The unbroken seal on King Tutankhamun’s tomb, 1922.
This seal was actually a seal to King Tut’s fifth shrine. The king was buried in a series of four sarcophagi, which were in turn kept inside a series of five shrines. This unbroken seal stayed 3,245 years untouched. The late discovery of Tut’s tomb resulted from the fact that it was covered by debris from that of Ramesses IV which was located directly above its entrance. While the outermost shrine of the youthful pharaoh had been opened not once but twice in ancient times, the doors of the second of the huge shrines of gilded wood containing the royal sarcophagus still carried the necropolis seal which indicated the pharaoh’s mummy was untouched and intact.

The tomb of the boy-king was opened by the famous archaeologist and Egyptologist Howard Carter in the early 1920’s. The tomb contained treasure more spectacular than any previous discoveries. Shortly after Howard Carter removed the lid of the outermost shrine in Tutankhamun’s Burial Chamber, he discovered three more. Harry Burton photographed the ornately decorated doors of the second shrine while closed, their simple copper handles secured together tightly by a rope tied through them. The knotted cord was accompanied by a delicate clay seal featuring Anubis, the ancient Egyptians’ jackal god entrusted with the protection of the cemetery.

That must have been something else to discover one of these tombs still intact. They think there is an inner chamber in one of the big pyramids. Some kind of ground radar is picking up a void but they can't locate any opening cos they can't get the proper equipment down to the spot

Federal ironclad USS Galena showing some battle damage, 1862.
It’s amazing that this broadside ironclad was designed and built without the aid of computers. Someone put pen to paper and designed this. Then the parts were made by hand in some fashion or another. USS Galena was a wooden-hulled broadside ironclad built for the United States Navy during the American Civil War. The ship was initially assigned to the North Atlantic Blockading Squadron and supported Union forces during the Peninsula Campaign in 1862. She was damaged during the Battle of Drewry’s Bluff because her armor was too thin to prevent Confederate shots from penetrating.

The Galena was one of 3 trial ironclads approved by the Ironclad Board during the early part of the Civil War. The other two were the New Ironsides, and of course the Monitor. The Galena’s method of armoring the hull was a flop so it wasn’t used on other ships. The Monitor style won out and many more were made, some with 2 turrets. The two guns in the photo are 9 inches Dahlgrens. Each nine-inch gun weighed approximately 9,000 pounds (4,100 kg). They could fire a 70–90-pound (31.8–40.8 kg) shell to a range of 3,450 yards (3,150 m).

Polish pole vaulter Wladyslaw Kozakiewicz jubilates after setting a new world record in the Olympic pole vault final 30 July 1980 in Moscow and winning the gold medal.
By the late 1970s it was clear that Russians were no longer particularly liked in Poland. The reverse was also probably true. Władysław Kozakiewicz felt this in person as he ran up to take his jump at the 1980 Summer Olympics. The 1980 Summer Olympic Games were already mired by controversy even before they opened. The United States led the boycott of 64 other countries in protest of the 1979 Soviet invasion of Afghanistan.

The crowd supporting Soviet jumper Konstantin Volkov booed, hissed, jeered, and whistled during Kozakiewicz’s performance. After he had cleared the bar with a new world record of 5.78 meters, Kozakiewicz leapt to his feet in joy, turned to the spectators, placed his left hand on his right arm, and made a fist as he raised his arm in defiance to the Soviet crowd. The photos of this incident circled the globe, with the exception of the Soviet Union and its satellites, although the event was broadcast live on TV in many countries of the Bloc.

Looks like his wedding tackle is going to fall out

Facing Death: Poles shot by Germans in Bydgoszcz, 9 September 1939.
It’s interesting to see the range of emotions displayed by these men. Anguish, defiance, stoicism, acceptance and fear, the third one from the left is even smiling. This execution happened during the Bloody Sunday in Bydgoszcz, Poland, 1939.

Bloody Sunday was a series of killings of members of the German minority that took place at the beginning of World War II. On September 3, 1939, two days after the beginning of the German invasion of Poland, highly controversial killings occurred in and around Bydgoszcz (German: Bromberg), a Polish city with a sizable German minority. The number of casualties and other details of the incident are disputed among historians.

The Nazis exploited the deaths as grounds for a massacre of Polish inhabitants after the Wehrmacht captured the town. In an act of retaliation for the killings on Bloody Sunday, a number of Polish civilians were executed by German military units of the Einsatzgruppen, Waffen SS, and Wehrmacht. According to German historian Christian Raitz von Frentz, 876 Poles were tried by German tribunal for involvement in the events of Bloody Sunday before the end of 1939. 87 men and 13 women were sentenced without the right to appeal. Polish historian Czesław Madajczyk notes 120 executions in relation to Bloody Sunday, and the execution of 20 hostages after a German soldier was allegedly attacked by a Polish sniper.

Hard to say how you would act

Adolf Hitler on a walk with Helga Goebbels.
Helga was the oldest of Goebbels’ six children and notably his favorite. Goebbels was proud of his eldest daughter and would go straight to her cot as soon as he returned from his office, to take her on his lap. Helga was a “daddy’s girl” who preferred her father to her mother. She was reported to have been a lovely baby who never cried and just sat listening uncomprehendingly to the Nazi officials with “her blue eyes sparkling”. It was not unusual for Hitler, who was fond of children, to take her on to his own lap while he talked late into the night. Joseph Goebbels and his wife Magda Quandt had 6 children: Helga Susanne, Hedwig Johanna, Helmut Christian, Hildegard, Holdine Kathrine and Heidrun Elisabeth – all starting with the letter H (allegedly after Hitler).

I dont think he was all bad

Campbell Brodie wrote:Unable to breathe, patients entered iron lungs, which made use of negative pressure ventilation to compress and depress the chest, simulating respiration.
In the early 20th century, polio was one of the most feared diseases in industrialized countries, paralysing hundreds of thousands of children every year. A highly infectious disease, polio attacks the nervous system and can lead to paralysis, disability and even death. The symptoms – pain and weakness, fatigue and muscle loss – can strike any time from 15 to 50 years after the initial disease. In 1952, more than 21,000 Americans contracted a paralyzing form of polio, and 3,000 died from it. Once infected, there was no treatment besides time and tending to the symptoms.

No device is more associated with polio than the tank respirator, better known as the iron lung. Before its invention, children with polio died frequently. Physicians who treated people in the acute, early stage of polio saw that many patients were unable to breathe when the virus’s action paralyzed muscle groups in the chest.

Bet the kid in the first photo ended up cixelsyd...

The Reichstag in flames, 1933.



The Reichstag fire came amid “a campaign of unparalleled violence and bitterness” by then Chancellor Adolf Hitler, in advance of an approaching German election, and it turned a building that was “as famous through Germany as is the dome of the Capitol in Washington among U. S. citizens” into “a glowing hodge-podge of incandescent girders”.

The fire started in the Reichstag building, the assembly location of the German Parliament. Shortly after 21:00 on 27 February 1933, the Berlin Fire Department received a message that the Reichstag was on fire. Despite the best efforts of the firemen, most of the building was gutted by the blaze. By 23:30, the fire was put out. The firemen and police inspected the ruins and found twenty bundles of flammable material (firelighters) unburned lying about. At the time the fire was reported, Adolf Hitler was having dinner with Joseph Goebbels at Goebbels’ apartment in Berlin. When Goebbels received an urgent phone call informing him of the fire, he regarded it as a “tall tale” at first and hung up. Only after the second call did he report the news to Hitler.



Both left Goebbels’ apartment and arrived by car at the Reichstag, just as the fire was being put out. They were met at the site by Hermann Göring who told Hitler: “This is Communist outrage! One of the Communist culprits has been arrested”. Hitler called the fire a “sign from God” and claimed it was a Fanal (signal) meant to mark the beginning of a Communist Putsch (revolt). The next day, the Preussische Pressedienst (Prussian Press Service) reported that “this act of incendiarism is the most monstrous act of terrorism carried out by Bolshevism in Germany”. The Vossische Zeitung newspaper warned its readers that “the government is of the opinion that the situation is such that a danger to the state and nation existed and still exists”.

In July 1933, Dutchman Marinus van der Lubbe, the Bulgarians Ernst Torgler, Georgi Dimitrov, Blagoi Popov, and Vasil Tanev were indicted on charges of setting the Reichstag on fire. In his verdict, Judge Bürger was careful to underline his belief that there had in fact been a Communist conspiracy to burn down the Reichstag, but declared, with the exception of Van der Lubbe, there was insufficient evidence to connect the accused to the fire or the alleged conspiracy. Only Van der Lubbe was found guilty and sentenced to death. The rests were acquitted and were expelled to the Soviet Union, where they received a heroic welcome. Var der Lubbe was beheaded by guillotine (the customary form of execution in Saxony at the time; it was by axe in the rest of Germany) on 10 January 1934, three days before his 25th birthday.

It must have been him, he's still got the matches!

Well spotted