Of course, picking only three photographs was difficult. I could easily find twenty or eighty. So many powerful images. But I’ve cut it down to three, knowing full well that they cannot possibly be the right ones.
My first choice is “Earthrise”. A photograph so iconic it has a formal name. Taken by Apollo 8 Astronaut Bill Anders, this would certainly be on any list of important photographs.
Next, I would offer one of the most powerful images ever taken. This young child from Africa lays, frail from hunger, while a vulture waits in the background for him to die. The story behind the image is even more heartbreaking. The photo was taken by Kevin Carter and first appeared in The New York Times on 26 March 1993. Armed Sudanese soldiers prevented him from helping the little boy, named Kong Nyong, to the feeding center. The vulture did fly away… Amazingly, Nyong’s father said that the boy had somehow managed to make it to the feeding center the day he was photographed and survived the 1993 famine. He died of fever a couple of years later. The experience took a heavy toll on Carter — and eventually drove him to suicide in 1994.
Because this list is subjective, I can add a last photograph that wouldn’t otherwise make the cut. It’s that jackass who ran over people in Charlottesville, VA. I’m including this because the “Unite the Right” protesters have their Dear Leader back. The day after this photo was taken Trump said there were fine people on both sides and savaged the press for not exposing the anti-racists protesters for the vicious animals they are. I suspect that this is not a photo from the past so much as one possible prediction of a future America.
My three most iconic images
The first of my three is an image, or a picture as we called it in those days, in the Daily Express in the U.K. It was also seen in most other newspapers around the world that day, and it has haunted me ever since.
It was taken during the Soweto Uprising of 1976. It shows an 18-year-old boy, who had nothing to do with what was happening that day, but knew that children were being shot by the police, carrying the limp, sadly dead, body of a 13-year-old with his distraught elder sister running alongside. This image, virtually overnight, saw international opinion harden against South Africa’s apartheid regime.
Many years later, Mrs. B and I went to Soweto, where there is now a museum almost on the spot of where that photo was taken. I cried then, as I did when I first read that edition of the Daily Express.
Much more happily, I include the oh-so-famous image of the Beatles that adorned the Abbey Road album.
It was taken on August 9th 1969, and was the fifth of six photos taken in a 10-minute period, during which the police managed to curtail the traffic. It remains one of rock’s most enduring pictures.
Sadly, I must end on another tragedy. I was just 14 when I learned of the Aberfan Disaster in Wales. A coal tip on the mountain slope above the village collapsed on 21 October 1966, killing 144 from the village below, 116 of whom were children in their school. The subsequent inquiry placed the blame for the disaster on the National Coal Board, who were responsible for the tip.
The sheer waste of young life horrendously destroyed by simple incompetence, and captured by photography, is something that will never leave me.
My three most iconic images
The three pictures I’ve chosen are surely world-famous. To me, they are the most powerful. Yet, each one is very different.
The first photo in my charts, though chronologically it was the third, is the picture of Buzz Aldren: A man on the moon.
The photo was taken by Neil Armstrong, the first man on the moon. It looks iconic, and it is. A man stands on another world’s surface, with the dark, blind cosmos behind him. Indeed, it is an out-of-the-world symbol!
The second one was taken much earlier, in 1943, in Tehran, Iran.
It was the first summit of Stalin, Roosevelt, and Churchill, the leaders of the anti-Hitler coalition. That summit changed the world and shaped the future of the world after the war. Their cooperation looked unlikely, given what Stalin was. Still, facing Nazism, they choose to unite against the common enemy.
This image tells a nice story: Audrey Hepburn in Breakfast at Tiffany’s. She is a beautiful, stylish woman in a fancy cafe. The whole set-up and Audrey’s look, in particular, set the trend in fashion and style for the years to come. It is still true to this day.