h2g2 The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy: Earth Edition

Chinese student with carrier bag standing in front of tank in Tiananmen Square. (I know that I got the spelling of "square" right.

PP

That last one just sprnag to my mind too. Other instant ones are the tennis girl and guy with baby, both of which have been mentioned.

I think it rather depends on your interpretation of 'famous'. Famous in what way? To whom - Joe Public or other photographers?

Maybe the question should be "What's the photo that has change things the most"

in that sense none of the WTC photos qualify as the event has changed things not the photo

Obviously the classic tennis girl photo is out then.

The Tienamen Square and the napalm girl images I think do count as they both showed a certain truth behind the event that mear dialog couldn't

I wish the picture of the burnt Iraqi soldier on the road to Basra should have been counted with the above 2, bit as it was almost banned from all USA media and the photographer ostracised then it didn't have the impact it should have done.

ChawkE

The Vietnamese Girl covered in burning Napalm.

The execution of (or by?) the Viet Cong General (isn't that on film too?)

Challenger - with that chilling soundtrack "obviously a major malfunction" - I did not realise until MUCH later that Huston is manned by other astronauts.

Iwo Jima - famous, but cheesy - and apparently not posed. Maybe I find it cheesy because I am a Brit, and old glory doesnt do it for me.

For me - Che Guevara is a t-shirt, not a photograph. I can remember the moonlandings, but not clearly. And I have missed a lot of the recent images living without a TV and with very few news papers.

One piece of footage I do remember was taken in West Africa at the time of the Biafran war - late 60s, early 70s. It shows a captured Ibo lying in the dirt, with his hands tied behind his back. He is eventually killed, shot as he lies there. It became clear to the camera crew that it was an act of bravado for the benefit of the westerners, and if they had not been there, he would not have been killed.

And other footage I remember clearly was the famine footage of 1985.

The children in that footage are young men and women of 16 or 17 now.

Perhaps the fact that we can witness what is done in our names will help to make a difference.

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an infrequent witness called Ben

Interesting how this thread is filled with tragic news footage, most of it recent. Just goes to show how one's age and experience will alter the response to the question.
I think flinch originally had real old-fashioned single frame photographs in mind, not frozen clips from running news footage. But here too, images of the dead and dying might at first seem to dominate, if one remembers the golden age of Life magazine (the girl on the car roof who jumped off the New York highrise, the Hindenberg, etc).

But as 'art' (I believe flinch is a photo artist), the VE-Day sailor kiss is near the top of my list. Also the Iwo Jima flag, Einstein, little John Kennedy Junior saluting, Geronimo, the surrender at Appomattox, Lincoln's 2nd Inauguration, Churchill's cigar, Marylin Monroe standing on a hot air vent... Ooops, now I'm doing it too! Pop images. Sorry flinch. How about directing us to what you would call real photographic art.
peace
jwf

By The Most Famous Photograph, i think i meant which photo's have become icons, are known and familiar to most people as photos not just as events so yes Joe Public - single images which have become bigger or more famous than the event or person themselves or encapsulate that person event time. Something like that.

That photo of the Iraqi is excellent. Do you know the Tony Harrison poem "A Cold Coming"? It is a long poem about that photo and features it on the cover, it's available as a booklet from Bloodaxe books in the UK and it is really really good.

Other Person - you mentioned a Cartier Bresson photo - are you referring to Doisneau's "The Kiss" which i would say is one of the few non-news images to stick in the mind (though it was produced for a magazine article.

I think that the Guevara picture is the photo that has, above all become an icon, it is so recognisable in so many places that it no longer has any meaning, it's no long Che it has become itself. Does that make sense. Many people would recognise it without knowing anything about Che who he was or what he represents.

The World Trade centre - obviously a big event, but i'm not sure that there is any one photo that stands out (as yet) as encapsulating the event or is really iconographic. When you think of the dropping of the first atomic bombs - probibly the most important event of the last hundred years there's not one image, not of the explosion, the tests, the bomb or the victims that really stand out from all the others. I think it may be a while before we can see which images are the strongest, i think you need some distance between the events.

I thought of the Hugh Grant arrest number photo too, but who'll remember that in 10 years? But it was one of the most memorable images of the '90's. That and the Kevin Carter photo.

Equally it is strange that no-one has a death camp photo spring to mind - there's that picture of the open oven doors, and of the prisoners in their stripped uniforms standing at the gates, both a fairly iconographic, but there are so many powerful and awesome images of these places that they seems to cancel each other out. Also they don't get seen so much now.

Chaldej's "On the Reichstag" sprang to my mind too, but i thought that was just my own commie prejudices coming to the floor. There's a pretty ubiquitous portrait of Stalin (possibly the official picture i guess) which is fairly famous.

It is Journalistic images that become the best well known, because they are the ones that get syndicated of course. Hence no famous images before newspapers could reproduce photos. Record sleeves and posters are good indicators - if you could buy it in Athena it's probably pretty famous, but only the Beatles (and maybe Madonna by Herb Ritts) have any iconographic pictures. The tennis player's itch is probibly as famous as Iwo Jima, which is a bit scary. Which is probibly where Che wins, he made the transfer from news to pop.

This is good - keep them comming.

Does anyone have any more to add to these? Does anyone disagree with ones one the list? Are some unknown in other parts of the world?

Journalism:

Che Guevara - by Korda. You know the one, on all the posters and t-shirts.
Children Fleeing American Napalm Strike by Nick Ut - The little Vietnamese girl on fire
Buzz Aldrin - Armstrongs photo on the moon.
Iwo Jima by Joe Rosenthal - American soldiers on Iwo Jima raising their flag.
Charred Iraqi soldier in the remains of his truck on the Basra road
Street execution of a Vietcong Prisoner by Eddie Adams - Col Loan shoots prisoner through head.
Prince Charles & Diana - with her in the blue suit showing off the ring
Chuck & Di - the official Litchfield wedding photo with the dress and the near kiss.
Chirchill looking staunch with a cigar
Queen Liz II - the official 1977 Jubilee photo
St Paul's Cathedral, London glimpsed through smoke in WW11.
Earthrise as seen by astronauts orbiting the moon.
Edmund Hilary - Sherpa Tensing on the summit of Mount Everest.
The burning Tibetan monk.
Chinese student with carrier bag standing in front of tank in Tiananmen Square
Chaldej's "On the Reichstag" - Russian soldiers hanging their flag on the ruins in 1945

Pop & Posters:

Sgt Pepper - Peter Blakes album sleeve photo
The Beatles on the stairwell - Angus McBean
Abbey Road - Album sleeve
James Dean- standing in the Rain on Broadway
Marilyn Monroe - standing over the air vent showing her legs
Andy Warhol's Marilyn
Tennis Player Scratches her Arse
Louise Brooks in her pearls.
Guys hands holding baby
That (WWII?) picture of the sailor kissing a girl in New York is supposed to be pretty famous
Ansell Adams - Half Dome
Ansell adams - Moonrise over Hernandez

Film clips.

JFK assasination.
The Space Shuttle Challenger exploding
The Palestinian man hiding with his son on a street corner and his son is shot.

I'm certainly not restricting it to ART. I think art is a subjective term anyway. Any photographic image will do really, including still from film / video.

Was it the Einstien with his tongue out picture you were thinking of? The Hindenburg - very powerful, but who remembers it? I was with a (36 years old, well educated, intelligent, watches lots of tv) freind in Egypt last year watching TV and the Hindenberg footage was shown and he'd never seen it before. He was blown away by it, but still, he hadn't seen it before.

I suppose a lot of these pictures are part of your own cultural capital, they are part of a national charachter - i don't know the, John Kennedy Junior or Lincoln's 2nd Inauguration photo's you mention, but i'm not American, they're not as famous over here and certainly aren't in any of my books on American History.

There's a few more images i've just though of too. The picture of workmen of a skyscraper eating their lunch on a girder, and Elizabeth the 2nd's coronation photo.

Fascinating.
With the exception of Ansell Adams' landscapes everything on your list is WW2 and since! (Oh, BTW you missed the Einstein portrait which rivals Che and Marylin as a poster AND is used elsewhere as the icon for genius.)

The earliest photographs from the American civil war, India, Africa, the American west, Victorian factory and railway workers, early steamships, french balloonists, pre-revolutionary Czarist family photos, Buffalo Bill Cody, PT Barnum... Hell, even Teddy Roosevelt's hunting and fishing snaps, have been around so much longer and been seen by millions over the years.

What is fascinating is that WW2 now seems to be the demarcation line for 'reality' and 'relevance'. A dark shadowy line that marks where our past disappears into the lifeless and misunderstood facts of Ancient History. And yet we have photos to prove that life actually existed even before that. I remember one of a tightrope walker crossing Niagara Falls more than a hundred years ago.
peace
jwf (a really really old fart)

The key event of course is the invention at the turn of the centruy of new reproduction techniques alowing pictures in newspapers, and then later, of cheap photo repro in text books and on posters and packaging.

The thing that suprises me is the lack of advertising related images. (Though of course record sleeve i guess count - but then i suggested all of them!)

WWII is much more the begining of Modern History than any other date these days. But images like the American Civil War, the Crimean War the Paris Commune - these SHOULD be really famous but they're not, they're forgotten because they didn't sink into the mass conciousness at the time. The most famous images of the civil war come from Gone With the WInd, not the real photos that exist of the actual events.

Unfortunately fame has nothing to do with either importance or quality!

Perhaps the reason that WW2 is the threashold is that it is on the edges of living memory. There are still people alive who can remember it, and people like me, who were raised by people who were adults during it.

WW2 of course was just the continuation of WW1, and did not actually start anything new. If the peace of Versailles had been less punative there would have been less discontent and xenophobia in Germany, and the German people would have less of a need for closure.

a baby-boomer called Ben

For me, the photograph of the man in front of the tank in Tiananmen Square will always be seared into my memory...that and the icon-like photo of a man seen from behind as he looked at the devastation of the World train Center destruction, while tightly clutching to his briefcase.
And for many Americans, the photo of the baby that was carried from the devastation of the Murrah Building in Oklahoma City, Oklahoma will always weigh heavy on our hearts.

Good point.
Quality is seldom an attribute of popularity. (I will not outrage the young with specific references to recent pop stars.)

May I suggest a look at a book or two of 'real' photos from the civil war era. It will make Gone With the Wind seem silly, as relevant as "Hogan's Heroes" or "'allo 'allo" are to the real WW2.

In fact, there are several 19th century photographers besides Ansell Adams you would find interesting. Photos, of Sitting Bull, Geronimo and the last of plains Indians, are among the most haunting images ever recorded. They are in their own way more disturbing than anything out of Vietnam or the Gulf War.
And early photos of late Victorian activities, railways, steamships and early motor cars do capture the moment in a single image, even if those moments are no longer relevant or important to us today in terms of fashion, style, manners - they are where we come from.

But yes, moving footage has its own special stunning effect. I must admit I will never forget Kennedy in Dallas, Challenger or those Desert Storm helicopter-gunship shots of panic-stricken Iraqui soldiers, running across the desert, frantically waving white flags and being mowed down by machine gun fire. And the road to Bagdad footage of F-18s bombing the retreating columns is just to difficult to watch. Hope we don't get many more like that.

peace
jwf

Ooops! If it isn't obvious there Ben and Anne I was replying to flinch's post #30 and nothing I said was in response to yours. I just took too long to post, sorry if anything I said looks like a reflection on your posts, which I hadn't seen.

peace to two of my favourites gals
jwf

as always, jwf

a gal called Ben

Nope, I wasn't thinking of the Doisneau picture. I'll do some more research and get back to you.

Another image that came to mind was the photo of the astronaut floating free in space during the first untethered spacewalk.

Most of the photos mentioned here I don't remember, or never saw. A lot of them seem to be video films, anyway.

I'd go for the Marylin over the air vent or for the Bogey and Bergman Casablanca poster.

This could be the beginning of a beautiful friendship.

There are two photos, which here in the UK at least are reproduced in newspapers etc. on a very regular basis. The first is the photo of the missing Lord Lucan (they use the same photo every time) and the other (slightly less well known) photo of Charles and Camilla taken by a tree during a polo match - every time Camilla is mentioned in the British press, they print the photo.

There are many images of the trenches in WWl, but no single photo stands out, only the image.

The other immediately recognizable crime pic to a Brit is Myra Hindley. A collage of children's faces a few years ago was instantly recognised (and villified) as her

What about the photo of the fellow which is used in those newspaper ads "Have trouble remembering peoples names" and "Do you wish you had better english". His face must have been seen by millions of people even if they didn't realise it.