Most iconic photographs in history

Earthrise▲ Rising

Christmas Eve, 1968: Apollo 8 astronaut William Anders swings his camera around and catches a marbled blue-and-white Earth rising over the Moon's desolate horizon. It's credited with kickstarting the environmental movement almost single-handedly, giving humanity its first gut-punch glimpse of home as a fragile, finite oasis in the void. No other photo has ever made so many people feel simultaneously tiny and responsible.

Era: 1968

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Raising the Flag on Iwo Jima▲ Rising

Joe Rosenthal's camera catches six Marines straining together to plant a pole atop Mount Suribachi in February 1945, the composition so perfectly balanced it looks staged — it wasn't. It won a Pulitzer within weeks, got turned into the Marine Corps War Memorial, and became the definitive visual shorthand for American sacrifice and victory in WWII. Few images have been reproduced, parodied, and monumentalized as relentlessly as this one.

Era: 1945

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The Blue Marble▲ Rising

Apollo 17's crew, the last humans to leave low Earth orbit, snapped this fully illuminated view of the whole planet in December 1972 — the first time Earth had been photographed as a complete, cloud-swirled sphere. NASA didn't even know who exactly pressed the shutter, but the image became one of the most reproduced photographs ever, plastered on flags, textbooks, and Whole Earth Catalogs. It gave the nascent environmental movement its logo and gave everyone else a reminder that we're all stuck on one small, blue rock together.

Era: 1972

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Tank Man▲ Rising

June 5, 1989, the morning after the Tiananmen Square massacre: an unidentified man in a white shirt stands alone in front of a column of tanks, briefly halting them with nothing but his body and a couple of shopping bags. He was never identified, likely never survived, yet his silhouette became the single most potent visual symbol of individual defiance against state power ever recorded. It's the rare photo that changed nothing politically in the moment and everything symbolically forever after.

Era: 1989

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Migrant Mother

Dorothea Lange, working for the Farm Security Administration in 1936, spotted Florence Owens Thompson at a California pea-pickers camp and took six frames in ten minutes; the final one shows a gaunt mother staring into middle distance, two children burying their faces against her. It became the face of the Great Depression, running in newspapers and prompting emergency food aid to the camp within days. Its power lies in how it dignifies desperation without ever asking for pity — it demands recognition instead.

Era: 1936

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V-J Day in Times Square▼ Falling

Alfred Eisenstaedt caught a sailor sweeping a stranger, a dental assistant named Greta Zimmer Friedman, into a kiss amid the euphoric chaos of Times Square on August 14, 1945, the day Japan surrendered. It ran in Life magazine as pure, uncomplicated jubilation — the exhale of a world finally free of war. Decades later it's been reexamined and contested as an unconsented act caught mid-frame, which only makes its cultural footprint more fascinating: an image once read as pure joy now forces harder conversations about consent and memory.

Era: 1945

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Lunch atop a Skyscraper▼ Falling

Eleven construction workers dangle their legs off a girder 850 feet above Manhattan, casually eating lunch as if gravity were optional, all while building GE's 30 Rockefeller Plaza in 1932. Nobody's even certain who took it or fully who's in it, and it was largely a publicity stunt for the building itself — yet it became the ultimate image of Depression-era American grit, skyline ambition, and blue-collar swagger. It's the photo every office poster of

Era: 1932

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The Hindenburg▼ Falling

On May 6, 1937, photographer Sam Shere captured the German airship LZ 129 Hindenburg erupting into a ball of flame as it attempted to dock in Lakehurst, New Jersey, killing 36 people in under a minute. The image, paired with Herbert Morrison's anguished radio cry of

Era: 1937

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