The Real Stories Behind 8 Famous Historical Photographs

On August 14, 1945, word spread that Japan had surrendered, and Times Square erupted. Life photographer Alfred Eisenstaedt was moving through the crowd when a sailor swept a woman in a white dress into a kiss, and he fired off a few frames without ever stopping to ask their names. That one missing detail kept the couple’s identities a mystery for decades, with any number of people stepping forward to claim they were the two in the photo.

A 2012 book, The Kissing Sailor, made the case that the pair were George Mendonsa and Greta Zimmer Friedman, matching his scars and tattoos to the picture. What’s harder to square away is the moment itself. Friedman, a dental assistant and a stranger to him, later said plainly that it wasn’t her choice — it was, she recalled, “more of a jubilant act that he didn’t have to ask permission.” The image still reads as joy, but the woman at the center of it didn’t see it quite that way.

Driving north through California in March 1936, government photographer Dorothea Lange passed a sign for a pea-pickers’ camp, turned around, and spent about ten minutes with a woman sitting in a lean-to tent with her children. The resulting portrait — a mother in her thirties, worry etched across her face, two children turned away against her shoulders — became the enduring image of the Great Depression. The woman said almost nothing, and she never earned a cent from it.

Her name was Florence Owens Thompson, a Cherokee woman who felt the photo had followed her like a shadow. In 1978 she went public to say she felt exploited by it. Her children disputed parts of Lange’s account, too — Lange said the family had sold their car tires to buy food, but her son Troy answered flatly, “There’s no way we sold our tires, because we didn’t have any to sell.”

Eleven ironworkers sit shoulder to shoulder on a steel beam, eating sandwiches and lighting cigarettes, with the whole of Manhattan dropping away 850 feet below their dangling boots. It’s the picture people point to when they talk about the men who built New York, and if you’ve ever looked up at a skyscraper and felt your stomach lurch, you understand its grip.

Here’s the part the caption leaves out: it was a publicity stunt, staged in September 1932 to sell office space in the still-rising Rockefeller Center and keep the project in the papers during the Depression. The men were real ironworkers and the height was absolutely real — but the lunch break was arranged for the camera. Oddly, no one is even sure who took it. Three photographers worked the site that day, and the picture has never been pinned to any one of them.

On June 5, 1989, the day after the Chinese army’s deadly crackdown in and around Tiananmen Square, Associated Press photographer Jeff Widener was perched on a sixth-floor balcony of the Beijing Hotel, nursing the flu and a head wound from a thrown rock. He was framing a column of tanks when a lone man in a white shirt, a shopping bag in each hand, walked out and planted himself in front of them.

Widener’s first thought was irritation — he figured the man was about to wreck his composition. Instead the picture became one of the most recognized images in the world, a single person standing down a line of war machines. It is still banned in China. And the man himself? His name and his fate have never been established. He simply stepped into history and then out of it again.

On Christmas Eve 1968, the three astronauts of Apollo 8 became the first people to orbit the Moon. On their fourth pass around the far side, a roll of the spacecraft swung their windows around, and there was the Earth — a small blue-and-white marble climbing above the dead gray lunar horizon. It wasn’t on the flight plan. You can hear the scramble on the mission recordings as the crew grabs for color film to catch it before it slipped away.

Bill Anders took the frame that stuck. It arrived at the end of a year of assassinations and riots and war, and people felt it. One stranger wrote the crew a telegram that simply said, “Thank you, Apollo 8. You saved 1968.” The photographer Galen Rowell later called it the most influential environmental photograph ever taken — the first time most of humanity saw its own home as one fragile, borderless thing.

The green eyes got everyone. Steve McCurry photographed a young refugee in a school tent at the Nasir Bagh camp near Peshawar, Pakistan, in 1984, and her portrait ran on the cover of National Geographic the following June. She became one of the most reproduced faces on the planet — and for seventeen years, no one knew her name, including the man who took the picture.

In 2002 a National Geographic team brought McCurry back to the region to look for her, and after a long search they found her living in a remote part of Afghanistan. Iris-recognition analysis confirmed it: she was Sharbat Gula, by then a mother in her late twenties who wasn’t even certain of her own age. She remembered the day she was photographed, and she remembered being angry about it. She had never had her picture taken before.

The German airship Hindenburg was easing in to land at the Lakehurst naval station in New Jersey on the evening of May 6, 1937, when it burst into flame and came apart in the sky. The whole thing was over in roughly half a minute. On the ground, radio announcer Herbert Morrison broke down as he described it, his voice cracking into the line everyone still quotes: “Oh, the humanity.”

Among the photographers scrambling that night was Sam Shere of International News Photos, and his frame of the burning ship became the one that lasted. There was no time to aim. “I literally ‘shot’ from the hip,” Shere later said — “it was over so fast there was nothing else to do.” An image that looks almost composed was really just a man’s reflex in the worst moment of his working life.

Four days into the brutal fight for Iwo Jima — a battle that would run more than a month and cost over 25,000 American casualties — Associated Press photographer Joe Rosenthal climbed Mount Suribachi and caught five Marines and a Navy corpsman heaving a flagpole upright. The photo won a Pulitzer and became the model for the Marine Corps War Memorial outside Washington.

Two things get muddled about it. First, this was the second flag raised on the summit that day; an earlier, smaller one had gone up hours before, but commanders wanted something bigger the men below could see. Second, Rosenthal was haunted for years by a rumor that he had posed it. The confusion came from a separate, genuinely staged “gung-ho” group shot he took afterward — but every inquiry found the flag-raising photo itself was caught on the fly. Even some of the Marines’ names were wrongly assigned for decades before the record was corrected.