Series
One photograph, one archive record, and the documented context the caption usually loses.
8 stories published.
Start here · Part 1
Two photographers stood metres apart in Times Square on 14 August 1945 and shot the same embrace. One frame became LIFE's most reproduced image. The other belongs to the public — and the woman in it said it was not her choice.
4 min read
Part 2
Dorothea Lange stopped at a pea-pickers' camp, shot five frames and drove on. The woman in the picture spent the rest of her life objecting to how it was used.
4 min read
Part 3
Apollo 8's photographic checklist was full of lunar craters. When the Earth appeared over the horizon, the crew scrambled for colour film — and briefly joked that the shot was not scheduled.
3 min read
Part 4
Arthur Conan Doyle published them as evidence of the supernatural in 1920. The cousins who made them finally explained how in 1983 — and one of them never fully recanted.
3 min read
Part 5
Apollo 17's crew had the Sun behind them and a hand-held Hasselblad. The result went round the world before the astronauts did — and it is free for anyone to use.
2 min read
Part 6
Titanic leaving Southampton on 10 April 1912, photographed from the quayside by a local postcard publisher who had no reason to think the picture mattered.
3 min read
Part 7
No photographer captured the Gettysburg Address itself. But a crowd plate held by the National Archives turned out to contain the president — spotted by an archivist in 1952.
3 min read
Part 8
More people survived the Hindenburg than died in it. What did not survive was public confidence in the airship — because for the first time, cameras and a radio reporter were already there.
3 min read
The weekly frame
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