Topic
One photograph, one archive record, and the provenance that explains what you are actually looking at.
8 stories published.
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
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
Orville Wright pre-set the camera and asked a lifeguard from the local lifesaving station to squeeze the bulb. He squeezed it at exactly the right instant — then never looked through a viewfinder again that day.
4 min read
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
Before it stood in New York Harbor, the statue filled a workshop off the rue de Chazelles — a hand the size of a room, a head that tourists paid to walk into.
3 min read
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
Annie Edson Taylor was a widowed schoolteacher who calculated that surviving the Horseshoe Falls would make her rich. She survived. It did not.
3 min read
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
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