I hope everyone is surviving the holiday chaos! During my shopping ventures, I stumbled across a TIME Magazine Special Edition: “100 Photographs: The Most Influential Images of All Time,” and of course I just had to purchase it.
The magazine is subdivided into the following categories: icons, evidence, and innovation.
Icons
Some of the photographs included in the icon category range from political figures such as Abraham Lincoln and Winston Churchill to unidentifiable people such as Migrant Mother and Flag Raising On Iwo Jima to pop culture figures such as Michael Jordan and Demi Moore.
Demi Moore, Annie Leibovitz, 1991
Evidence
I wasn’t quite sure what to expect from this category. The introductions to the category discuss how seeing is believing, and until the invention of photography, evidence relied simply on human testimony. Some of the photographs included in this category show some of the hard times such as Girl Worker in Carolina Cotton Mill which features a young child at work, The Dead of Antietam, Hitler at a Nazi Party Rally, D-Day, JFK Assassination, Frame 313 which shows a still frame of the footage from that day, Behind Closed Doors which depicts the act of domestic violence, and many other gruesomely terrible moments in history. Truly what is probably the only positive event documented in the photographs is A Man on The Moon from the first moon landing.
A Man on The Moon, Neil Armstrong, NASA, 1969
Innovation
The innovation category features exactly what you would expect, moments of innovations. Some of the photographs included are The Hand of Mrs. Wilhelm Röntgen which shows the first medical x-ray, Fetus, 18 Weeks which shows a remarkably clear image of a human fetus at 18 weeks of age that is dated from 1965, Earthrise which is a photograph of Earth from the Moon, Pillars of Creation taken with the Hubble Telescope, Oscars Selfie taken by Bradley Cooper at the 2014 Oscars, and of course First Cell-Phone Picture which is exactly as it’s titled.
First Cell-Phone Picture, Philippe Kahn, 1997
Overall, it’s a pretty great read and a great forward to the History of Photography course that I’ll be beginning in the spring. It’s crazy to see exactly how far we’ve come as well as how much we were able to create before we got this far. I picked up my copy for $14.99 at Bass Pro Shops, but I’m sure you would be able to find it online or at a variety of book stores. If you don’t care to spend the money, there is also a great digital synopsis of it on YouTube as published by TIME.
As always, thanks for the read and everyone have a wonderful and safe holiday!
None of the images or videos used in this blog belong to myself, all were derived from TIME, Inc.
