coll. - 100 Photographs: The Most Influential Images of All Time

100 PHOTOGRAPHS | the most influential images of all time

One of the three photographers who documented the construction of Rockefeller Center and the now-iconic Lunch Atop a Skyscraper

Philippe Halsman in his studio, circa 1950

| table of contents

by Ben Goldberger, Paul Moakley and Kira Pollack

by Geoff Dyer

by Mathew Brady

by Unknown

by James VanDerZee

by Dorothea Lange

by Margaret Bourke-White

by Yousuf Karsh

by Gordon Parks

by Frank Powolny

by Joe Rosenthal

by Yevgeny Khaldei

by Alfred Eisenstaedt

by Margaret Bourke-White

by Nat Fein

by W. Eugene Smith

by Hy Peskin

by Richard Avedon

by Alberto Korda

by Julius Shulman

by Malick Sidib

by Harry Benson

by Neil Leifer

by Unknown

by John Dominis

by Don McCullin

by Ron Galella

by Luis Orlando Lagos

by Susan Meiselas

by Co Rentmeester

by Therese Frare

by Annie Leibovitz

by Carleton Watkins

by Alexander Gardner

by Edward S. Curtis

by Alfred Stieglitz

by Lewis Hine

by Unknown

by Heinrich Hoffmann

by Sam Shere

by H.S. Wong

by Dmitri Baltermants

by Unknown

by Weegee

by Robert Capa

by Lieutenant Charles Levy

by David Jackson

by Peter Leibing

by Charles Moore

by Malcolm Browne

by Abraham Zapruder

by Eddie Adams

by Josef Koudelka

by Neil Armstrong, NASA

by John Paul Filo

by Nick Ut

by Kurt Strumpf

by Stanley Forman

by Sam Nzima

by Eddie Adams

by Jahangir Razmi

by Donna Ferrato

by Jeff Widener

by Ron Haviv

by James Nachtwey

by Kevin Carter

by Michael Nichols

by Richard Drew

by Sergeant Ivan Frederick

by Tami Silicio

by Chris Hondros

by Brent Stirton

by Pete Souza

by Joseph Nicphore Nipce

by Louis Daguerre

by Roger Fenton

by Eadweard Muybridge

by Jacob Riis

by Wilhelm Conrad Rntgen

by Edward Steichen

by Paul Strand

by August Sander

by Erich Salomon

by Henri Cartier-Bresson

by Unknown

by Robert Capa

by Philippe Halsman

by Robert Frank

by Harold Edgerton

by Lennart Nilsson

by William Anders, NASA

by Cindy Sherman

by Robert Mapplethorpe

by Nancy Burson

by Andres Serrano

by Richard Prince

by NASA

by Philippe Kahn

by Andreas Gursky

by Unknown

by David Guttenfelder

by Bradley Cooper

by David Von Drehle

Nine of Robert Capas surviving negatives from D-Day. Most of the film showed no images after processing, and only some frames survived.

DEFINING INFLUENCE

By Ben Goldberger, Paul Moakley and Kira Pollack

W e began this project with what seemed like a straightforward idea: assemble a list of the 100 most influential photographs ever taken. If a picture led to something important, it would be considered for inclusion. From that simple concept flowed countless decisions. Though photography is a much younger medium than paintingthe first photo is widely considered to date from 1826the astonishing technological advances since then mean that there are now far more pictures taken every day than there are canvases in all the worlds galleries and museums. In 2014 alone, hundreds of billions of images were made.

How do you narrow a pool that large? You start by calling in the experts. We reached out to curators, historians and photo editors around the world for suggestions. Their thoughtful nominations whittled the field, and then we asked TIME reporters and editors to see if those held up to scrutiny. That meant conducting thousands of interviews with the photographers, picture subjects, their friends and family members and others, anywhere the rabbit holes led. It was an exhaustive process that unearthed some incredible stories that we are proud to tell for the first time.

Mathew Bradys 1860 portrait of Abraham Lincoln as seen on a campaign carte de visite.

Jeff Wideners Tank Man photograph on the front page of the June 6, 1989, New York Times.

There is no formula that makes a picture influential. Some images are on our list because they were the first of their kind, others because they shaped the way we think. And some made the cut because they directly changed the way we live. What all 100 share is that they are turning points in our human experience.

A list about influence necessarily leaves off its fair share of iconic pictures and important photographers. A survey class in great photographers would surely include Ansel Adams and Walker Evans. And yet no single one of the pictures Adams took inside Yosemitemajestic as they arecould rival in influence Carleton Watkins work, which actually led to the creation of the park. Similarly, no one of Evans deservedly celebrated pictures from the Depression conveyed the human toll of that dark period with the immediate force of Dorothea Langes Migrant Mother.

Photography was born of a great innovation and is constantly reshaped by new ones. So it is fitting that our definition of an influential photo changes along with the ways pictures are taken and seen. There were other photographers who captured the man confronting a column of Peoples Liberation Army tanks during the Tiananmen Square protests in 1989. But only Jeff Wideners picture of Tank Man was sent out over the wire of the Associated Press. For almost seven decades, that wire was the most powerful distribution tool in photography, offering the fastest route to the largest audience. It is possible that even such an astounding image as the one Eddie Adams took of an execution in Saigona masterwork that distilled the futile horror of the Vietnam War into a single framemight not have become iconic had it not been launched far and wide by the AP.

Stills from Abraham Zapruders film of John F. Kennedys assassination pictured in the November 29, 1963, issue of LIFE.

The July 23, 1964, issue of Jet magazine featuring David Jacksons photographs of Emmett Till.

Led Zeppelin used Sam Sheres photograph of the Hindenburg disaster on the cover of its debut album.

In other cases, it was the appearance on the cover of a magazine or the front page of a newspaper that lent a photo its influence. The first time the world saw Abraham Zapruders haunting images of John F. Kennedys assassination was not as a moving picture but as a series of frame-by-frame stills published in LIFE magazine. Before televisions were in every home, the photos that ran in LIFE influenced how a lot of people understood their world. But LIFE was far from alone. In 1955, Jet magazine published pictures from the open-casket funeral of Emmett Till, a 14-year-old African American murdered for supposedly flirting with a white woman in Mississippi. The photo of Tills mother grieving over her sons mutilated body became a clarion call for the nascent civil rights movement.