Here we have selected what we think are the best photos that changed that world. Every day, millions of photos are snapped in countries all over the world but what ones have changed the course of history and the way we live today. Well below we have narrowed it down to the 5 most prominent images that have helped shape the way we live today.

Please be warned – Some of the photos and stories shown here are graphic in nature and are not suitable for under 18’s.

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Latticed window at Lacock Abbey, August 1835, by Henry Fox Talbot

Latticed window at Lacock Abbey was taken by Fox Talbot in August 1835 and is a positive from what may be the oldest existing camera negative.

At the time there were other photographic processes being created but they were too expensive, and the photographic images couldn’t be reproduced. They were one off’s, like a painting or drawing. Fox Talbot was the only person thinking of photography as a printing production, like etchings and other print reproductions of the time. He invented the calotype process were you made one negative and from this negative you could produce several positives. The calotype process changed and improved over time but the basics of one negative being turned into several positive prints continued to the turn of digital photography.

It made photography cheaper and more accessible to people. This is the first example of that process and clearly goes down in history as one of the most important photos that changed the world. Who knows, if this wasn’t evented, maybe photography would be a completely different medium.

Photographic inventions

Talbot invented a process for creating reasonably light-fast and permanent photographs that was the first made available to the public; however, his was neither the first such process invented nor the first one officially announced.

Shortly after Louis Daguerre's invention of the daguerreotype was announced in early January 1839, without details, Talbot asserted priority of invention based on experiments he had begun in early 1834. At a meeting of the Royal Institution on 25 January 1839, Talbot exhibited several paper photographs he had made in 1835. Within a fortnight, he communicated the general nature of his process to the Royal Society, followed by more complete details a few weeks later. Daguerre did not publicly reveal any useful details until mid-August, although by the spring it had become clear that his process and Talbot's were quite different.

Talbot's early "salted paper" or "photogenic drawing" process used writing paper bathed in a weak solution of ordinary table salt (sodium chloride), dried, then brushed on one side with a strong solution of silver nitrate, which created a tenacious coating of very light-sensitive silver chloride that darkened where it was exposed to light. Whether used to create shadow image photograms by placing objects on it and setting it out in the sunlight, or to capture the dim images formed by a lens in a camera, it was a "printing out" process, meaning that the exposure had to continue until the desired degree of darkening had been produced. In the case of camera images, that could require an exposure of an hour or two if something more than a silhouette of objects against a bright sky was wanted. Earlier experimenters such as Thomas Wedgwood and Nicéphore Niépce had captured shadows and camera images with silver salts years before, but they could find no way to prevent their photographs from fatally darkening all over when exposed to daylight. Talbot devised several ways of chemically stabilizing his results, making them sufficiently insensitive to further exposure that direct sunlight could be used to print the negative image produced in the camera onto another sheet of salted paper, creating a positive.

The Calotype

The "calotype", or "talbotype", was a "developing out" process, Talbot's improvement of his earlier photogenic drawing process by the use of a different silver salt (silver iodide instead of silver chloride) and a developing agent (gallic acid and silver nitrate) to bring out an invisibly slight "latent" image on the exposed paper. This reduced the required exposure time in the camera to only a minute or two for subjects in bright sunlight. The translucent calotype negative made it possible to produce as many positive prints as desired by simple contact printing, whereas the daguerreotype was an opaque direct positive that could be reproduced only by being copied with a camera. On the other hand, the calotype, despite waxing of the negative to make the image clearer, still was not pin-sharp like the metallic daguerreotype, because the paper fibres blurred the printed image. The simpler salted paper process was normally used when making prints from calotype negatives.

Talbot announced his calotype process in 1841, and in August he licensed Henry Collen, the miniature painter, as the first professional calotypist. The most celebrated practitioners of the process were Hill & Adamson. Another notable calotypist was Levett Landon Boscawen Ibbetson. In 1842, Talbot received the Rumford Medal of the Royal Society for his photographic discoveries.

In 1852, Talbot discovered that gelatine treated with potassium dichromate, a sensitiser introduced by Mungo Ponton in 1839, is made less soluble by exposure to light. This later provided the basis for the important carbon printing process and related technologies. Dichromated gelatine is still used for some laser holography.

Talbot's later photographic work was concentrated on photomechanical reproduction methods. In addition to making the mass reproduction of photographic images more practical and much less expensive, rendering a photograph into ink on paper, known to be permanent on a scale of hundreds if not thousands of years, was clearly one sure way to avoid the problems with fading that had soon become apparent in early types of silver image paper prints. Talbot created the photoglyphic (or "photoglyptic") engraving process, later perfected by others as the photogravure process.

Fox Talbot

William Henry Fox Talbot was an English scientist, inventor and photography pioneer who invented the salted paper and calotype processes, precursors to photographic processes of the later 19th and 20th centuries.

His work in the 1840s on photomechanical reproduction, led to the creation of the phytoglyphic engraving process, the precursor to photogravure. He was the holder of a controversial patent that affected the early development of commercial photography in Britain.

He was also a noted photographer who contributed to the development of photography as an artistic medium. He published The Pencil of Nature (1844–46), which was illustrated with original salted paper prints from his calotype negatives, and made some important early photographs of Oxford, Paris, Reading, and York.

The Horse in Motion by Eadweard Muybridge, 1878

The Horse in Motion is a series of cabinet cards by Eadweard Muybridge, including six cards that each show a sequential series of six to twelve "automatic electro-photographs" depicting the movement of a horse. Muybridge shot the photographs in June 1878. An additional card reprinted the single image of the horse "Occident" trotting at high speed, which had previously been published by Muybridge in 1877.

The series became the first example of chronophotography, an early method to photographically record the passing of time, mainly used to document the different phases of locomotion for scientific study. It formed an important step in the development of motion pictures. Muybridge's work was commissioned by Leland Stanford, the industrialist, former Governor of California and horseman, who was interested in horse gait analysis. Was to settle a bet that Leland Stanford, the industrialist, former Governor of California, had made saying that a horse lifts all 4 feet of the ground while running.

Eadweard Muybridge was an English American photographer important for his pioneering work in photographic studies of motion, and early work in motion-picture projection. Born in Kingston upon Thames in the United Kingdom, at age 20 he emigrated to America as a bookseller, first to New York, and then to San Francisco. Planning a return trip to Europe in 1860, he suffered serious head injuries in a stagecoach crash in Texas. He spent the next few years recuperating in Kingston upon Thames, where he took up professional photography, learning the wet-plate collodion process, and secured at least two British patents for his inventions. He went back to San Francisco in 1867. In 1868 he exhibited large photographs of Yosemite Valley, which made him world-famous.

In1874 Muybridge shot and killed Major Harry Larkyns, his wife's lover, but was acquitted in a jury trial on the grounds of justifiable homicide. In 1875 he travelled for more than a year in Central America on a photographic expedition.

Today, Muybridge is known for his pioneering work on animal locomotion in 1877 and 1878, which used multiple cameras to capture motion in stop-motion photographs, and his zoopraxiscope, a device for projecting motion pictures that pre-dated the flexible perforated film strip used in cinematography. In the 1880s, he entered a very productive period at the University of Pennsylvania in Philadelphia, producing over 100,000 images of animals and humans in motion, capturing what the human eye could not distinguish as separate movements.

During his later years, Muybridge gave many public lectures and demonstrations of his photography and early motion picture sequences, returning frequently to England and Europe to publicise his work. He also edited and published compilations of his work, which greatly influenced visual artists and the developing fields of scientific and industrial photography. He returned to his native England permanently in 1894. In 1904, Kingston Museum was opened in his hometown and continues to house a collection of his works to this day in a dedicated 'Muybridge Exhibition'.

This image Paved the way for motion picture, the moving image. If it wasn’t for Muybridge, you may not have film scenes of alien ships blowing up stuff, or women on the end of cruise ships shouting “I’m on top of the world”.

Earthrise by William Anders, 1968

Earthrise is a photograph of Earth and some of the Moon's surface that was taken from lunar orbit by astronaut William Anders on December 24, 1968, during the Apollo 8 mission. In Life's 100 Photographs that Changed the World, wilderness photographer Galen Rowell called Earthrise "the most influential environmental photograph ever taken". Another author called its appearance the beginning of the environmental movement. Fifty years to the day after taking the photo, William Anders observed, "We set out to explore the moon and instead discovered the Earth."

Earthrise is the name popularly given to NASA image AS08-14-2383, taken by astronaut William Anders during the Apollo 8 mission, the first crewed voyage to orbit the Moon. Initially, before Anders found a suitable 70 mm colour film, mission commander Frank Borman said he took a black-and-white photograph of the scene, with the Earth's terminator touching the horizon (AS08-13-2329). The land mass position and cloud patterns in this image are the same as those of the colour photograph entitled Earthrise.

The photograph was taken from lunar orbit on December 24, 1968, 16:00 UTC, with a highly modified Hasselblad 500 EL with an electric drive. The camera had a simple sighting ring rather than the standard reflex viewfinder and was loaded with a 70 mm film magazine containing custom Ektachrome film developed by Kodak. Immediately prior, Anders had been photographing the lunar surface with a 250 mm lens; the lens was subsequently used for the Earthrise images.

An audio recording of the event is available with transcription which allows the event to be followed closely – excerpt:

Anders: Oh my God! Look at that picture over there! There is the Earth coming up. Wow, that is pretty.

Borman: Hey, don't take that, it's not scheduled. (joking)

Anders:(laughs) You got a colour film, Jim?

Hand me that roll of colour quick, would you.

Lovell: Oh man, that's great!

There were many images taken at that point. The mission audio tape establishes several photographs were taken, on Borman's orders, with the enthusiastic concurrence of Jim Lovell and Anders. Anders took the first colour shot, then Lovell who notes the setting (1/250th of a second at f/11), followed by Anders with another remarkably similar shot (AS08-14-2384).

A nearly full-page black and white reproduction of Borman's image may be viewed on page 164 of his 1988 autobiography, captioned, "One of the most famous pictures in photographic history – taken after I grabbed the camera away from Bill Anders". Borman was the mission commander and notes that this is the image "the Postal Service used on a stamp, and few photographs have been more frequently reproduced". The photograph reproduced in the Frank Borman autobiography is not the same image as the Anders photograph; aside from the orientation, the cloud patterns differ. Borman later recanted this story and agreed that the black and white shot was also taken by Anders, based on evidence presented by transcript and a video produced by NASA Goddard Space Flight Center Scientific Visualization Studio employee, Ernie Wright.

The stamp issue reproduces the cloud, colour, and crater patterns of the Anders picture. Anders is described by Borman as holding "a master’s degree in nuclear engineering"; Anders was thus tasked as "the scientific crew member also performing the photography duties that would be so important to the Apollo crew who actually landed on the Moon".

On the 50th anniversary of the Apollo 8 mission in 2018, Anders described in an interview how the image undermined his religious belief: "It really undercut my religious beliefs.

Execution by Eddie Adams, 1968

Eddie Adams was an American photographer and photojournalist noted for portraits of celebrities and politicians and for coverage of 13 wars. He is best known for his photograph of the execution of a Viet Cong prisoner, for which he won a Pulitzer Prize in 1969. Adams was a resident of Bogota, New Jersey.

Associated Press photographer Eddie Adams and NBC News television cameraman Vo Suu witnessed the event. Adams later recalled that he believed Loan was going to "threaten or terrorise" Lém and took out his camera to record the event. The photo he subsequently took showed the microsecond the bullet entered Lém's head. This took place on a Saigon street on February 1, 1968, during the opening stages of the Tet Offensive.

The photograph and footage were broadcast worldwide, galvanizing the anti-war movement. Adams' photo of the event became one of the most famous and influential images of the war, winning him the 1969 Pulitzer Prize for Spot News Photography.

The photo would also come to haunt Adams: "I was getting money for showing one man killing another. Two lives were destroyed, and I was getting paid for it. I was a hero." He elaborated on this in a later piece of writing: "Two people died in that photograph. The general killed the Viet Cong; I killed the general with my camera."

Ben Wright, associate director for communications at the Dolph Briscoe Center for American History, said about the photo: "There's something in the nature of a still image that deeply affects the viewer and stays with them. The film footage of the shooting, while ghastly, doesn't evoke the same feelings of urgency and stark tragedy."

Lém was captured near the Ấn Quang Pagoda on 1 February 1968, during the Tet Offensive. He was brought to Brigadier General Nguyễn Ngọc Loan, Chief of the Republic of Vietnam National Police at 252 Ngô Gia Tự Street, District 10, near the modern-day Chùa Trấn Quốc temple. Loan summarily executed Lém using his sidearm, a .38 Special Smith & Wesson Bodyguard revolver. Loan is reported to have said afterwards: "If you hesitate, if you didn't do your duty, the men won't follow you” Lém was 36 years old at the time of his death.

Max Hastings, writing in 2018, noted that Lém was in civilian clothes and was alleged to have just cut the throats of South Vietnamese Lt. Col. Nguyen Tuan, his wife, their six children and the officer’s 80-year-old mother.

In 1978, a report by the United States Library of Congress concluded that the summary execution of Nguyễn Văn Lém had been illegal under Vietnamese law.

Adams won the 1969 Pulitzer Prize for Spot News Photography and a World Press Photo award for the photograph. Writer and critic David D. Perlmutter points out that "no film footage did as much damage as AP photographer Eddie Adams's 35mm shot taken on a Saigon street.

Anticipating the impact of Adams's photograph, an attempt at balance was sought by editors at The New York Times. In his memoirs, John G. Morris recalls that assistant managing editor Theodore M. Bernstein "determined that the brutality manifested by America's ally be put into perspective, agreed to run the Adams picture large, but offset with a picture of a child slain by Vietcong, which conveniently came through from AP at about the same time." Nonetheless, it is Adams's photograph that is remembered while the other image was overlooked and soon forgotten.

In Regarding the Pain of Others (2003), Susan Sontag was disturbed by what she saw as Loan's staging of the execution in the street for journalists' photographs. She wrote that "he would not have carried out the summary execution there had they not been available to witness it" and positioned himself in profile view with the prisoner facing the cameras. However, Donald Winslow of The New York Times quoted Adams as having described the image as a "reflex picture" and "wasn't certain of what he'd photographed until the film was developed". Furthermore, Winslow noted that Adams "wanted me to understand that 'Saigon Execution' was not his most important picture and that he did not want his obituary to begin.

Adams would later lament the impact of the photo. On Loan and his photograph, Adams wrote in Time in 1998:

Two people died in that photograph: the recipient of the bullet and General Nguyen Ngoc Loan. The general killed the Viet Cong; I killed the general with my camera. Still photographs are the most powerful weapons in the world. People believe them; but photographs do lie, even without manipulation. They are only half-truths. What the photograph didn't say was, "What would you do if you were the general at that time and place on that hot day, and you caught the so-called bad guy after he blew away one, two or three American people? “This picture really messed up his life. He never blamed me. He told me if I hadn't taken the picture, someone else would have, but I've felt bad for him and his family for a long time. I sent flowers when I heard that he had died and wrote, "I'm sorry. There are tears in my eyes."

Loan moved to the United States, and in 1978, there was an unsuccessful attempt to rescind his permanent residence status (green card). Adams advocated for Loan when the U.S. government sought to deport him based on the photograph and apologised in person to Loan and his family for the irreparable damage it did to his honour while he was alive. When Loan died, Adams praised him as a "hero" of a "just cause". On the television show War Stories with Oliver North Adams referred to Loan as "a goddamned hero!

He once said, "I would have rather been known more for the series of photographs I shot of 48 Vietnamese refugees who managed to sail to Thailand in a 30-foot boat, only to be towed back to the open seas by Thai marines." The photographs, and accompanying reports, helped persuade then President Jimmy Carter to grant the nearly 200,000 Vietnamese boat people asylum. He won the Robert Capa Gold Medal from the Overseas Press Club in 1977 for this series of photographs in his photo-essay, "The Boat of No Smiles" (published by AP). Adams remarked, "It did some good and nobody got hurt."

On October 22, 2009 Swann Galleries auctioned a print of Adams' photo of Loan and Lém. Printed in the 1980s, it had been a gift to Adams's son. It sold for $43,200. What many including Adams did not know is that one of many families that Lem and his group executed was the whole family of South Vietnamese Lt. Col. Nguyen Tuan, including his parents and 5 children, except one little boy of 10 years old who survived after being shot in the arm, leg, and head execution style. The little boy, Huan Nguyen, grew up in the U.S and became the first Vietnamese American U.S Navy Rear Admiral in 2019.

Death of Alan Kurdi by Nilüfer Demir, 2015

Alan Kurdi, initially reported as Aylan Kurdi, was a three-year-old Syrian boy of Kurdish ethnic background whose image made global headlines after he drowned on 2 September 2015 in the Mediterranean Sea near Bodrum, Turkey. He and his family were Syrian refugees trying to reach Europe amid the European refugee crisis. Photographs of his body were taken by Turkish journalist Nilüfer Demir and quickly spread around the world, prompting international responses. Because Kurdi's family had reportedly been trying to reach Canada, his death and the wider refugee crisis immediately became an issue in the 2015 Canadian federal election.

Kurdi is believed to have been born about 2012 in Kobanî, Syria. After moving between various cities in northern Syria to escape the civil war and ISIL, his family settled in Turkey. The family returned to Kobanî at the beginning of 2015, but returned to Turkey in June 2015 when ISIL attacked Kobanî again. During this time, Kurdi's father arranged for an illegal passage to Kos.

Kurdi's family members were hoping to join their relatives in Vancouver, British Columbia, Canada, after his aunt Tima Kurdi filed for refugee sponsorship, but this was rejected by the Department of Citizenship and Immigration Canada after the family members were denied an exit visa by Turkish authorities.

Canadian New Democratic Party (NDP) MP Fin Donnelly told the media that he had hand-delivered their file to Citizenship and Immigration Minister Chris Alexander earlier in the year, but the application was rejected in June 2015 because it was incomplete.

In the early hours of 2 September 2015, Kurdi and his family boarded a small plastic or rubber inflatable boat, which capsized about five minutes after leaving Bodrum in Turkey. Sixteen people were in the boat, which was designed for a maximum of eight people. They were trying to reach the Greek island of Kos, about 30 minutes (4 kilometres or 2 1⁄2 miles) from Bodrum. Kurdi's father said: "We had no life vests", but also said they were wearing life jackets, but they "were all fake". Others have stated that they believed that they were wearing lifejackets, but the items were ineffective.

It was later stated on Syrian radio that the Kurdi family paid $5,860 for their four spaces on the boat, which had twelve passengers on it despite being only about five metres long. Alan Kurdi's mother joined in the trip even though she had a fear of being on the open sea. The individuals on the boat evaded the Turkish Coastguard by setting out from an isolated beach late at night.

Around 5 am authorities started an investigation after an emergency call that a boat had capsized, and bodies were coming ashore. The bodies of Kurdi and another child were discovered by two locals at around 6:30 am. The two men moved the bodies from the water, where Kurdi was later photographed by a Turkish press photographer.

On 3 September 2015, Kurdi along with brother Galib and mother Rehana were taken to Kobanî for burials, which took place the next day. It is Islamic tradition to bury the dead within 24 hours if possible. The Siege of Kobanî ended in March 2015 and Islamic State attacks on what was left of the city stopped completely in August 2015.

An Iraqi survivor from the same boat, Zainab Abbas, who also lost two children from the disaster, told reporters that Abdullah had been presented to her as the "captain", that he was driving the overcrowded boat too fast, causing it to flip over, and that he pleaded with her while they were still both in the water not to report him to anyone in authority. Abbas said her family escaped out of Baghdad from ISIS and she was angry because all the media attention was on Aylan Kurdi and Abdullah Kurdi and not on her family. She later returned to Baghdad and said her dead children's bodies had not been correctly prepared for burial.

The picture has been credited with causing a surge in donations to charities helping migrants and refugees, with one charity, the Migrant Offshore Aid Station, recording a 15-fold increase in donations within 24 hours of its publication.

An article in The Guardian, on 22 December 2015, outlined a collection of what it described as "outrageous claims" against Abdullah Kurdi. It was said that he was an opportunist who used his status as a Syrian refugee for personal gain. Another source said that Abdullah was profiting from the tragedy, including selling his dead son's clothes to a museum in Paris.

In contrast, Nick Logan of Global News argued on 4 September 2015: "Photojournalists sometimes capture images so powerful the public and policymakers can't ignore what the pictures show." He compared the images of Kurdi's body to the pictures taken during the "Bloody Sunday" event in which civil rights activists during the Civil Rights Movement were beaten by Alabama state troopers.

In March 2016, a huge mural of Kurdi's dead body appeared on a wall next to the European Central Bank headquarters in Frankfurt.

Reactions to the photos

A week following his death, around 30 Moroccans recreated the discovery of Kurdi's body in a tribute in the Moroccan capital.

In January 2016, the Chinese artist Ai Weiwei posed like Kurdi by imitating his dead body as shown in the media pictures.

In March 2016, a huge mural of Kurdi's dead body appeared on a wall next to the European Central Bank headquarters in Frankfurt.

Over three months later, on Christmas Eve 2015, 3 News New Zealand said "Pictures of his lifeless body on a beach came to symbolise the wider tragedy. Can there have been a more moving, a more powerful image than the photograph of the tiny lifeless body of Aylan Kurdi being carried from the sea?"

On 2 January 2016, a feature article on the BBC News website opened with the words: "It was one of those moments when the whole world seems to care." It went on to quote Alan Kurdi's aunt Tima Kurdi:

“It was something about that picture, God put the light on that picture to wake up the world.”

Image and text sources: www.wikipedia.org

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