Category: Great Photo

This was taken on 21 December 1956, the day of the desegregation of the public transportation system in Montgomery, Alabama. More than 12 months earlier, Rosa Parks had been arrested for refusing to give up her seat for a white man, sparking the 382-day Montgomery bus boycott – the first large-scale demonstration against segregation in the US. The white man in this photo was not a random passenger but veteran UPI reporter Nicholas Chriss: the shot was staged by an uncredited photographer to illustrate this important victory. GS

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“This was the only moment in my career when I instinctively knew it was going to be just fine – that I had a great shot,” Dario Mitidieri says. It was the Italian-born photojournalist’s final evening in Beijing, where he had flown to document the protests in the square. He had a return ticket to the UK the following morning.

When he first arrived in the Chinese capital, Mitidieri recalls that the atmosphere had been “quite joyful”. “It was like a massive student party, they were dancing in the streets at night, singing Chinese opera. We knew there were secret police filming everywhere but there was no sense of danger,” he says. But then soldiers began assembling around the square. Mitidieri’s photo of a young boy sitting on the shoulders of a relative, above a sea of helmets, was shot at around 6pm on 3 June 1989, only a couple of hours before the massacre began. In order to get the best angle, he climbed on to the seat of a nearby bicycle, held upright by two student protesters.

The image would become a potent symbol of the innocence of the protesters who were violently oppressed when the troops were sent in that night. Mitidieri, who never learned the name of the boy in the photo, thinks of his record of the events at Tiananmen Square as “a true example of the value of the work photojournalists do”. He compares it to the current situation in Ukraine: “We have this propaganda coming from the Russian government, but the rest of the world is very well aware of what’s going on because of the presence of photographers and journalists documenting it all, risking their lives.” GS

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Is the dystopian future envisioned in The Handmaid’s Tale, Margaret Atwood’s novel turned TV show about a theocratic regime that strips women of their basic freedoms, already here? In recent years, the red cloaks and white bonnets worn by the handmaids of Gilead have become a familiar feature at protests on women’s issues around the world. The group of women standing outside the US Capitol in this image from 2017 were demonstrating against a bill that sought to defund the sexual healthcare provider Planned Parenthood. GS

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“Maidan was the first act in a great historical movement,” wrote Jérôme Sessini prophetically in 2019. “It was just the beginning of a coming confrontation on a much larger scale.” The Magnum photographer covered the protests in central Kyiv that led to the ousting of the pro-Russia president Viktor Yanukovych in 2014. Sessini was present during a period of extreme violence, when snipers killed at least 70 people; he captured the events with a series of extraordinarily dramatic and disturbing images. In this photograph, an Orthodox priest blesses the protesters on a barricade on 20 February 2014. FB

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“No news picture in history has generated so much emotion around the world as that one,” John F Kennedy said about this image of an elderly Buddhist monk taking his own life, on 11 June 1963, in protest against the persecution of Buddhists by South Vietnam’s largely Catholic government. American photojournalist Malcolm Browne won a Pulitzer prize for his documentation of the shocking event. GS

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A small neo-Nazi rally in the Swedish city of Växjö made worldwide news when this image of a woman striking a skinhead with her handbag began to circulate. Danuta Danielsson, a 38-year-old Jewish woman whose mother had survived the Holocaust, hijacked the demonstration by the Nordic Realm party on 13 April 1985, in an impulsive counterprotest that has since been memorialised in multiple statues. GS

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Rachel and Rabbi Dr Akiva Posner were a Jewish couple with three children, living in Kiel, Germany, in the early 1930s. As part of Hanukkah celebrations, the menorah must be prominently displayed; but it can be hidden during a time of persecution. Rachel documented the moment – just over a year before Hitler took power – when the rabbi defiantly lit their menorah in the window, facing a building decked with Nazi flags. The Posners fled Germany two years later. FB

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Jan Rose Kasmir, 17, holds a chrysanthemum before a row of bayonet-wielding soldiers. This shot was taken by the Magnum photographer Marc Riboud on 21 October 1967 at the March on the Pentagon, a rally in Washington DC attended by 100,000 anti-war protesters. It would become the defining image of that movement. The soldiers, Kasmir later said, “were just as much a victim of the war machine as anyone else”. GS

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From the Guardian – https://www.theguardian.com/world/2022/jul/02/it-felt-like-history-itself-48-protest-photographs-that-changed-the-world

My photograph of the man at Whitehall was for the Observer. I was sent to cover an anti-nuclear demonstration in Trafalgar Square during the Cuban missile crisis. The man had broken away from the crowd and made his way down Whitehall – the seat of power. The police threw a line out across the road very quickly, knowing other protesters would follow him.

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The Greenham Common Women’s Peace Camp, an anti-nuclear encampment that ran from 1981 to 2000, was the largest female-led protest movement since the suffragettes. The most famous event at the camp was Embrace the Base: a protest marking the first anniversary of Nato’s decision to store nuclear missiles at the RAF airfield in Berkshire. On 12 and 13 December 1982, more than 30,000 women came together to hold hands and encircle the nine-mile perimeter fence of Greenham.

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Fulvio Grimaldi was one of the few journalists present when British soldiers opened fire on protesters in Derry, killing 13 people. His image of panicked civilians carrying the body of teenager Jackie Duddy became the iconic image of the massacre. FB

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“You could literally feel the emotion in the air. It was a very heavy feeling,” Patsy Stevenson says of the vigil on London’s Clapham Common on 13 March 2021. Hundreds had gathered to mourn Sarah Everard, who had been abducted, raped and murdered by Metropolitan police officer Wayne Couzens. “Often as women we’re told to stay indoors when things like this happen. It was one of those moments where it was like, no, we don’t want to stay silent any longer,” Stevenson says.

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People in more than 600 cities across the world took to the streets on 15 February 2003 to express their opposition to the planned US-led invasion of Iraq. These demonstrations are said to be the largest coordinated protest event in history. This photograph of a sea of banners at the march in London captures the scale of the proceedings. Despite the groundswell of public opposition, the war in Iraq began just over a month later. GS

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In the late 70s, Jayaben Desai (second from right) led a workers’ strike at the Grunwick Film Processing factory in Willesden, advocating for better working conditions. Most of the workers, including Desai, were Ugandan Asian women who had been expelled by Idi Amin before settling in the UK. Their strike gained wide support: postal workers refused to take mail to and from the factory, and even Arthur Scargill joined the picket line. The writer Amrit Wilson, who covered the protest, remembers Desai as “very persuasive … She also understood patriarchy, which was central to the strike.” FB

Again the Guardian – https://www.theguardian.com/world/2022/jul/01/we-wont-stay-silent-any-longer-the-protest-photographs-that-changed-britain