Harry Benson didn’t want to meet the Beatles. The Glasgow-born photographer had plans to cover a news story in Africa when he was…
Spectacle was like oxygen for the Nazis, and Heinrich Hoffmann was instrumental in staging Hitler’s growing pageant of power. Hoffmann, who joined the…
The capture of the Mariana Islands in late 1944 had given the US a base from which to launch long-range bombing raids on…
Wilhelm Roentgen, 50, professor of physics at Wurzburg University, Bavaria, had his eureka moment in 1895 He was studying gases in his lab…
Philippe Halsman Dalí Atomicus, 1948 “Philippe Halsman, Astonish Me!” at Musée de l’Elysée, 2014 Before photographer Philippe Halsman and Surrealist Salvador Dalí settled on the idea of tossing…
The German zeppelin Hindenburg flies over Manhattan on May 6, 1937. A few hours later, the ship burst into flames in an attempt…
Migrant Mother, 1936. Dorothea Lange took this photograph in 1936, while employed by the U.S. government’s Farm Security Administration (FSA) program, formed during…
It’s never easy to identify the moment a hinge turns in history. When it comes to humanity’s first true grasp of the beauty,…
“Tragedy by the Sea”: A dreadful incident that changed a couple’s life forever, 1955 April 2, 1954: A couple are photographed moments after…
Thomas Edison was long credited as the inventor of recorded sound — that is, until a 2008 discovery. Wikimedia CommonsPhonautograph As we’ve argued…