Historical images - Images that made history

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Perhaps stretching the "image" requirement somewhat, but still pretty damn interesting:
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Ivan Sutherland testing the first VR headset at MIT Labs in 1968
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NASA testing flight controls on VR headset with motion control glove 1988
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NASA 1985 VR headset
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First virtual reality magazine - PCVR 1994
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First 3D online virtual world - AlphaWorld 1995
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This a current favorite of mine that I have seen floating around I don't know if has been posted here previously.

The First Antifascist Action Conference (1932).

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The Hammer and Sickle banners, Social Democratic Party of Germany (SDP) banner, Communist Party of Germany (KPD) banner, and the long central banner that translates to "Long Live the Red United Front", all tie it together nicely.
 
Robert Frank passed away two days ago, he deserves a post here.

Robert Frank, legendary documentary photographer, has died at 94

From another article:

He was best known for his 1959 book The Americans, a collection of black-and-white photographs he took while road-tripping across the country starting in 1955. Frank's images were dark, grainy and free from nostalgia; they showed a country at odds with the optimistic views of prosperity that characterized so much American photography at the time.

His Leica camera captured gay men in New York, factory workers in Detroit and a segregated trolley in New Orleans — sour and defiant white faces in front and the anguished face of a black man in back.
The book was savaged — mainstream critics called Frank sloppy and joyless. And Frank remembered the slights.

"The Museum of Modern Art wouldn't even sell the book," he told NPR for a story in 1994. "I mean, certain things, one doesn't forget so easy. But the younger people caught on."

Eventually, the photographs in The Americansbecame canon, inspiring legions. Photographer Joel Meyerowitz remembered watching Frank at work early on.
"And it was such an unbelievable and powerful experience watching him twisting, turning, bobbing, weaving," Meyerowitz said in 1994. "And every time I heard his Leica go 'click,' I would see the moment freeze in front of Robert."

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The dutch minsweeper named "Abraham Crijnssen" was stranded on its own in Asia after Japan attacked India. Ordered to withdraw to Australia, the crew had to camouflage the ship with plants to make it harder to spot.

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The ship successfully reached Australia and joined the Australian Navy.
Damn good Camo. Took me a few seconds to realize there was a big ass ship in the photo.
 
I'd just like to pop in and thank everyone for this thread. I've spent the last couple of hours reading every single word and seeing every single image and it's just fucking amazing. A historical history thread if you will.
 
March 1st, 1982, just another beautiful day on the planet Venus, as photographed by the Soviet Venera 13 lander.

The outside temperature that day was measured at a balmy 885 degrees Fahrenheit, with a local atmospheric pressure about eighty-seven times as heavy as here on Earth. Although only designed to take pictures and samples for 30 minutes (at which point the probe was projected to be destroyed by the planet's sulfuric-acid rain), Venera 13 managed to hold on for 127 minutes before succumbing.

There was a brief moment of excitement for the possibility of life (somehow) when a dark object appeared to be moving across the ground in the series of images, but this was later dismissed as being one of the probe's camera lens caps that had rolled through the shot after being ejected.

The Soviet space program was relegated in the consciousness of most people to "also-ran" status when the Race to the Moon was won by the US Apollo program, but, they proved much more successful when it came to getting a craft to make a surface landing on Venus, as at least a dozen successful flyby, atmospheric and hard-surface landing probes were sent there from the early 60's and into the early 80's. Just about everything we definitively know about the surface condition of our closest planetary neighbor comes from that series of probes as what was really below the thick cloud cover couldn't be penetrated by light-based terrestrial telescopes and wouldn't be fully topographically mapped until radar-based imaging was used.

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Fun Fact - When compared to the other major planets of the solar system, Venus rotates backwards on it's axis. Scientists aren't sure why, but have theorized that it became tidally locked to the Sun, much like how the Moon is with Earth, and then was sent the "wrong" way by the torque effect of high-speed atmospheric wind currents, which have been measured as being as fast as 220mph, about as fast as a race car that just would have barely qualified for the Indy 500 this year.
 
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My great-grand uncle, circa 1943-45.
RIP 2015

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What airplane did he fly? Looks like a P-51 mustang variant

IIRC, he didn't do much time in P-51's, except in training & until after WW2, as he flew largely in a ground-attack role during both conflicts. He transitioned to F-80s for Korea.

P-40's were better suited to the rugged conditions in China, and by the time he got there Japanese fighters were a lot less of a concern..... and the Mustangs were largely earmarked for escort and air-superiority outfits.

Besides that, China was very much a supply backwater until Germany capitulated and the Philippines were retaken, so they often didn't get the new stuff until equipment started being relocated from Europe.
 
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Can a suicide be beautiful?

'The Most Beautiful Suicide': A Violent Death, an Immortal Photo

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The TIME’s article.

In May 1947, LIFE magazine devoted a full page to a picture taken by a photography student named Robert Wiles. The photograph is extraordinary in several ways—not least because it remains, seven decades later, one of the most famous portraits of suicide ever made. Along with Malcolm Browne's 1963 image of a self-immolating Buddhist monk and a small handful of other photos of men and women seen before, during, or after their own self-slaughter, Wiles' picture graphically and unforgettably captures the destruction—both literal and figurative—that attends virtually all suicides.

The woman in the photo was 23-year-old Evelyn McHale. Not much is known of her life, or of her final hours, although countless people have put enormous effort into uncovering as much about the troubled, attractive California native as they possibly could. For example, the tremendous visual-culture blog Codex 99 has a solid discussion of her life and her suicide. But even that examination of her history and her death feels somehow lacking—not because the Codex post is weak, but because Evelyn left behind so little to hold on to. In the end, there is not even a gravesite; she was cremated, according to her wishes, and no marker or tombstone exists.

But beyond the mystery of Evelyn McHale's life and death, there is the equally profound mystery of how a single photograph of a dead woman can feel so technically rich, visually compelling and—it must be said—so downright beautiful so many years after it was made. There's a reason, after all, why she is often referred to as "the most beautiful suicide"; why Andy Warhol appropiaded Wiles' picture for his Suicide: Fallen Body (1962); why once we look, it's so hard to look away.

In Wiles' photo, Evelyn (it doesn't feel right to refer to her as "Ms. McHale") looks for all the world as if she's resting, or napping, rather than lying dead amid shattered glass and twisted steel. Everything about her pose—her gloved hand clutching her necklace; her gently crossed ankles; her right hand with its gracefully curved fingers—suggests that she is momentarily quiet, perhaps thinking of her plans for later in the day, or daydreaming of her beau.

(Here, again, the Codex 99 post provides insight into her final hours, and maybe her final thoughts.)
For its part, LIFE magazine captioned the picture with language that veers strikingly from the poetic to the elemental: "At the bottom of Empire State Building the body of Evelyn McHale reposes calmly in grotesque bier her falling body punched into the top of a car."
A single paragraph, meanwhile, describing how the scene came about is at-once unsentimental and elegiac:
On May Day, just after leaving her fiancé, 23-year-old Evelyn McHale wrote a note. "He is much better off without me. . . . I wouldn't make a good wife for anybody," she wrote. Then she crossed it out. She went to the observation platform of the Empire State Building. Through the mist she gazed at the street, 86 floors below. Then she jumped. In her desperate determination she leaped clear of the setbacks and hit a United Nations limousine parked at the curb. Across the street photography student Robert Wiles heard an explosive crash. Just four minutes after Evelyn McHale's death Wiles got this picture of death's violence and its composure.
This is not the place to delve into the deep, troubling universe of suicide, with all of its attendant pain, grief and lingering, unanswerable questions. But for a single moment, we can look one last time at Evelyn McHale, and remember her. Even if none of us ever knew her. Even if we'll never really know what pushed her off the building. Even if she's long, long gone, and never coming back.

Evelyn McHale was an American bookkeeper who killed herself by jumping from the 86th floor Observation Deck of the Empire State Building on May 1, 1947. A photograph taken four minutes after her death by photography student Robert Wiles has become an iconic suicide photograph, referred to as “the most beautiful suicide”.

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The photo by Robert C. Wiles was published as the “Picture of the Week” in the 12 May 1947 issue of LIFE Magazine. It ran with the caption: “At the bottom of the Empire State Building the body of Evelyn McHale reposes calmly in grotesque bier, her falling body punched into the top of a car.”

Evelyn, still clutching a pearl necklace, looks disarmingly placid and composed – as if simply asleep. Around her, however, the broken glass and crumpled sheet metal of a car roof shows how brutally destructive her 1040 ft jump was. Some 70 years later the photo remains as haunting and affecting as when it was first published.

Evelyn Francis McHale was born 20 Sept 1923 in Berkeley, California. She was the sixth child (of seven) of Vincent and Helen McHale.

Around 1930 Vincent accepted a position of Federal Land Bank Examiner and the family moved to Washington, D.C. Shortly thereafter Helen left the family for unknown reasons (although, apparently, they were due to her mental illness). They were divorced and Vincent took custody of the children. Later he moved the family to Tuckahoe, New York were Evelyn attended high school. Helen returned home to California.

After high school Evelyn joined the Women’s Army Corps and was stationed in Jefferson, Missouri. It was reported that after her service she burned her uniform.
After the War Evelyn moved to Baldwin, New York to live with her brother and sister-in-law and took a job as a bookkeeper with an engraving company.3 It was here that she became engaged to Barry Rhodes, an ex-GI studying at Lafayette College in Easton, Pennsylvania. They had intended to be married at Barry’s brothers house in Troy, New York in June 1947.

On 30 Apr Evelyn visited her fiancé in Easton presumably to celebrate his 24th birthday and boarded a train back to NYC at 7 am, 1 May 1947. Barry later stated to reporters that “When I kissed her goodbye she was happy and as normal as any girl about to be married.”

Of course we’ll never know what went through Evelyn’s mind on 66-mile train ride home, but after she arrived at Penn Station around 9 am she went across the street to the Governor Clinton Hotel where she wrote a suicide note then walked two blocks east where, shortly before 10:30 am, she bought a ticket to the 86th floor observation deck of the Empire State Building.

Around 10:40 am Patrolman John Morrissey, directing traffic at 34th Street and Fifth Avenue, noticed a white scarf floating down from the upper floors of the building. Moments later he heard a crash and saw a crowd converge on 34th street.5 Evelyn had stepped out on the parapet, jumped, cleared the setbacks, and landed on the roof of a United Nations Assembly Cadillac limousine parked on 34th street, some 200 ft west of Fifth Ave.6 As one reporter wrote “Forenoon shoppers on Fifth Ave were horrified.”

Across the street, Robert C. Wiles, a student photographer, also noticed the commotion and rushed to the scene where he took his iconic photo some four minutes after her death. Later, on the observation deck, Detective Frank Murray found her tan (or maybe gray, reports differ) cloth coat neatly folded over the observation deck wall, a brown make-up kit filled with family pictures and a black pocketbook with the note to her sister which read:

“I don’t want anyone in or out of my family to see any part of me. Could you destroy my body by cremation? I beg of you and my family – don’t have any service for me or remembrance for me. My fiance asked me to marry him in June. I don’t think I would make a good wife for anybody. He is much better off without me. Tell my father, I have too many of my mother’s tendencies.”

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Her body was identified by her sister Helen Brenner and, according to her wishes, she was cremated. There is no grave. Her fiancé Barry eventually relocated to Florida. He never married.

After Wiles photograph appeared in LIFE it was widely republished in a number of photography anthologies and became one of the iconic images of the 20th century. It was the only photograph he ever published.

I’m not crying, you’re crying. :'(
 
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Can a suicide be beautiful?


“I don’t want anyone in or out of my family to see any part of me. Could you destroy my body by cremation? I beg of you and my family – don’t have any service for me or remembrance for me. My fiance asked me to marry him in June. I don’t think I would make a good wife for anybody. He is much better off without me. Tell my father, I have too many of my mother’s tendencies.”

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I salute this woman for doing the right thing. More women should take note, if you believe you will make a shit wife this is a viable solution. Good for her. 👍
 
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Theodor Eicke, one of the most underrated nazis. Commandant of the Dachau camp, commander of SS-Totenkopfverband and Waffen SS Totenkopf division. Here pictured with Robert Ley in Dachau in 1936.
 
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