Budapest, November 1956. The sixteen-year-old girl stands in the middle of a revolution, a firearm in her hands. Her name is Erika Szeles. Around her, Hungary has risen against the Soviet-backed regime that rules the country.
For a few days, it looks as though the uprising might succeed. Then the Soviet forces return with tanks, and the revolution is crushed. Erika Szeles dies in the fighting, one of the youngest people to lose her life in one of the most significant acts of resistance of the Cold War. She is sixteen years old.
She is one face in a century of photographs that captured history without announcing itself. Some of those photographs show the moment just before everything changed. One of them shows the Titanic, full and moving, as it departs Queenstown in Ireland on April 11, 1912. The ship looks exactly like what it was designed to be: the largest and most luxurious ocean liner ever built.
The people on deck are waving, some of them at family they will never see again. The photograph was taken by a passenger named Father Francis Browne, who disembarked at Queenstown. That decision saved his life. In three days, the ship will be at the bottom of the Atlantic.
In Berlin in 1945, the war has just ended. The city lies in ruins. A woman writes a message on a wall, one of thousands of notes left by people searching for family members. There are no phones, no databases, no internet.
There are only handwritten names on broken walls, left in the hope that someone who knew something will walk by and see. Some of those names were never answered. They are still on the walls in photographs like this one. In 1954, Marilyn Monroe stands on top of an M46 Patton tank in Korea, surrounded by thousands of United States soldiers who have not seen home in months.
She flew in specifically to perform for them, doing ten shows in four days in freezing temperatures, wearing a dress. She later said it was one of the most meaningful things she ever did. The soldiers who were there never forgot it. Some of them talked about it for the rest of their lives.
In Central Park, New York, in 1974, a young street performer does mime. He has a small crowd and a hat on the ground for tips. He is good at what he does; you can see it in the way the crowd watches. The photographer did not know his name and would not have known it mattered.
The young man is Robin Williams, twenty-three years old, living in New York and performing wherever anyone would watch. Within four years, he will be one of the most recognized faces in the world. In this photograph, he is just a man on a sidewalk making strangers stop. In Normandy, France, in 1944, Winston Churchill asks a French soldier for a light.
The soldier obliges, and both men look completely at ease. The photograph was taken during the liberation of France, one of the defining moments of the Second World War. Churchill had been awake for days, and had crossed the English Channel to watch the Allied forces advancing. He wanted a cigarette.
A French soldier had one. In the middle of a war that had consumed the world, two men shared a flame. At Bikini Atoll in 1946, photographers prepare their equipment for what they are about to witness. In a few hours, the United States military will detonate a nuclear device, and the cameras are being set up to record it.
The photographers know what is coming. Some of them were at Hiroshima and Nagasaki the year before. They have already seen what these devices do to cities. Now they are watching one go off in the open ocean.
The images they captured that day are still used in scientific literature today. In Tehran, Iran, in 1979, women are marching in protest against a new law requiring them to wear the hijab in public, imposed by the government that came to power after the revolution months earlier. Many of these women had supported the revolution. They had wanted the previous government gone, but they had not voted for this.
They came out in the thousands to say so. They were not listened to. The mandatory hijab remained. Most of these women spent the rest of their lives under it.
In Chicago around 1931, Al Capone sits in the stands at a baseball game, asking Gabby Hartnett, the catcher for the Chicago Cubs, to sign a baseball for his son. Hartnett signs it, and Capone smiles. The photograph caused a minor scandal when it was published, because it showed the country’s most wanted man attending a public event and being treated like any other fan. Capone was arrested the same year, not for any of the violence he had ordered, but for tax evasion.
The baseball, in all likelihood, still exists somewhere. On Wall Street in New York in 1918, Douglas Fairbanks lifts Charlie Chaplin above his head on the steps of a building. Both men are grinning. They are there to sell Liberty bonds, war bonds used to fund the United States military effort in the First World War.
Chaplin and Fairbanks were the two most famous people in the world at that moment. When they appeared together on Wall Street, the crowds were so large that traffic stopped for blocks. They raised enormous sums of money that day. The whole thing took less than an hour.
In the 1980s, Michèle Mouton was the only woman to have ever won a round of the FIA World Rally Championship. She did it in 1982 in the Rally of the Ivory Coast, driving a road that most professional male drivers refused to enter. Her team principal initially did not want to sign her, and the press did not know how to write about her. She won anyway.
She retired in 1986 with a record that still has not been matched by another woman in the sport. History moved on. Her achievement did not. On June 16, 1917, in France, soldiers wear the color known as horizon blue, a pale grayish blue chosen specifically because it blends into the sky.
At the start of the First World War, French troops had gone into battle wearing bright red trousers and dark blue jackets. They were easy targets. Hundreds of thousands of them died in the first months of the war. The government finally changed the uniforms.
This is what the change looked like. It came too late for the men who died before it. In 1901, Niagara Falls froze. The mist that usually rises in clouds became walls of ice, and the roaring rush of water went almost silent.
The station at the base looks like it belongs to another world, buried under snow and surrounded by frozen formations that no architect could ever design. Nature had decided to stop the falls, and for a moment it did. In 1914, the Panama Canal opened. It did not exist ten years earlier.
To build it, tens of thousands of workers moved mountains, literally, digging through a continent. The death toll during construction was staggering: over 25,000 lives lost to disease and accidents. When it finally opened, ships no longer had to sail around the entire southern tip of South America. The world got smaller, and this ditch in the ground is why.
In 1973, Motorola built the first portable mobile phone. Martin Cooper, the engineer who led the project, made the first call on a New York City street, calling his rival at Bell Labs to let him know. The phone weighed over one kilogram. The battery lasted 25 minutes, and it took ten hours to recharge.
Cooper said afterward that he was surprised by how little attention it attracted. People on the street barely looked. Nobody understood what they were watching. They were watching the end of the world as it existed.
On July 20, 1969, in Buenos Aires, Argentina, a crowd gathered outside an electronics store to watch a television. Neil Armstrong was about to step onto the moon. Most of these people had no personal television, so they watched through a store window in the street at night, with strangers. The moon landing was not just an American event.
It was a human event. And in Buenos Aires on that night, these people understood that something had changed, something about what was possible and what was not. On March 6, 1953, in Milan, a man kisses a photograph of Joseph Stalin. Stalin died that morning, and in cities across Europe and the world, people who had believed in him, truly believed, were openly devastated.
Stalin had overseen the systematic destruction of millions of his own people. He had run labor camps and manufactured famines. And still, in 1953, grown men wept in the streets. History has rarely produced a more disturbing example of what propaganda can do to the human mind.
In 1960, flight attendants of the Concorde were photographed. The aircraft they worked on did not yet exist as a finished product; it was still being designed. The Concorde would not make its first commercial flight until 1976, but the people who would one day staff it were already being prepared. They were trained, selected, uniformed, and photographed for a plane that was still years away from carrying a single passenger.
The confidence required to do that is remarkable. So is the plane they were waiting for. In Texas in 1938, a veteran of the First World War lives alone in a small cabin overlooking Nueces Bay in Corpus Christi. He built it himself by hand from whatever materials he could find.
Twenty years earlier, he was in the trenches in Europe. Now he is here. The war gave him a story he carried for the rest of his life, and took things from him that never came back. The cabin is small.
The view is large. He chose the view. That much at least was his. In China in 1910, a man stands on top of a stone elephant at the Imperial tombs.
These massive stone animals line the approach to the tombs of Chinese emperors, placed there to guard the dead into eternity. The man on top of the elephant has no idea he is standing at a site that will become one of the most visited historical locations in the world. He just looks like a man who climbed something he probably should not have climbed. Some things never change.
In 1905, Mark Twain sits on a porch in New Hampshire. He looks comfortable, unhurried. He is seventy years old, and has already written the books that will outlive everything else about his era. What most people do not know is that by 1905, Twain had lost most of his money in bad investments, buried his wife and two of his daughters, and was writing in a darkness that never fully left him.
The man on that porch had seen more than the photograph suggests. In California in 1858, men work a gold claim, standing in freezing water and shoveling gravel, looking for something most of them will never find. The gold rush was one of the greatest mass migrations in American history. It brought hundreds of thousands of people to a territory that had barely been mapped.
Most of them found nothing. Some of them found enough. A few became very wealthy. The men who made the most reliable money were the ones selling shovels and boots to everyone else.
That lesson has never stopped being true. In the late 1950s, at the Walt Disney studio during the production of 101 Dalmatians, animators work at large wooden desks with pencils and paper. Every single frame of that film was drawn by hand. The entire movie required an estimated 17 million drawings.
The studio had recently developed a new process called xerography, transferring animation drawings directly to film cells. That saved years of work. Without it, the film might never have been completed. The result is 101 dogs that have never stopped running.
In 1964, Enzo Ferrari was photographed. The company bearing his name had been producing road cars for less than 20 years, but the racing team behind it had already won more Formula 1 championships than any other constructor. Ferrari was not a businessman. He was not an engineer.
He was an obsessive, a man who believed that the car was the only thing that mattered. He treated his drivers as instruments and his machines as art. Some of the greatest and most tragic stories in motorsport carry his name. On September 17, 1982, HMS Invincible returns to Portsmouth after the Falklands conflict.
People line the docks, and the sailors crowd the deck. After ten weeks of fighting 8,000 miles from home, they are back. The Falklands conflict was a war that almost nobody expected. It ended with British forces retaking the islands at a cost of 255 lives on one side and 649 on the other.
The people on that dock are not thinking about the numbers. They are thinking about one person coming home. In 1956, Sophia Loren sits at the wheel of a Mercedes-Benz 300SL Gullwing during an Italian rally, moments before an accident. She walked away.
The car did not. What is remarkable about this photograph is not the crash. It is that Loren was competing in the rally at all. She was one of the most famous women in the world.
She did not have to be there. She chose to be. The photograph, captured by Federico Patellani, shows a woman in complete control seconds before everything stopped being in her control. In Rome in 1953, Sophia Loren is at home.
She is in her early twenties, and the career that will make her one of the most recognized faces of the 20th century is just beginning. She is already striking, already completely herself. What the photograph does not show is where she came from. Born during the Second World War in a city under occupation, raised in poverty in a small town south of Naples, the child of parents who never married, everything she became she built from almost nothing.
The image of effortless elegance hides a great deal of effort. In the early 1970s, Carly Simon was just beginning. The music career that would define her had barely started. Within a few years, she would write one of the most famous songs in American pop history and spend decades refusing to reveal who it was about.
The secret became as famous as the song. She finally told one person in 2015. He agreed to keep it to himself. The mystery, in many ways, was always the point.
In St. Petersburg, Russia, in 1924, a human chess game is played in a public square. Real people in period costumes act as the pieces, moving on command and being captured when the position demands it. Chess had a specific cultural importance in Soviet Russia.
It was considered a game of intelligence and strategic thinking, officially promoted by the state. This is the revolution made theatrical, a game being performed in a square where a few years earlier very different performances had taken place. In New York City in 1892, a woman sells hot potatoes from a cart on the street. She has been standing there since before sunrise, and will be there until she runs out of stock or light, whichever comes first.
She has no permit, probably, no insurance, no retirement plan. She is keeping herself alive by standing in the cold and selling food to people walking past. This was the economy for most people in 1892: not the stock market, not the banks, but a cart and potatoes, and the cold. In the Arctic Ocean in the 1970s, the crew of an icebreaker has a drink on the frozen sea.
The ship forced its way through pack ice to get to this spot. The temperature is well below freezing, and the ice beneath them is meters thick, yet they sit on it in folding chairs with cold drinks. There is something deeply human about this: men in one of the most extreme working environments on Earth finding a way to have a normal afternoon. The ice does not care.
They sit on it anyway. In Paris, France, in 1950, Coca-Cola has arrived. The bottles are displayed in a shop window. The French government actually attempted to ban Coca-Cola from the country, fearing American cultural influence.
The ban was overturned, and by the end of the decade, the drink was everywhere. What looks like a simple commercial photograph is a document of one of the great cultural battles of the post-war era, a battle between the American way of doing things and the European insistence on doing things differently. America won this one. In Kakheti, Georgia, in 1881, a man stands next to a vessel taller than he is.
It is a Kvevri, used to store wine. Kakheti is one of the oldest wine-producing regions in the world; some evidence of winemaking here dates back 8,000 years. The Kvevri is buried in the earth up to its neck to maintain a stable temperature. The man next to it is part of a tradition so old that the written history of most civilizations does not reach back to its beginning.
He looks proud. He should. Inside a Harley-Davidson factory in the 1920s, the machines are enormous and the workers are young. At this point, Harley-Davidson had been building motorcycles for less than 20 years and had already become the preferred vehicle of the United States military during the First World War.
What you are looking at is the beginning of an American icon being assembled by hand, one piece at a time, in a factory that smelled of oil and metal and possibility. In Toronto, Canada, on June 29, 1981, a group of women sit in a fountain weaving a Canadian flag together. It sounds like a simple patriotic image, but look at the year. Canada had only adopted its current maple leaf flag in 1965.
The generation of women in this photograph grew up under a different flag entirely. This one was still new, still theirs in a way the old one never quite was. They are not just weaving fabric. They are weaving something they chose.
In France in the 1900s, these men are not on stilts for a circus act. They are shepherds. In the marshy lowlands of the Landes region of southwestern France, the ground was so soft and wet that walking was nearly impossible, so the shepherds learned to walk on stilts. Some could run on them.
Some could knit on them while keeping watch over their flocks. The French government eventually drained the marshes. The stilts disappeared, and an entire way of life vanished with the water. In the 1950s, a woman stood at the base of a giant sequoia and looked up.
The tree was already old when Columbus arrived in America, already ancient when the first European maps of California were drawn. These trees live for thousands of years. They survive fire and drought. The woman in the photograph will not outlive the tree she is standing next to.
Almost certainly, nobody alive today will. There is something in that fact that is very hard to sit with. In Portland, Oregon, in 1958, a drive-in restaurant has cars lined up, with car hops moving between vehicles. This is not fast food as it would later be understood.
No drive-thru window, no standardized menu, no corporate branding. This is a specific American moment: the car as dining room, the parking lot as social space. The culture of the automobile had reshaped the country so completely that people did not even want to leave their cars to eat. The drive-in was the purest expression of that idea.
In Los Angeles in 1949, this is a drive-thru market. Customers pull up in their cars to buy bread and packaged goods without leaving their vehicles. This concept predates the fast food drive-thru by years. Los Angeles in 1949 was already a city designed entirely around the automobile.
The freeway system was being built, and the streetcar lines were being torn up. The car was not just transportation; it was identity. And this little market on the corner understood that before most of the country did. In Shanghai, China, in 1938, a merchant is pushed through the street in a wheelbarrow.
This is not unusual for the time. Wheelbarrow transport was a common form of urban travel in Chinese cities for centuries: practical, low-cost, requiring no fuel. But 1938 in Shanghai was not an ordinary year. Japanese forces had occupied parts of the city.
The streets that looked busy and commercial in this photograph were also streets where extraordinary violence had occurred months before. The ordinary and the terrible existed side by side. They usually do. In Staten Island, New York, around 1970, the McDonald’s crew poses for a photograph.
At this point, McDonald’s has been expanding for about 15 years and already has thousands of locations. The workers in this photograph are teenagers and young adults, wearing paper hats and polyester uniforms. They do not know they are part of the most successful fast food expansion in history. They are just working a shift, smiling for the camera, making minimum wage.
In Hollywood on August 11, 1982, the arcade is full. Teenagers stand shoulder to shoulder, dropping coins into machines. This is the peak of the arcade era, the moment before home consoles became powerful enough to replace the experience. Pac-Man has already happened.
Donkey Kong is on every corner. These young people are playing games that do not save progress, do not tell stories, do not connect to the internet. They just demand your full attention and take your quarters. It was enough.
For a moment, it was everything. Look at this man. He stands in the Norwegian Highlands around 1910 holding the reins of a white reindeer, wearing sunglasses and smoking a pipe. He is Sami, one of the indigenous people of northern Scandinavia.
His people have herded reindeer across these lands for thousands of years. What looks like a casual portrait is actually a record of a way of life that governments across Europe spent most of the 20th century trying to erase. They did not succeed. Around 1913, these women were not marching in celebration.
They were marching in demand of the right to vote, something half the country was still being denied. They came from every state. They carried signs, and the crowds that gathered to watch them were not always polite. Some threw things.
Some shouted. These women kept walking. It took seven more years, but they kept walking. In Coney Island, New York, in the 1950s, the beach is packed, the sun is out, and the rides are running.
This is what leisure looked like for working-class New Yorkers in the middle of the 20th century. Not a vacation abroad, not a resort, but a subway ride to Brooklyn and a day in the sand with 50,000 other people. Coney Island at its peak was the most visited amusement destination in the United States. Some of the people in this photograph had never been anywhere else.
For them, this was enough. In New York City in January 1910, a streetcar pushes through a blizzard. The passengers inside have no heat, and the driver has no protection from the wind. The streets are almost impassable, and yet the car is moving because it has to.
Because in 1910, if you stopped working, you stopped eating. There were no sick days, no work from home, no backup plan. You got on the streetcar, and you went. In West Germany in October 1959, these people are not celebrating.
They are protesting. Fourteen years after the end of the Second World War, Germans were still living with the consequences of a division that cut families in half, separated neighbors, and turned a single country into two separate realities. The wall had not been built yet; that came in 1961. But the fracture was already there.
These people were asking questions that would not be answered for another 30 years. In Chicago in the early 1970s, a man rides a chopper bicycle down the street. These bikes were everywhere during this era: long forks, banana seat, high handlebars. They were built to look like the custom motorcycles that grown men rode.
Children wanted to be dangerous. They wanted to feel like they were going somewhere. The chopper bicycle let them pretend. It was one of the great toys of the 20th century, and it looked absolutely ridiculous.
That was entirely the point. In New York City in the 1950s, the sign above the door reads Fat Men Shop. This is not a joke. This is a legitimate retail store catering specifically to larger men, at a time when the fashion industry had not yet acknowledged that not every customer was the same size.
The men going in and out of that door needed clothing that fit. This store sold it. It is, in its own way, a small act of dignity in a decade that was not always good at providing it. In 1950, a police officer arrests a man dressed as a skeleton.
The man is clearly intoxicated and clearly committed to his costume. The officer looks like he has seen stranger things, which, given that it is 1950 and this appears to be a Halloween celebration, he probably has. What makes this photograph remarkable is not the absurdity of the scene. It is the fact that someone thought to capture it.
Somebody looked at a drunk skeleton being handcuffed and thought, this needs to be preserved.
