(Dobbs) Important Pictures That Memorialize Momentous Moments Forever

They define tragedies, they define triumphs, they define eras.

All my life, I’ve made a living with words. Words tell the story. The story of our days, the story of our lives.

But it was an advertising executive a hundred years ago named Fred R. Barnard who first said, “A picture is worth a thousand words.” He was right. Since for most of my career I reported for television, sometimes I was the beneficiary of his maxim.

Once a camera crew and I flew into a massive earthquake in Italy’s Apennine Mountains and we were in the rubble of a church that had collapsed on a hundred parishioners, when the then-new Pope John Paul II strode in and lifted the sheet from a bloodied corpse and planted a kiss on the poor soul’s temple. That picture was worth a thousand words. 

When we captured on video the specter in Iran of soldiers from the Shah’s Imperial Guard fighting close-in street battles with young rebellious army recruits who helped usher in the Islamic Revolution, that picture was worth a thousand words.

When I did live broadcasts from the Kennedy Space Center for every space shuttle launch for the last six years of the program, I always stopped talking for the final minutes of every countdown so that viewers could just watch, hear, and absorb what was about to happen, a chance to feel the courage, the intellect, the patriotism, and, as almost four-and-a-half million pounds lifted off toward the cosmos, the sheer power that drove each mission.

That picture was worth a thousand words.

That’s why I was fascinated to attend a recent program at The Vail Symposium in Colorado about some of the most important and impactful pictures in the now two hundred year history of photography.

Some of them define an era. Like this one, which took on the title “Napalm Girl.” 

Her name was Phan Thị Kim Phúc, it was 1972, and she was running from a village during the Vietnam War onto which American warplanes had dropped the jellied burning gas known as napalm. Some say it was this photo that turned the tide of the war. As a backstory, although burned over 80% of her body, Phúc survived and eventually emigrated to Canada where to this day, now 61, she campaigns for human rights.

Another photo from the Vietnam era is equally wrenching.

It was taken by a student during an anti-war protest in 1970 on the campus of Kent State University. His name was John Filo, and he said afterwards that he only had two shots left in his camera so he just clicked it fast before he’d get chased away. The girl’s name was Mary Ann Vecchio. She wasn’t a part of the protest, she wasn’t even a student at Kent State. She just walked into the middle of it and screamed as she kneeled over the body of Jefferey Miller, one of four protesters murdered that day by the National Guard. This also helped turn the tide of public opinion. 

Another photo that defines an era is this one, which on August 6th, 1945, unveiled the dawn of the atomic age.

Whether or not the Second World War in the Pacific would have ended without dropping the bombs on Hiroshima and Nagasaki, the Japanese did surrender less than one month later and the war was done.

But it was during the heart of the war that some of the most iconic photos were shot. Like Robert Capa’s picture of a single American soldier crawling to the Normandy beach under ferocious fire on D-Day, June 6th, 1944. Capa epitomized classic war photographers, once famously saying, “If your pictures aren't good enough, you're not close enough.” 

There’s also Joe Rosenthal’s legendary photo nearly nine months later as American Marines, who had climbed to the highest point of the conquered Pacific island of Iwo Jima, raised Old Glory. 

An earlier photo of an earlier flag didn’t have the drama of this one….

.… so the second picture immortalized the conquest. It became the focus of a war-bond campaign that helped raise $26 billion in the last year of the war. 

And this next one became the focus of the happiest moment of the war: it was August 14th, 1945, VJ Day (which stands for “Victory over Japan”) when after Germany’s surrender, then Japan’s, the war was truly over. Photographer Alfred Eisenstaedt was in Times Square and caught this moment of ecstatic impulse. A thousand words could not have come close.

By all accounts, the nurse (some say she was a dental assistant) and the sailor didn’t know each other and never saw one another again. A New York newspaper put out an appeal a few days later for them to come forward, but they never did. A few other nurses and a few other sailors did try to claim the moment, but it was clear that they weren’t the ones. It is worth noting, if a sailor grabbed a strange woman that way today, there might be hell to pay. But if it was on another day like VJ Day, maybe not.

There are eternally unforgettable photos that define different kinds of eras. Like the space program. 

Maybe most famous, from July 20th, 1969, Apollo 11 and the first man on the moon. Although actually it shows the second man on the moon, Buzz Aldrin. Neal Armstrong, the first, was already on the ground, taking the picture.

Then there’s the amazing picture known as Earthrise.

The story behind it is, none of the three astronauts on Apollo 10, whose mission was to find and photograph the best landing spot for Apollo 11, expected to see what they saw, until Bill Anders shouted at his fellow fliers, “Oh my God, look at that picture over there! There's the Earth coming up.” It was Christmas Eve, 1968.

But of course for those who were alive, this photo from the space program is forever sadly seared into our memories.

The loss of Challenger and its crew in 1986, just 73 seconds into its flight, were a loss for America. The catastrophe was later blamed on a faulty seal and bad decisions. The photograph embodies both the ingenuity of the space program and the tragedy of human shortcomings, all in a single shot.

The photo of a much earlier flight is forever famous: Kitty Hawk, North Carolina, on December 17, 1903. The first-ever powered flight, although that day there were three more. 

It lasted for twelve soaring seconds. That’s Orville on the Wright Flyer, brother Wilbur on the ground.

The photo of a different fateful flight defines the 21st Century.

It led to two wars, tens of thousands of deaths at home and abroad, and a permanent change in our sense of security. But I would also nominate another photo from 9/11 for its importance and impact: President George W. Bush, three days later, on a pile of rubble, his arm upon the shoulder of a retired firefighter who’d volunteered to return to work.

For a few days, we all were up on that pile of rubble, we all had our hands on the firefighter’s shoulder. This picture is worth a thousand words because for a few days, although for the worst of reasons, we were unified.

Almost forty years earlier, two photos defined the end of the era called Camelot. This was November 22nd, 1963, when President John Fitzgerald Kennedy was killed in a motorcade in Dallas. 

It wasn’t just the end of Camelot, it was the end of our innocence. The other photo came just hours later on Air Force One, when Vice President Lyndon Johnson felt it was important to immediately effect the transfer of power and a municipal Dallas judge was rushed to the airport to swear him in. 

They had to plead with Jackie Kennedy to come away from her husband’s coffin in the back of the airplane, because her presence in the photo would symbolize continuity. Someone suggested she remove her blood-stained suit but she said no, “I want them to see what they did.”

There are other quintessential photos that define an era, or a mood, or just a feeling.

Like Dorothea Lange’s peerless picture of a migrant mother and her kids in 1936, during the Depression.

Lange actually asked the woman, Florence Owens Thompson, to turn her children inward— there’s a baby too at the bottom of the photo— because she felt that the focus should be fully on the hopelessness of the woman’s face. Thompson spent her last years in a trailer park near Modesto, California.

We find the same mood in the haunting photograph that appeared in 1985 on the cover of National Geographic.

She is Sharbat Gula, an Afghan refugee, photographed in Pakistan by Steve McCurry during the Soviet–Afghan War. She was 13. Seventeen years later, McCurry tracked her down and took her picture again. 

The more recent shot is worth a thousand words. If there was hope, if there were possibilities in the first photo, they are gone in the second. But the story has a happy ending of sorts: during the Taliban takeover, she was rescued and now, in her early 50s, lives in Italy.

As political pictures go, this photograph on Election Day, 1948, of a re-elected and rapturous president is the best there is and needs no explanation other than to say, it demonstrates the folly of the prediction business.

Others are iconic because they define American culture. Marilyn Monroe in 1954 when an air blast from a subway vent lifts her dress.

The Beatles in 1969, crossing London’s Abbey Road.

And finally, my favorite even if it was staged and makes my stomach churn. 11 immigrant ironworkers in 1932, eating their lunch on a girder during the construction of the RCA Building in New York (now “30 Rock”), 850 feet above the ground. 

The backstory is, after this famous photo was shot and the men came in, a couple went back out on the girder and tossed a ball back and forth, then another went out and laid down on his back. When I look at this great photo, I think of Alex Honnold, the professional rock climber who became the first ever to “free-solo” Yosemite’s El Capitan. He said in a documentary, “When you’re up there, you’re all alone.”

Almost all these photographs are from the 20th Century with a handful from the 21st. But if a single photo from the 19th Century merits a mention, it might be this one by photographer Matthew Brady, who won permission from Abraham Lincoln to accompany troops on the battlefield during the Civil War and was there when Lincoln came to see it for himself. He captured this image of Lincoln in his stovepipe hat, with George McClellan, the commanding general of the Army of the Potomac on his left, and detective Allan Pinkerton on his right. It’s the same hat he was wearing a few months later when he went to Ford’s Theater, and was assassinated.

Nowadays it seems, with the ubiquity of cell phones, there is hardly a human movement that goes unrecorded. But that only underscores the magical quality of important pictures that memorialize momentous moments forever. Pictures that really are worth a thousand words.

Over more than five decades Greg Dobbs has been a correspondent for two television networks including ABC News, a political columnist for The Denver Post and syndicated columnist for Scripps newspapers, a moderator on Rocky Mountain PBS, and author of two books, including one about the life of a foreign correspondent called “Life in the Wrong Lane.” He also co-authored a book about the seminal year for baby boomers, called “1969: Are You Still Listening?” He has covered presidencies, politics, and the U.S. space program at home, and wars, natural disasters, and other crises around the globe, from Afghanistan to South Africa, from Iran to Egypt, from the Soviet Union to Saudi Arabia, from Nicaragua to Namibia, from Vietnam to Venezuela, from Libya to Liberia, from Panama to Poland. Dobbs has won three Emmys, the Distinguished Service Award from the Society of Professional Journalists, and as a 38-year resident of Colorado, a place in the Denver Press Club Hall of Fame.