Five Historical Photos That Tell Stories Worth A Thousand Words

You would go from “Wow!” to “What!” in seconds. I bet.

Vritant Kumar
Lessons from History
5 min readAug 29, 2022

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Photo by kevin laminto on Unsplash

Recently, I am seeing a lot of “Rare Historic Photos” videos on YouTube.

I am so into it that if we were deciding what to watch on YT for next week, this thing would surely become your pet peeve.

So, in order not to, here I present some historical pictures for virtually feeling all your possible emotions. You’ll go from Wow! to What!

Are you ready? Let’s go!

1. Princess Diana Shakes Hands With An AIDS Patient Without Gloves, 1991

Can you believe it? It was 1991. It must have taken a lot of courage and people must have thought she’s gone mad.

This picture is one of the best examples of going out of what you are supposed to do image and doing what is right. We can clearly see compassion and empathy in her smile.

2. The Most Beautiful Suicide

“The most beautiful suicide” – Evelyn McHale, 1947. Source

No suicide is beautiful; it’s tragic. But this picture became one of the most beautiful pictures of suicide ever taken.

The girl in this picture is Evelyn McHale. As her last wish, Evelyn didn’t want anyone to see her body. But little did she know that the photo of her death would become one of the most famous suicide pictures and would be famously called as “The Most Beautiful Suicide.”

Evelyn leaped from the 86th-floor Observation Deck of the Empire State Building. She landed on a United Nations limousine, parked at the curb, and just after four minutes, a photography student named Robert C. Wiles snapped pictures of the body.

It was published as a full-page image 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.”

If you look closely at the picture, you can notice her calm demeanor. She appears as if she’s sleeping. Her legs crossed at the ankles, the way the car’s metal folded like sheets and the pearls and white gloves she had been wearing at the time of her death were elegantly captured in one shot, earning the title of The Most Beautiful Suicide.

I just can’t get over this picture: A tragedy transformed into beauty; a picture that made Evelyn’s demeanor immortal. Tragically beautiful!

3. The Taste of Freedom

Jewish prisoners after being liberated from a Nazi death train in 1945.

Four different emotions on four different faces. Source: Reddit

This picture perfectly captures the horror of the holocaust, smiles among chaos, and the happiness, relief and taste of freedom.

Look at the faces of the women. The lady with the child in the foreground is more relieved than happy. Happier for her child’s life than her own.

The innocence on the child’s face sends shivers down my spine just by imagining what could have happened and brings tears of joy for what had happened. A truly wholesome image.

4. Children are innocent, no matter what side in a war they are; it’s never their war.

A German child meets her father, a WWII soldier, for the first time since she was one-year-old. 1956.

(Photo credit: Helmuth Pirath / World Press Photo of the Year 1956) Source

In the picture, this girl is 12-yer-old. She last saw her father over a decade ago, when she was one-year-old.

The event, where this famous photo was taken, was part of what was known as “Die Heimkehr der Zehntausend” (The Return of the 10,000), as they were the last German prisoners of war to be released by the Soviet Union since the end of World War II.

I can only imagine how emotional she must be feeling at this moment. her eyes want to speak a hundred emotions she’s feeling. And her face, a thousand.

5. The Last One, Finally

The last public execution by Guillotine, 1939.

Source

I first saw the Guillotine in the movie Pirates of the Caribbean. When Jack is captured and brought to the public execution grounds, the officer asks him:

“How would you like to die, pirate? Hanging? Firing squad? Or, new invention, the Guillotine?

To which Jack replies:

“Guillotine? Sounds French. I love French. Did you know that they invented mayonnaise? How bad could it be? It's French.”

And then he sees the Guillotine for the first time. That was a funny scene.

Source: Screen Rant

This is a film scene, but the one above it is not. It’s real. One shows the beginning while the other is the end.

Wonderful, isn’t it?

This story originally appeared on my Substack, Be Curious.

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Vritant Kumar
Lessons from History

I write to EXPLORE as much as I write to EXPRESS. 6x top writer. newsletter: vritant.substack.com