20 Iconic Photographs & The Cameras That Captured Them

This photo by astronaut William Anders, titled “Earthrise” was taken during the Apollo 8 mission on December 24, 1968. The astronaut used a heavily modified Hasselblad 500 EL camera with an electric drive. The photo was captured on custom 70 mm Kodal Ektachrome film.

Photographer Lyle Owerko captured the tragic events of 9/11 using a Fuji 645zi camera. One of the photos he took that day even made it to the cover of TIME magazine.

The Hindenburg airship disaster that happened in Manchester Township, New Jersey on May 6, 1937, was captured by Sam Shere using a Graflex Speed Graphic camera. Out of the 97 people that were on board during the flight, 36 died.

Malcolm Browne used a simple Petri rangefinder camera to capture the iconic photo of Thích Quảng Đức, a Vietnamese Mahayana Buddhist monk who set himself on fire in Saigon back on 11 June, 1963.

The iconic portrait of the Afghan Girl, Sharbat Gula, was captured by photojournalist Steve McCurry back in 1984 using a Nikon FM2 camera. The photograph made it on the cover of the June 1985 issue of National Geographic but the girl’s real identity remained a mystery until 2002.

The unidentified Chinese man, nicknamed Tank Man, that stood in front of a line of tanks leaving Tiananmen Square on June 5, 1989, was captured by photographer Jeff Widener on a Nikon FE2 camera.

This dramatic photograph of Florence Owens Thompson and her children was captured by photographer Dorothea Lange on March 6, 1936. The photo was taken inside a pea-pickers’ camp on Nipomo Mesa after freezing rain destroyed the crop, leaving the workers without work and pay.

The legendary photo of The Beatles on Abbey Road was captured by photographer Iain Macmillan back in 1969. The photographer used a Hasselblad camera with a 50mm wide-angle lens.

Photographer Alfred Eisenstaedt captured this photo of a US Navy sailor kissing a stranger in New York City’s Times Square back on August 14, 1945. Even though many people claimed they are the ones in the pictures, the real subjects in the photo are unknown.

Photographer Robert Capa captured the events of D-Day using his Contax II camera. He was one of the first troops to land on Omaha Beach and managed to take 106 pictures while under fire. Sadly, only 11 of those survived due to a processing accident in the Life magazine photo lab in London.

Photographer Joe Rosenthal captured this photo of six US Marines raising the flag atop Mount Suribachi during the Battle of Iwo Jima on February 23, 1945. Sadly, three of the six soldiers were killed in action during the few following days.

Photographer Josef Koudelka captured the military forces invading Prague back in 1968. His negatives were smuggled out of Prague and anonymously published in The Sunday Times Magazine under the initials P. P. (Prague Photographer).

This chilling photograph of John Lennon and his would-be killer Mark David Chapman was captured by photographer Paul Goresh just hours before the legendary Beatle was shot near his home in New York City.

Photographer Yevgeny Khaldei took this picture of Russian soldiers raising a flag over the Reichstag during the Battle of Berlin on 2 May, 1945 using his Leica III camera.

Vietnamese American photographer Huỳnh Công Út (Nick Ut) captured this eerie photograph of a 9-year-old girl Phan Thị Kim Phúc running away from a South Vietnamese napalm strike that hit the Trảng Bàng village on June 8, 1972.

Photographer Yasushi Nagao captured the assassination of Japanese politician Inejiro Asanuma by 17-year-old Otoya Yamaguchi on October 12, 1960. The picture won the photographer a Pulitzer Prize and was named World Press Photo of the Year.

Nightclub owner Jack Ruby shot Lee Harvey Oswald, the man who killed US President John F. Kennedy, in the basement of Dallas Police Headquarters on live television just two days after his crime. The photo was captured by photographer Robert Jackson using a Nikon S3 camera.

Photographer Alberto Korda took the photo of Marxist revolutionary Che Guevara in Havana, Cuba, back on March 5, 1960. Guevara was 31 years old when the picture was taken.

Photographer Stanley Forman shot this photograph titled “The Soiling of Old Glory” on April 5, 1976. It shows a white teenager, Joseph Rakes, attacking a black civil rights activist Ted Landsmark using a flagpole with the American flag. The photo went on to win the Pulitzer Prize.

The heartbreaking photo showing 19-year-old Diana Bryant and her 2-year-old goddaughter Tiare Jones falling off a collapsed fire escape was captured on July 22, 1975, by photographer Stanley Forman using a Nikon F camera.