100 Photographs: The Most Influential Images of All Time

In this unprecedented exploration of 100 photographs that shaped the human experience, TIME goes behind each spectacular image to reveal how and why it changed the course of history.

We live in a culture oversaturated with images. Videos of violence and death circulate with disturbing regularity, only rarely rising to the level of mass public outrage. Social media and news feeds bombard us not only with distressing headlines but with photograph after photograph–doctored, memed, repeated, then discarded and forgotten. It’s impossible to do otherwise than to forget: the sheer volume of visual information most of us take in daily overwhelms the brain’s ability to sort and process.

Emmett Till was brutally killed in the summer of 1955. At his funeral, his mother forced the world to reckon with the brutality of American racism.

The man standing up to a row of tanks in Jeff Widener's iconic Tiananmen Square image became a global symbol of dignity in the face of violent repression.

In his depiction of the Beatles' playful romp at a Paris hotel, Harry Benson distills a magic moment: John, Paul, George and Ringo on the eve of incomparable stardom.

Therese Frare’s scene of the deathbed of AIDS patient David Kirby gave the illness a human face. Its use in a United Colors of Benetton ad blurred the lines between commerce and public provocation in 1990.

HOMEPAGE: http://100photos.time.com/

TIME itself, once a standard bearer for photojournalism, shows us how much our interaction with photography has changed. The so-called “turn to video” may have been mostly hype—we continue to read, listen to podcasts, and yes, pour over striking photographs obsessively. But hardly anything these days, it seems, can pass by without a mini-YouTube documentary. We may not need them to be emotionally moved by these photographs, yet taken altogether, these short videos offer “an unprecedented exploration,” writes TIME, of how “each spectacular image… changed the course of history.”