V-J Day in Times Square (USA)

V–J day in Times Square, perhaps the most famous photograph by Alfred Eisenstaedt, is of an American sailor kissing a young woman on V-J Day in Times Square on 14 August 1945, that was originally published in Life magazine.

Because Eisenstaedt was photographing rapidly changing events during the V-J celebrations he didn't get a chance to get names and details. The photograph does not clearly show the faces of either kisser and several people have laid claim to being the subjects. The photo was shot just south of 45th Street looking north from a location where Broadway and Seventh Avenue converge. (Today, the spot where the kiss took place is on the small island separating Broadway and Seventh Avenue between the Toys R Us and MTV studios in Times Square.)

The nurse in the photo is Edith Shain and the sailor has been identified as Glenn McDuffie.

Soviet Flag raised above the Reichstag (Germany)

In the closing days of World War II the Communist Russian Red Army smashed it’s way into Berlin. In the Nazi capital, the German army was overwhelmed into pockets of resistance that either surrendered or fought fanatically to the last man. On the front lines with the Red Army was Yevgeny Khaldei, Soviet war photographer. In the future, he would say that he spent every 1,481 days of the Russian-German war covering the Soviet battle for the motherland, but in Nazi Berlin he was looking for one thing, his Iwo Jima shot. Khaldei had seen the pictures of American GI’s raising the flag over the Japanese volcano and before the war ended he wanted to snap a similar scene in Berlin.

Soviet Union soldiers Raqymzhan Qoshqarbaev, and Georgij Bulatov raising the flag on the roof of Reichstag building in Berlin, Germany in May, 1945.

Antisemitism almost buried Khaldei into oblivion as his photos including his shot of the Soviet Flag over the bombed out ruins of Berlin were published without credit. It was only till after the cold war and the collapse of communism that professors Alexander and Alice Nakhimovsky came across his name in the Russian archives and created a book showcasing his work

Nagasaki (Japan)

Nothing like the mushroom cloud had ever been seen, not by the general public. It was a suitably awesome image for the power unleashed below. On 6 August 1945 the first atomic bomb killed an estimated 80,000 people in the Japanese city of Hiroshima.
There was no quick surrender, and three days later a second bomb exploded 500 meters above the ground in Nagasaki. The blast wind, heat rays reaching several thousand degrees and radiation destroyed anything even remotely nearby, killing or injuring as many as 150,000 at the time, and more later.

As opposed to the very personal images of war that had brought the pain home, the ones from Japan that were most shocking were those from a longer perspective, showing the enormity of what had occurred.

Raising the Flag on Iwo Jima and Ground Zero (Japan and USA)

Raising the Flag on Iwo Jima is a historic photograph taken on 23 February 1945, by Joe Rosenthal. It depicts five US Marines and a US Navy corpsman raising the flag of the United States atop Mount Suribachi during the Battle of Iwo Jima in World War II.

It became the only photograph to win the Pilitzer Prize for Photography in the same year as its publication, and ultimately came to be regarded as one of the most significant and recognizable images of the war, and possibly the most reproduced photograph of all time.

Of the six men depicted in the picture, three (Franklin Sousley, Harlon Block and Michael Strank) did not survive the battle; the three survivors (John Bradley, Rene Gagnon and Ira Hayes) became celebrities upon the publication of the photo. The picture was later used by Felix de Weldon to sculpt the USMC War Memorial, located outside Washington D.C.

Raising the Flag at Ground Zero is a photograph by Thomas E. Franklin, taken on 11 September 2001. The picture shows three firefighters raising the American Flag at ground zero of the World Trade Centre following the 11 September 2001 attacks.

The firefighters pictured were Brooklyn-based firefighters George Johnson of Rockway Beach and Dan McWilliams of Long Island (both from Ladder 157), and Billy Eisengrein of Staten Island (Rescue 2).