Icons: The Greatest Images of Photojournalism

Think of time as a small stream scattered with flowers and flowing relentlessly past. Pick up a petal. Examine it, savor it, press it away between the pages of private memory. That’s photography. Its birth was announced in 1839, when the French Academy made public Louis Jacques Mande Daguerre’s new process for fixing images on a metal plate and, a few months later, Englishman William Henry Fox Talbot broke the news of his own separate process. Since then, photography has been the best way of making time stand still.

Now think of time as a raging torrent, swollen with the trophies of war, disaster, luck and adventure. Pluck from the current some unidentified floating object. Pass it around. Put it on display. Argue about what it means. That’s photojournalism. No one knows exactly when it was born, but it was in the instant some photographer pointed his lens at an event other people wanted to see. Since then, photojournalism has remained the best way of freeze-drying history for further inspection.

The history of photojournalism is a saga of technological progress, commercial greed and individual heroism. It includes a shocking number of wars and tragedies — events with the visual power that compels people to buy newspapers and magazines. But the development of news photography is also the story of how cameras became smaller and film more sensitive, so that journalists could capture the look of the factory, the dance hall, the dictator’s study, the sharecropper’s cabin and other venues of daily life. These are all here, the momentous and the mundane alike.

The pictures have been piling up for 150 years. Battlefields, floods, summit conferences, auto accidents, congratulatory handshakes, game-winning touchdowns. Most scenes vanish quickly into the newspaper morgue. A few, however, linger in the mind’s eye. Of the billions of metal sheets, glass plates, celluloid spools and other light-sensitive surfaces exposed to history in the name of publishing, only a handful of images have themselves become part of history. These form a sort of shared visual heritage for the human race, a treasury of significant memories. Every educated person should be familiar with them, just as he or she would know the great achievements of painting, sculpture or music. And every person, educated or not, should be moved by these journalistic images, just as he or she would be by the masterpieces of art.

There is hardly any agreement on which, or even how many, news photos belong in this group of photojournalistic icons. The editors of TIME have chosen ten, shown on the following pages in rough chronological order. Photography experts and working photojournalists were consulted, but in the end the selection is TIME’s. Many readers will disagree with the list. That is to be encouraged. But look at these pictures. Pass them around. Put them on display. Argue about what they mean. That’s photojournalism.