The famous photographs that changed the world
From the political to the environmental, photography immortalises the transient and harnesses an unparalleled power to haunt eternal, inform change and trigger debate the world over.
In celebration of the new Photography Centre at the V&A, opening this October, we unpick the stories of 10 of the most famous photographs that have changed the world.
Earlier this year this heart-wrenching image of a starving polar bar went viral; more than 2.5 million watched the footage on the National Geographic website alone. Roaming around an ice-free landscape, the polar bear is in desperate need of food to survive; the Nat Geo team captioned the video: 'this is what climate change looks like.
The bear's desperate plight reignited the global conversation on the devastating and immediate impact of climate change. Things, though, are not always as they seem. The location team was not able to provide enough evidence to prove that the bear's physical state was directly linked to climate change, resulting in a public apology. They never discovered what happened to the bear.
