This photo conceals a clue to a brutal story of vengeance.
Two exploration teams raced to the South Pole. Only one made it out alive.
A routine press photo-op in 1937 ended up recording the explosion of the greatest airship ever built.
Today we're sharing the first Lab extra from the new series produced by Coleman Lowndes! Darkroom examines the untold history behind iconic photographs, starting with Robert Falcon Scott's 1912 doomed expedition to the South Pole. A major concern for Scott was documenting his expedition for scientific research, which he relied on photography to accomplish. But taking a picture was a lot more involved a century ago — here's how it worked.
In 1894, a French scientist used a camera to solve a physics problem.
People usually associate the birth of photography with Louis Daguerre’s Daguerreotype. His process became the first widespread method of photography after France revealed it to the world on August 19, 1839. But there were actually multiple inventors of photography, and one of them was an amateur French tinkerer named Hippolyte Bayard. Even before Daguerre's process was revealed, Bayard had achieved photographic results.
The Cuban Missile Crisis began with a photograph.
Child labor was widely practiced until a photographer showed the public what it looked like.
Mao Zedong swimming in a river in 1966 was a big deal.
In 1919, a total solar eclipse helped redefine gravity.
Tommie Smith and John Carlos's 1968 US national anthem protest, explained.
In 1913, suffragette Emily Davison disrupted a major horse race in the name of winning British women the vote.
The best hand-colored photos of the 19th century came from Japan.
The obsessive journey to answer one question: Which of these photos was taken first?
In 1961, Life magazine photographed systemic poverty in Brazil. One Brazilian magazine responded with a similar report—featuring photos of New York City.
And then took credit for "saving" them.
This photo of Lee Harvey Oswald has been analyzed for decades.
An obsessive collector noticed something strange in his 11,000 postcards.
Dorothea Lange's photos of the incarceration of Japanese Americans went largely unseen for decades.
William Mumler claimed he could photograph ghosts... and no one could prove he couldn't.