LIFE 100 Photographs that Changed the World

Can a still image change the way people feel and act concerning the world they live in? It surely can, often has, and still does today. The power of pictures is celebrated in this portfolio of the most forceful still images of all time. Robert Capa's dispatches from the beach at Normandy and Joe Rosenthal's photographic report of Iwo Jima stirred a nation as in quite an opposite way did Eddie Adams' and Larry Burrows' searing imagery from Vietnam.

LIFE thinks outside the box in this book: Did Marilyn Monroe's pinup change the world? Did Harry Benson's photography of the Beatles deplaning in New York in 1964 alter our cultural focus? The pictures in this book are sometimes beautiful, often striking, and undeniably powerful. On occasion, our arguments are provocative, even controversial. How does LIFE view 9/11? Abu Ghraib? The murders long ago in Mississippi so recently brought to justice? LIFE views these things, not in a political sense, but in the way pictures spoke the story. A fascinating volume, brought up to date.