History, they say, is written by the victors and not the vanquished. However, the stories themselves are told by photographers because there can be no lying in a photograph, even if that photograph is black and white! The history of our gorgeous planet and our great species reminds us where we have been the impressive and terrifying things we have done. Since the invention and development of the camera, photographers have been following right beside, documenting everything from a country’s final public execution to the tearful loving goodbyes shared during times of war and crisis. These 15 black and white pictures depict real people of the past in every walk of life that have added color in some form or other to the future we are living now.
1. Civil War Veteran recounts his war stories to shoeshine boys in 1920
2. An intoxicated man is taken home by a basket man employed at a bar in Turkey in the 1960s
3. An African-American sharecropper and devoted mother from Louisiana teaches her children letters and numbers at home in 1939
4. What a football game looked like in 1920
5. A portrait of Billie Holiday and Mister taken in New York in 1947
6. Eunice Winstead Johns, aged 9 years, and her husband, Charlie Johns, aged 22 years, sit in their home in Tennessee, in 1937
7. An arthritis-ridden Pierre Auguste Renoir continues to paint in his garden in the 1910s
8. The winners of Washington DC’s Tidal Basin Bathing Beauty Contest in 1922
9. An American marine tries to communicate with 2 captured Japanese child soldiers in 1945
10. An opium den in New York City in 1925
11. The progression of women’s bathing suits over 50 years starting 1875
12. A man gets on his knees for his wife in a Chicago Divorce court in 1948
13. Western Union messengers stand ready to work, 1911
14. A Thanksgiving day crowd in 1915
15. American Race car driver Bob Burman in 1910
Images Source: izsmile
