write a narrative essay titled 'a day at the beach

Essay on A Day at the Beach

Students are often asked to write an essay on A Day at the Beach in their schools and colleges. And if you’re also looking for the same, we have created 100-word, 250-word, and 500-word essays on the topic.

Let’s take a look…

100 Words Essay on A Day at the Beach

Arrival at the beach.

Upon arriving at the beach, the smell of the salty sea air greets us. The sound of waves crashing against the shore and the squawking seagulls echo in our ears.

Activities on the Sand

We set up our spot on the warm sand. Kids build sandcastles while adults sunbathe. The beach is a canvas for our creativity.

Fun in the Water

We run towards the cool water, splashing around and playing games. The feeling of the water against our skin is refreshing.

Leaving the Beach

As the sun sets, we pack up, leaving only footprints behind. A day at the beach is always memorable.

250 Words Essay on A Day at the Beach

Introduction.

A day at the beach is a multifaceted experience that engages all the senses. The beach, with its vastness and raw beauty, offers a unique blend of relaxation and adventure, providing an escape from the mundane.

The Arrival

The journey to the beach culminates in the first glimpse of the expansive ocean, a sight that invariably evokes a sense of awe. The salty air, the sound of waves crashing against the shore, and the sight of the horizon where the sky meets the sea, all contribute to a heightened sense of anticipation.

The Experience

Once settled, the day unfolds in a series of sensory experiences. The feel of warm sand underfoot, the taste of salt on the lips, and the enveloping heat of the sun form a medley of sensations. The beach is a theatre of life, with people engaging in various activities, from building sandcastles and playing beach volleyball to surfing and sunbathing.

Exploring the Depths

For the adventurous, the ocean beckons. Swimming in the sea or exploring its depths through snorkeling or scuba diving offers a glimpse into an underwater world teeming with life and color. It’s a humbling experience that underscores the vastness and complexity of nature.

As the day ends, the setting sun paints the sky in hues of orange and red. This spectacle of nature provides a fitting end to a day at the beach. It’s a reminder of the transient nature of our experiences and the enduring beauty of the world around us. A day at the beach, thus, is not just a day spent, but a day lived.

500 Words Essay on A Day at the Beach

The beach, a place where the land meets the sea, is a unique space of transition and transformation. Its dynamic nature, constant ebb and flow, and the juxtaposition of permanence and transience, make it an intriguing subject of contemplation. A day at the beach is not just about sandcastles and sunbathing; it’s a profound experience that engages all the senses and invites introspection.

The first step onto the beach is a sensory overload. The salty scent of the sea air, the sound of waves crashing against the shore, the warmth of the sun on your skin, and the gritty feel of sand beneath your feet all combine to create a symphony of sensations. The sight of the vast, seemingly infinite ocean ahead is humbling, reminding us of our place in the grand scheme of things. The beach is a theatre where nature stages its most spectacular performances.

The Interplay of Elements

Throughout the day, the beach reveals the interplay of the elements. The sun, the sand, the sea, and the sky, each plays its part in this grand spectacle. The sun’s journey across the sky paints the canvas of the day, from the soft pastel hues of dawn to the fiery drama of sunset. The sand, shaped and reshaped by the waves and the wind, is a testament to the impermanence of things. The sea, with its rhythmic dance of the tides, is a symbol of life’s ebb and flow. The sky, with its ever-changing patterns of clouds, mirrors the fleeting nature of our thoughts and emotions.

The Human Connection

The beach is also a social space, a meeting point for people from all walks of life. It’s a place where children’s laughter mingles with the murmurs of lovers, where the solitude of a lone walker intersects with the camaraderie of a group of friends. The beach is a melting pot of stories, each wave bringing a new tale to the shore. It’s a place where boundaries blur, and we reconnect with our shared humanity.

Reflection and Departure

As the day winds down, the beach becomes a place of reflection. The setting sun casts long shadows, and the sounds of the day give way to the quiet whispers of the evening. It’s a time to look back at the day’s experiences, to contemplate the lessons learned, and to carry those insights back into our daily lives. The beach, in its simplicity, offers a mirror to our complex selves, a reminder of our essential interconnectedness with nature and each other.

In conclusion, a day at the beach is more than a leisurely escape; it’s a journey of discovery and introspection. It’s a stage where nature’s drama unfolds, a canvas where our stories intersect, and a mirror that reflects our shared humanity. It’s a place that invites us to slow down, to observe, to feel, to connect, and to contemplate. A day at the beach is a celebration of life in all its beautiful complexity.

That’s it! I hope the essay helped you.

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Sample narrative essay - A day at the beach

write a narrative essay titled 'a day at the beach

It was a sunny day at the beach. The sand was hot under our feet. My little brother Xoli started crying. “Pick him up, Busi,” my mother said.

I picked him up. He was so heavy. And his nose was dirty. I didn’t want that snot on my summer top! I put him down and he started crying again. “Pick him up!” my mother shouted. I picked him up again, wishing I didn’t have a baby brother who was always such a pain.

Finally we got to a good spot and spread out the towels. My mother got out her magazine and started reading. I tried to play on my cellphone but the sun was too bright. So I lay down and closed my eyes.

Suddenly I realised it was quiet – too quiet. I sat up and looked for Xoli. He was nowhere around. Then I saw him. He was digging in the sand close to the water and a big wave was coming. “Xoli!” I shouted. But he didn’t hear me.

I started running as fast as I could. My mother had heard me and she came after me too. But we were too late. The huge wave swept him off his feet. I rushed into the water and managed to grab hold of his arm before he could be sucked out to sea. I picked him up. He was spluttering and crying. When I saw he was all right I nearly started crying too. “Why did you go so far?” I started shouting.

But my mother took him from me gently. “He is just a baby, Busi. We should have been watching him.” The two of us sat with Xoli and built a sandcastle. I found shells to decorate the castle and Xoli clapped his hands. My mother went to buy us ice creams.

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A Day At The Beach Essay

A day at the beach is a perfect way to relax and enjoy the summer sun. The colors of the sand and sea are so relaxing, and the sound of the waves crashing against the shore is just mesmerizing. Spending a day at the beach is definitely a must-do during the summertime!

On a hot, smothering day, my pals and I decided that it was a good day to go to the beach. As we drove into Newport Beach in Rhode Island, the Sun’s bright yellow pellet boiling in the sky, I could see that things were getting chilly. The open-air temperature was dropping steadily and traffic lanes were narrowing down, which meant we were nearing the beach.

As we finally got there, we parked the car and walked to the shore. I could feel the shining Sun beating down on my skin, warming my body up instantly. I could see the long expanse of the shoreline—the waves crashing against the rocks, seagulls flying in the sky, people playing volleyball on the sand, children building sandcastles, couples walking hand in hand. It was a scene of tranquility and peace.

The first thing I did was dip my toes in the water to test the temperature. The water was freezing cold! I quickly took my feet out and decided to go for a walk instead. I walked along the shore, letting the water flow over my feet every now and then. The cold water was refreshing and invigorating. After a while, I sat down on the sand and watched as the waves rolled in, one after the other. It was mesmerizing.

The sound of the waves crashing against the rocks, the smell of salt in the air, the feel of sand between my toes—it was all so calming and relaxing. I could feel all my worries and stress melting away. I felt like I could sit there forever and just soak in the peace and serenity of the moment.

Eventually, my friends came to join me and we spent the rest of the day swimming, playing beach games, and just enjoying each other’s company. It was a day well-spent indeed.

Colorful umbrellas, beach balls, and towels dotted the shoreline as people enjoyed a beautiful day at the beach. The sound of laughter and shouting could be heard over the sound of waves crashing against the rocks. Children were playing in the sand, building sandcastles or digging holes. Adults were sunbathing, reading books, or chatting with friends. Couples were walking hand in hand, enjoying the romantic scenery.

The water was a deep blue and the sky was a clear, bright blue. The sun was a huge yellow ball that blazed in the sky, sending its rays down to Earth. The beach was the perfect place to spend a hot, summer day.

We pulled into a parking place and set out for a stroll across the scorching black asphalt, which radiated heat from the sun. I could see across the silver lagoon, which was tinted blue by the sea. The sand burned my feet as soon as I put them on the silt white sand. Waves crashing and unruffled sea breeze blowing By, I could hear sounds of waves colliding and felt the soothing sea wind brush against me.

I set my beach items such as my castle, sunscreen, and towel on the sand. After I was all situated I started walking towards the water, which looked like a never-ending abyss. As I walked in further the temperature of the water gradually decreased making it feel therapeutic. Now that I was fully submerged in the water I could feel my body slowly relaxing from head to toe.

All my worries and stressors from school felt like they disappeared into oblivion. laying there for what felt like hours but were only minutes, I realized how blessed I am to have this moment right now. Moments like these are what we live for; moments that make us feel truly alive. Experiencing nature and its beauty is one way to achieve pure bliss. Who knew something as simple as going to the beach could provide me with such serenity and peace? As I slowly walked back to my stuff on the shore, I felt grateful for this moment, this day, and this life.

This is a beautiful piece about enjoying a day at the beach. The author describes the scene in great detail, from the sound of the waves crashing to the feel of the sand on their feet. They also reflect on how moments like these are what we live for – moments that make us feel truly alive. This is a great reminder to take time to appreciate the simple things in life that can bring us joy.

As I glanced around my surroundings, the beach was crowded with individuals. People lay down on various colored beach towels to get a sunbathe towards my right, while others are on an umbrella in order to get some rays. I could see many youngsters decorating their sandcastles with smooth round seashells as I looked down.

The smell of suntan lotion and BBQ’s fill the air as I begin to walk on the sand. The sand is warm and feels good as it rubs against my feet. As I get closer to the water, I could see that the ocean was a deep blue color and there were people walking, running, biking or just simply sitting on the beach enjoying their day.

Nearby, I could hear the sound of waves crashing against rocks and seagulls squawking in the distance. The sound of waves crashing makes me feel calm and relaxed. Sitting down on the beach, I let the sun hit my face as I close my eyes and enjoy the moment.

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Narrative Writing: A Day At The Beach

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Lakeisha Gray-Davis

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A painting of a red kangaroo and a man floating above the ground.

Friday essay: kangaroos and kindred spirits – D.H. Lawrence, Garry Shead and catching the flame of creativity

Senior Lecturer in Creative Writing, University of Wollongong

Disclosure statement

Dr Joseph Davis is a relative of the author.

University of Wollongong provides funding as a member of The Conversation AU.

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In 1922, self-exiled English novelist D.H. Lawrence arrived on Australian shores with his German wife Frieda. Travelling by steamboat from Italy to New Mexico via Sri Lanka, the pair disembarked in Sydney to spend a bit of time rediscovering their land legs. Lawrence was already a well-known writer by this point, with works such as Sons and Lovers and The Rainbow having been published in the decade before. However, this is to say little of his and Frieda’s financial situation.

Passing through Sydney’s famed headlands, the pair held in their possession a modest sum of 50 pounds, and after handing over four of those pounds for two nights’ accommodation in the harbour city, it became evident they’d be needing to find cheaper lodging if they were to spend any significant time in “the continent of the kangaroo”.

Boarding the 2pm train from Central Station and heading south, they arrived in the seaside township of Thirroul (now a northern suburb of Wollongong) and took up residence at “Wyewurk”, a Californian-style bungalow overlooking McCauley’s Beach previously leased by a family of 11 children. It was here, writing at the breakneck pace of some 3,000 words a day, that the child-free Lawrence penned his eighth novel, Kangaroo , in a mere six weeks.

I’m ambivalent about Kangaroo. It contains passages as technically and poetically brilliant as any to have been jotted down in English prose before or since, its psychological insights are convincing and artfully understated, while its representation of the Australian landscape remains as evocative today as it was at the time of publication when it helped free a cohort of Australian writers from the anxiety of European influence under which they’d been toiling.

As far as storytelling goes though, Kangaroo, with its clandestine right-wing army forever marking time and making plans, does less to excite my imagination. If I’m being completely honest, for all its virtuosity it probably would have ended up in the great pile of perennially bookmarked classics I was determined to enjoy but never quite got around to finishing were it not for the special place it holds in the oeuvre, and heart, of legendary Australian artist Garry Shead.

Portrait of an artist

Shead first encountered Lawrence through a volume of the author’s letters while working on a documentary in the Sepik Highlands of Papua New Guinea. The year was 1968 and Lawrence had been dead for almost four decades. It made little difference to the impressionable young Shead. The connection transcended both time and space.

In Lawrence’s letters, Shead felt he’d discovered a kindred spirit, a portrait of the artist he took himself to be – however under-realised that vision might still have been at this early stage of his career. As art critic Sasha Grishin, who has spent significant time interviewing Shead and analysing his work and journals, explains ,

[Shead] has always had a special relationship with Lawrence…There is also a strong sense of fidelity – a spiritual bonding. Lawrence is one of the few subjects that Shead will not joke about. Interviews turn sour whenever anyone is critical of Lawrence.

Returning from PNG to Australia, Shead set himself to reading as much of Lawrence’s work as he could get his hands on. Novels, poems, letters, psychoanalytical treatises – wherever the writer had trained his attention, Shead was there to reciprocate it. And when he ran out of printed artefacts, he boarded the same southbound train Lawrence had boarded half a century earlier and alighted at Thirroul – a pilgrimage that proved nothing short of life-changing.

For it was here, with his tattered copy of Kangaroo serving as a sort of mystical travel guide, that Shead began mapping out the series of paintings that would establish his reputation as a major national and international artist, a series Grishin likens to Sidney Nolan’s Ned Kelly series and Arthur Boyd’s Bride series in its conception and execution of a “new Australian myth”.

It’s difficult to put a figure on exactly how many paintings belong in Shead’s so-called D.H. Lawrence series. Does one include the prototypical D.H. Lawrence in Thirroul painting he completed in 1972 after that first trip south? How about the diptych, Portrait of D.H. Lawrence, which he painted the following year with his friend Brett Whiteley, the two of them renting the house next door to Wyewurk where they were sure they could “feel the presence of Lawrence hovering around the place”?

It goes without saying that one must include the 50 individual oil paintings made between 1991 and 1993, when Shead was at the height of his D.H. Lawrence fever, painting and “seeing everything clearly and all at once – whole and true, with the mind and emotions perfectly balanced, like a self-contained natural order”.

But what about the sporadic Lawrence-inspired works that would continue cropping up in the decade or two afterwards, when he’d done his best to move on from the novelist with equally well-received series based on Her Majesty Queen Elizabeth II’s 1954 visit to Australia (2000), or the life and death of fictitious poet Ern Malley (2003)? Try as he might, Shead has never quite been able to exorcise the ghost of Lawrence, which leapt off the page and into his psyche all those years ago.

Local connections

Mind you, I knew none of this when I wandered into Wollongong Art Gallery with half a dozen of my creative writing colleagues from the University of Wollongong back in 2017. We’d been invited to a private viewing of the gallery’s permanent collection in order that we might each choose a work to respond to as part of an upcoming exhibition titled, Jewels in the Crown.

Assembled in the foyer with notepads in hand and backpacks stowed safely in the cloakroom, we might have passed for a group of high-schoolers waiting for their art excursion to begin, had our median age not suggested something closer to the befuddled high school teachers who invariably tag along on such outings.

Eventually we were collected by the gallery’s public programs officer Vivian Vidulich – a woman whose impossibly radiant disposition could not possibly have shone in starker contrast to her trademark gothic attire and makeup. Down the corridor and into the subterranean temperature-controlled storage rooms she led us.

A week or so earlier, we’d been sent a catalogue of works to give us a rough idea of what was available, and I was keen to get a look at Thirroul artist Paul Ryan ’s painting One Last Blackbird, which had been part of a controversial exhibition in 2010 resulting in protests and the temporary closure of the gallery. It was on my way to viewing this work, though, that the ghost of a still-living Shead didn’t so much leap off the page and into my psyche as grab me by the throat and drag me through the timber frame it was prematurely haunting.

The painting was titled Death of Kangaroo, and the best way I can think to describe its effect on me, is to say that I felt “separated” by it. Physically stepping away to get a better view, I could simultaneously feel my consciousness being sucked toward or into its dusky-skied funeral scene, at the centre of which lies the bloated, crucified body of the totemic Kangaroo with his head haloed in a divine, Christ-like light.

At that point, the decision seemed less mine to make as to accept: this would be my painting, the work I would write about. I even knew what I would write: a short story about the kangaroo I’d been instructed to kill while working as a farmhand during my first year out of school – a horrifyingly formative experience to be sure.

I’d describe the farm owner’s Texan-style moustache, the way he’d chastised me for deigning to waste a second bullet on the animal I’d only managed to maim with my first shot, the hoe in the back of the ute with which I was expected to finish the job, the pocketknife I was handed for the purpose of procuring dog meat afterwards, and finally the hands that would have made Lady Macbeth’s look clean by comparison. I’d cleanse myself of this decades-old atrocity with a public confession.

A half-finished version of this story exists and is still taking up storage space on my hard drive. But it isn’t the work I ended up reading at the Jewels in the Crown exhibition. At some point along the way, this unpleasant memory of mine became entangled with somebody else’s unpleasant memory and the work moved in an unexpectedly lyrical direction.

“I had an experience when I was a kid when I used to go to the country with my dad,” begins Shead in a documentary I came across while researching the painting.

I did all the things that men do, you know, go out and shoot things. On one occasion there was a mob of kangaroos and the men told me to stay in this one spot. I was by myself, I was about 15 or 16 with my .22 and this old man kangaroo came by himself loping into the area where I was, and I did what I was supposed to do and took aim and shot him. But I was shattered really. This beautiful creature just dying there. And that was another very important thing that was in the background of this painting. I realised I was trying to repent for what I’d done and that’s why I put the halo.

I don’t want to make too much of this biographical coincidence. This is Australia after all and, having grown up in the country as I did, I know such experiences are not rare. Of more interest and value to me was the glimpse into Shead’s thinking and, in turn, artistic process.

In Lawrence’s novel, he’d discovered a lens through which to examine this key event from his own life and, in Lawrence, a figure onto whom he could overlay his artistic ambitions. The resulting series would be a conglomerate of personal history, biographical research, narrative interpretation and lyrical mysticism, all metaphorised through the world of Lawrence’s mysterious Kangaroo. Through Lawrence, Shead would discover his voice as an artist, just as through Shead, I would set out to discover my own as a poet.

Fanning the flame of influence

In his seminal books, The Anxiety of Influence and A Map of Misreading , literary theorist Harold Bloom argues that poets – or artists, to apply his theory more broadly – toil under the legacy of those stronger artists to have come before.

According to Bloom, it’s the fear of failing to meet the standard set by these forebears that inspires, and then for the most part destroys, each new generation of artists. Under this paradigm, which Bloom models on the competitive father–son relationship encountered in Freudian psychoanalysis, only the strongest manage to wriggle free of the paternal influence and rise to the canonical level of precursor artist themselves – or, as Bloom emphatically puts it: “Poetic strength comes only from a triumphant wrestling with the greatest of the dead.”

I seem to remember coming across a Charles Bukowski story in which the author’s alter-ego goes toe-to-toe with Ernest Hemingway in a boxing ring (nothing subtle about that!), and certainly much has been made of Johannes Brahms’s struggle to compose in the wake of Ludwig van Beethoven’s imposing legacy. Both Bukowski and Brahms wound up producing exceptional art in their lifetimes, so who knows – perhaps Bloom’s theory holds true for some variety of artist.

For me, though, the idea of being locked in neurotic competition with those artists I look up to, those who have nurtured and shaped my sensibilities through their own struggles and offerings, is an affront to the spirit of gratitude that characterises my creative efforts. I don’t feel in competition with these figures, I feel indebted to them.

Or, to shine a light on a different vector of the Oedipal triangle, it isn’t paternalistic fear or anxiety they inspire in me so much as a quasi-maternalistic desire. As Freud’s preeminent successor Jacques Lacan would have it, we learn not only what to desire from our mothers, but how to desire it – a discovery Lacan highlights when he employs the deliberately ambiguous phrase le désir de la mère which can mean both “the desire for the mother” and “the desire of the mother”.

The American novelist Henry Miller – another of Lawrence’s fervent admirers – seasons this variety of desire with artistic flavour when he writes:

The only way to do justice to a man like Lawrence who gave so much, is to give another creation. Not explain him, but prove […] that one has caught the flame he tried to pass on.

The poem I ended up writing for the event at Wollongong Art Gallery was the spark from which a much larger fire has grown. For several years now, I’ve been busy scrawling away with a monograph of Shead’s D.H. Lawrence series lying open on the table beside me, creating a series of some 50 poems that take their inspiration and titles from the works made by Shead between 1991 and 1993.

In some Baudelairean sense, each poem aspires toward a transposition of art from the visual register to the linguistic, which speaks to the project’s formal dimensions and the slew of technical problems I’ve had to overcome in turning them into literary artefacts. But transposition is far from the motivating factor for this project, just as I feel confident in proclaiming it far from the motivating factor for Shead, whose response to Lawrence has been described as “intuitive” and “personal” rather than merely “illustrative”.

Really, the key motivating forces here are gratitude and reciprocity – the impulse to return the favour by “paying it forward”, as it were. To create something in the likeness and spirit of its source so the flame might continue burning for another few years at least.

On this note, it doesn’t surprise me to hear interviews turn sour when journalists make light of Lawrence in Shead’s company. Shead never met Lawrence – they work, for the most part, in completely different media, and yet it would be difficult to name somebody who’s had a bigger impact on his artistic life than Lawrence. To poke fun at Lawrence in Shead’s presence would be to throw water over the flame, to trivialise the sacrosanct nature of the relationship from which Shead clearly derives so much of his artistic strength.

By this, I don’t mean his unique strengths as an artist (“a figurative painter with a flair for allegory and symbolism”, and so on), but rather the strength to make art in the first place. Lawrence is to Shead as Virgil was to Dante , a mythologised figure he has entrusted – and in many ways constructed – to guide him downward into the spiralling underworld of his creative unconscious and out the other side again. Where my own recent poetic adventures are concerned, that guiding light is Garry Shead.

Heroic encounters

They say never meet your heroes: they can’t possibly live up to your expectations and you’ll inevitably wind up disappointed. For Shead, this was obviously never a concern – Lawrence died of tuberculosis 12 years before he was born. In my case though, history has provided no such safeguards. At 82 years of age, Shead is not only still alive, but still producing new work.

I know because I had the opportunity to visit him in his studio last year after he contacted the University of Wollongong, offering to donate a complete set of etchings and collagraphs from his D.H. Lawrence series to celebrate the 100-year anniversary of Kangaroo’s publication. He’d become aware of my poems a few years earlier when I emailed him, requesting copyright permission to reproduce a painting for publication alongside its corresponding poem.

It was an interaction I’d been fretting over since I began the project – my worry being that he wouldn’t merely dislike my rendering, but that he’d be incensed to discover the liberty I’d taken in adapting his work in the first place and demand I put a stop to it. Fortunately, this isn’t how it played out. To cut a long story short, he enjoyed the original poem and took an interest in reading more. And, as I was shameless enough to oblige, I now found myself in the unlikely position of meeting him in person at one of the university cafés to discuss a possible collaboration.

The outcome was a poetry-art exhibition, titled Kangaroo Unbound , co-curated by artist and academic Teo Treloar . Etchings, collagraphs and paintings on loan from Wollongong Art Gallery as well as Shead’s private collection were hung in the university gallery alongside the poems I’d written in response to such works. Glass-top vitrines were filled with etching plates, process prints, early drafts of the poems, and various other paraphernalia (including an early edition copy of Kangaroo annotated by the barber who’d cut Lawrence’s hair during his time in Thirroul!).

There was a public lecture by local historian and Lawrence scholar Joseph Davis and an address by Shead himself, who spoke (not surprisingly) of Lawrence, author of that “eternally contemporary … book of observations, meditations and prophesies”, Kangaroo. While it had been one thing to trade compliments with this artistic hero of mine via email, I don’t mind admitting it was quite another to saunter around the gallery with him on opening night. A definite highlight of my admittedly modest writing career.

Spiritual mentors

After shaking Shead’s hand goodnight and wishing him a safe trip home, I accompanied a small group of friends and colleagues to a nearby hotel for dinner and drinks. One of these colleagues had some years earlier presented me with a small return-to-work gift, a book of essays she’d found insightful, called Light the Dark: Writers on Creativity, Inspiration, and the Artistic Process .

No doubt it was a combination of being in her company while thinking through many of the ideas presented here in this essay that I remembered a passage I’d underlined on my first read. It belonged to a short essay called Strangers on a Train, by the celebrated novelist Yuyin Li .

I pulled it down off my shelf as soon as I got home. “I like to think you write a book to talk to another book. Or write a story to talk to another story,” Li offers, on her way to explaining the role that influence has played in her work.

I remembered it had resonated strongly with me at the time of reading as I’d just published my own debut collection of stories and could’ve opened any random page of this book and told you the exact work I was attempting to “talk to” when writing.

Typically, the impetus amounted to noticing something novel or impressive in another writer’s work and wondering whether I had the chops to pull off the same manoeuvre in my own work. Bloom speaks of creative corrections, where one seeks to improve on the mistakes or shortcomings of one’s forebears, but this is more a process of identifying the strengths of one’s forebears and building upon them – standing on the shoulders of giants, as it were.

While the Shead poems started out in a similar manner, something happened along the way that led to me straining to see behind the canvas. My interest in the paintings, and their subsequent influence, became more personal, just as I believe it did for Shead, whose figurations, while ostensibly based on Lawrence and Frieda, have been labelled “beguilingly autobiographical” by arts columnist Bronwyn Watson , who notes that “Frieda is based on Shead’s wife while Lawrence is based on the artist” himself.

In his Lectures on Russian Literature, Vladimir Nabokov advises the “good [and] admirable reader” to identify himself “not with the boy or girl in the book, but with the mind that conceived and composed the book”. Making my way through this Shead-inspired writing project, this was the state in which I so often found myself – trying as best I could to identify with the mind that composed the iconic series of paintings.

And while I’ve never asked him directly, and am willing to stand corrected, I would wager a similar impulse lies at the heart of Shead’s interpretation of Lawrence’s novel. Having spent much time with these works now, the series strikes me as being less concerned with the novel than with the sensibility that shaped it, that is with “the spiritual mentor, whose fate [Shead sees as being] somehow mysteriously and inextricably bound up with his own”.

The paintings seem to me Shead’s best attempt at entering into direct communion with the man who sojourned in Australia all those years ago, becoming one with Lawrence’s spirit as it were, in an effort to keep alight the flame he brought with him on that long voyage across the Indian Ocean.

From the embers

During the final days of the Kangaroo Unbound exhibition, one of the visual arts lecturers brought her class of first-years to the gallery for a tour. As I wandered around the space talking to small clusters of students about Shead’s artworks and their connection to Lawrence and the Illawarra region more generally, I couldn’t help but notice the young woman sitting cross-legged on the polished concrete floor in front of Death of Kangaroo.

She was by herself and seemed happy enough to be left alone, and so I didn’t interfere. To my delight, though, she stopped on her way out to thank me for the exhibition. She told me she’d never heard of Shead until then, but upon entering the gallery had immediately been drawn to that same painting I’d found myself drawn to all those years earlier – the one on loan from Wollongong Art Gallery.

Moving in closer, she’d taken the time to read the poem hanging alongside the work too, and had found something appealing in its closing lines:

Lift Up Your Hearts And Pray Pardon To The Land Which Is God, for the blood of the bushfire is new and everlasting and only It may rightfully forget or undo – a morte iniquitatis Macropus – this iniquitous death of Kangaroo.

“Here,” she said, passing me the spiral-bound notebook she was clasping in her hand.

With impressive fidelity, she’d sketched the crucified body of Kangaroo onto the cotton-rag paper with a graphite pencil, titling it, “The Iniquitous Death of Kangaroo”.

Standing under the gallery’s museum-standard lighting, I held the work in front of me at arm’s length and couldn’t help but smile at what I saw. The halo around Kangaroo’s Christ-like head was glowing with a burning intensity that I recognised immediately. Somebody else had encountered the flame.

DH Lawrence
Australian art
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The 25 Photos That Defined the Modern Age

A group of experts met to discuss the images that have best captured — and changed — the world since 1955.

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By M.H. Miller , Brendan Embser , Emmanuel Iduma and Lucy McKeon

Published June 3, 2024 Updated June 6, 2024, 1:26 p.m. ET

This story contains graphic images of violence and death.

Let’s get this out of the way first: Of the dozens of photographers not represented here that a reasonable person might expect to have been included, the most conspicuous absentees include Berenice Abbott, Ansel Adams, Robert Adams, Richard Avedon, Dawoud Bey, Henri Cartier-Bresson, Imogen Cunningham, Roy DeCarava, William Eggleston, Walker Evans, Robert Mapplethorpe, Helmut Newton and Irving Penn. Putting together a list of the 25 most significant photographs since 1955 — both fine art photos and reportage — proved a difficult task for the panelists (even the chosen time frame was controversial). They were: the Canadian conceptual photographer Stan Douglas , 63; the Vietnamese American photographer An-My Lê , 64; the acting chief curator of Photography at the Museum of Modern Art, Roxana Marcoci, 66; the American documentary photographer Susan Meiselas , 75; the American photographer Shikeith , 35; and Nadia Vellam, 51, T’s photo and video director. Each participant (including myself, the moderator, 36) submitted up to seven possible nominees for the list. We gathered at The New York Times Building on a morning last February (with Shikeith joining on video from a shoot in Los Angeles) to begin our deliberations.

We chose judges from the realms of both fine art and reportage because, increasingly, the line between the two has collapsed. The modern age has been defined by photographs — images that began their lives in newspapers or magazines are repurposed as art; art has become a vehicle for information. Therefore, it was important to us and our jurors that we not draw boundaries between what was created as journalism and what was created as art. What was important was that the photographs we chose changed, in some way, how we see the world.

Six people sit around a circular table. On the wall, a t.v. showing an image of that room.

The conversation naturally turned into a series of questions. Like how important was it for a photograph to have expanded the possibilities of the medium? And how much did it matter who took a photo and what their intentions were? The list that emerged is less concerned with a historical chronology or an accepted canon than it is with a set of themes that have been linked indelibly to the photographic medium since its inception: labor and activism; war; the self and the family. Intriguingly, beyond an image by Wolfgang Tillmans from the ’90s, fashion photography is largely absent. So, too, are many world historical events that have been captured in landmark photographs, including the assassination of JFK, the fall of the Berlin Wall and anything from the pandemic lockdown or the presidency of Donald Trump. There were just too many other photographs to consider.

The process of producing the final list was clearly not scientific. It was more of a debate among a certain group of people on a certain day and is best considered that way. At the end of nearly four hours, jittery from caffeine, the group stood before a pile of crumpled masterworks on the floor as we assembled our chosen 25 images on a conference table. Many of our questions weren’t resolved (indeed, are unresolvable), but the results — which aren’t ranked but rather presented in the order in which we discussed them — are nothing if not surprising. — M.H. Miller

The conversation has been edited and condensed.

M.H. Miller: I thought we should start by talking about the time frame we settled on, starting in 1955.

Stan Douglas: It’s an agenda.

Miller: A little bit. It certainly shows an American bias, so I apologize to our Canadian representative — 1955 is really the beginning of the American civil rights movement, an era from which a number of us nominated photographs, and photography was so important in just making people aware of what was going on in the country. An-My, you chose Robert Frank’s picture of a streetcar in New Orleans, taken that year.

1. Robert Frank, “Trolley — New Orleans,” 1955

Robert Frank used “Trolley — New Orleans” as the original cover of his influential photo book “The Americans,” first published in the United States in 1959. Frank, a Swiss émigré, spent two years traveling the States and capturing what he saw. In this photograph, two Black passengers sit at the rear of a New Orleans streetcar while four white passengers sit at the front; all look out from a row of windows, the mullions between them emphasizing their strict separation. At the time of its publication, “The Americans” was considered by several critics to be a pessimistic, angry portrait of the country. (The magazine Popular Photography famously called it a “warped” and “wart-covered” depiction “by a joyless man.”) Many more viewers and artists, however, found inspiration in the direct, unromantic style pioneered by Frank, whose outsider status likely let him view America’s contradictions from a clarifying distance. He had “sucked a sad poem out of America onto film,” as Jack Kerouac wrote in an introduction to the book. This image, shot in the months before the Montgomery bus boycotts made segregation a national debate, showed America to itself, as if for the first time. The faces in the photographs, Kerouac wrote, don’t “editorialize or criticize, or say anything but ‘this is the way we are in real life.’” — Emmanuel Iduma

An-My Lê: I tried to look for things that spoke to me, but also spoke to a generation.

Douglas: If I had to choose a civil rights image, I wouldn’t choose this one. Great photograph. But something happening on the street would be more appropriate, I think, like the dog attacking protesters , or the photo with the firemen .

Roxana Marcoci: But this was the cover of “The Americans,” and it does happen in the street, actually. I think that what you’re saying is, it’s not a photojournalistic image.

Douglas: The most important thing to me is: does a photograph reveal a new reality, or reveal something that’s been hidden previously? I think that’s a key criterion for making it significant. What impact on the world can that image have? A European might not have recognized that this was happening in the U.S. Maybe a lot of Americans in the North didn’t realize this was happening in the U.S. And I love this photograph, so I’m very happy to keep it.

2. David Jackson, Mamie Till and Gene Mobley Standing Before the Body of Emmett Till at a Chicago Funeral Home, 1955

Mamie Till fixes her eyes on her dead son, as her fiancé, Gene Mobley, holding her, stares at the viewer. Emmett Till , 14, is laid out on a cot in a Chicago funeral home, his face disfigured and bloated. His mother allowed the photojournalist David Jackson to take this picture in September 1955, a few days after two white men had abducted and murdered Till while he was visiting relatives in Mississippi. Quickly acquitted by an all-white jury, the men would go on to sell their confession to Look magazine for $4,000. When this photo was published, first in Jet magazine and then in The Chicago Defender and other Black newspapers, it incited an unprecedented level of outrage in America over racial violence; Jet had to reprint the Sept. 15, 1955, issue in which it appeared because of high demand. For the same reason Mamie Till let this picture be taken, she chose to keep her son’s coffin open during the funeral. “The murder of my son has shown me that what happens to any of us, anywhere in the world, had better be the business of us all,” she said. An estimated 100,000 people came to view his body. Jackson’s photograph was a call to action for many, including Rosa Parks, who said she thought of Till when she refused to give up her seat on a Montgomery bus later that same year. — E.I.

Miller: I feel like you can’t have this conversation, especially with the year we designated as the starting point, without talking about Emmett Till. There’s the devastating series of photographs of Till’s funeral. But there’s also the one from the trial — when Till’s great-uncle is identifying the men who murdered his nephew. The judge didn’t allow that photographer, Ernest C. Withers, to shoot in the courtroom. So it’s a miracle that the picture exists, and that it’s composed as well as it is when it had to be taken in secret. And it’s a moment where you saw a larger shift taking place. Up to that point in the South, a Black witness identifying white defendants in court was unheard-of.

Marcoci: The picture [of his body] was also about the power of the witness, right?

Susan Meiselas: Oh, for sure. Mamie Till and her insistence on an open coffin: how brave an act that was. And it ran in Jet and moved around the world.

Douglas: The issue for me with the trial picture is that it needs a paragraph to explain why we’re looking at it.

Marcoci: The courtroom was a travesty. They went free. But this, Mamie Till with her son, created a generation of Black activists.

Shikeith: I grew up in a predominantly Black neighborhood in Philadelphia, and when we were learning about Black history in the fourth or fifth grade, that picture was brazenly shared with students. It was probably the first time I learned how powerful a photograph can be in having real material change in the world. It’s an image that I’ve lived with my [whole] life, and that’s impacted how I viewed the world and racism and its violence. It scares me. But, you know, it’s the truth. The truth can be very scary for a lot of us.

Miller: Shikeith, you also selected this Gordon Parks photograph, which is one of two color images the group nominated from the 1950s and ’60s — and the second was taken from outer space.

3. Gordon Parks, “Department Store, Mobile, Alabama,” 1956

In 1956, Life magazine sent Gordon Parks to document the effects of Jim Crow segregation laws in the American South through the experiences of one extended family in Mobile, Ala. Parks was one of the few Black photojournalists to work for an establishment magazine at the time, and was known especially for his fashion photography, as is easily apparent from this image. For Life, he photographed everyday scenes — a church choir singing or children drinking from water fountains — intentionally capturing signs reading “White Only” or “ Lots for Colored .” “Department Store, Mobile, Alabama” (1956) was shot for the Life story, which ran at 12 pages under the title “The Restraints: Open and Hidden” but, for unknown reasons, it didn’t make the final edit, and it wasn’t published until 2012, when a five-volume collection of Parks’s photographs was released. “Department Store” has since become a belated icon, one of the most memorable images in a career that also includes directing the 1971 film “Shaft.” Notable most of all for its vivid color, a startling contrast to the predominantly black-and-white imagery from the civil rights era, the portrait depicts Joanne Thornton Wilson, then age 27, dressed in an ice-blue, A-line cocktail dress, with her young niece, Shirley Anne Kirksey, standing beneath the red neon “Colored Entrance” sign in front of a department store. Wilson’s upright posture and outward gaze — peering in the opposite direction of the sign’s blue arrow — subtly signify defiance. But there’s an intimacy and vulnerability in the picture, too. In 2013, Wilson, who went on to become a high school teacher, told the art historian Maurice Berger that she regretted that the strap of her slip had visibly fallen. “Dressing well made me feel first class,” she said. “I wanted to set an example.” She had set an example, of course, which Parks had recorded with such clarity: Wilson also told Berger that she refused to take her niece through the “colored” entrance. — Brendan Embser

Shikeith: I think what’s beautiful about this image is that it’s brilliantly composed — it uses beauty to draw you into a poignant moment in history, becoming a record of the Jim Crow laws in the Southern U.S. I tried to pick photographs that had an influence on me, and that I thought my mother would recognize, to indicate their influence on people who might operate outside of art history conversations. It [can be used as] a tool for educating even the youngest of minds about what marginalized communities went through.

Marcoci: I think that’s a great point: the pedagogical nature of photographs. In this picture, there’s the elegance and grace of these two figures, and then the ugliness of that “Colored Entrance” sign. There’s such a tension between them.

Nadia Vellam: You don’t immediately realize the context because you’re so attracted to the two people in the image. It asks you to spend more time looking.

Douglas: It’s quite an exquisite picture. It’s basically an X, which draws your eye into the center, which then takes you to that woman’s gaze outside the frame. Inside the frame, there’s something quite sweet. But outside — both beyond that door and out in the world that’s made that door — there’s something quite ugly.

4. Alberto Korda, “Guerrillero Heroico (Che Guevara),” 1960

Alberto Korda, a favored photographer of Fidel Castro, captured this image of a 31-year-old Che Guevara by chance during a funeral in Havana in 1960 to honor the victims of a freighter explosion. Guevara, at the time the president of the National Bank of Cuba, happened to move into Korda’s line of sight while Castro was giving a speech. His expression is one of restrained anger; the Cuban government accused the United States of being responsible for the tragedy, which it denied. Five years later, Guevara resigned from Castro’s cabinet and joined revolutionary causes abroad, including in Congo and Bolivia, where he led guerrillas in a failed coup attempt. Korda’s photo wasn’t widely published until after Guevara’s execution by Bolivian soldiers in 1967, when posters, murals and eventually T-shirts emblazoned with Guevara’s face began to appear around the world. In the original portrait, he is flanked by another man and some palm fronds, but the reproductions are cropped to show just Guevara’s head. Korda’s image made Guevara into something more than a man, or even a famous revolutionary; he became a symbol for revolution itself. — E.I.

Miller: We have two pictures of Che Guevara to consider. Stan, you picked Che following his execution , and Susan, you picked the more famous portrait of him by Alberto Korda. It’s in every college dorm.

Marcoci: It’s in every tattoo parlor.

Douglas: They’re both propaganda images. One is the revolutionary looking to the future, which we’ve seen in everything from Soviet realist paintings to Obama posters. So, in many ways, a cliché, even though it’s had this huge impact. The image of Che dead [which was taken by the Bolivian photographer Freddy Alborta] is both iconic in that it’s like [an Andrea] Mantegna [1431-1506] painting of the dead Christ [“ Lamentation Over the Dead Christ ,” circa 1480], but also as evidence, on the part of the people who killed him, that the guy is dead. It’s just such a weird photograph: the officer on the right who’s poking at Che’s body to prove he’s just a human. Just mortal. And it somehow seemed like the end of the export of revolution from Cuba, which very much shut down after Che’s death.

Meiselas: And then he’s resurrected as a tattoo.

5. Diane Arbus, “Boy With a Straw Hat Waiting to March in a Pro-War Parade, N.Y.C., 1967”

The boy in “Boy With a Straw Hat” doesn’t look like a typical Arbus subject. Wearing a prim collared shirt, bow-tie and boater hat, with one American flag at his side and another, much smaller one twisted into a bow on his lapel, the thin-lipped paradegoer seems like the paragon of anodyne conservatism. He’s nothing like the cross-dressers, carnival entertainers, nudists and others relegated to the margins of society that fascinated Arbus, whose work prompted one of the more protracted debates on the ethics of photography, as her images were so often said to skirt the lines of voyeurism and exploitation. Yet his steady gaze prompts a similar sense of unease in the viewer, as does the small pin on his jacket that reads Bomb Hanoi. “Boy With a Straw Hat” was the cover image of Artforum’s May 1971 issue, published two months before Arbus’s death by suicide at age 48. In 1972, when her posthumous MoMA retrospective drew record crowds, the art critic Hilton Kramer refuted the idea that she was merely capturing her subjects for the sake of spectacle; he argued that she collaborated with the people she photographed, and that that act of participation provided dignity — or at least authenticity — especially for those individuals who are shunned or otherwise invisible. Arbus herself once said that the “best thing is the difference. I get to keep what nobody needs.” — B.E.

Miller: A number of us nominated Diane Arbus photos.

Douglas: [I picked] the sitting room in Levittown [“ Xmas Tree in a Living Room in Levittown, L.I., 1962 ”], which is one of those suburbs created in the postwar period that people could buy [homes in] with their G.I. Bill money, in which Black people couldn’t live. It’s a case of there [being] something outside the image, which is very powerful: The construction of this new suburban reality, while Emmett Till’s being killed.

Marcoci: I chose the “Giant” [“ A Jewish Giant at Home With His Parents in the Bronx, N.Y., 1970 .”], because this was one of the first pictures where I was really thinking, “Who is that person? What would it be like to be him?”

Meiselas: One of the things that photographs do is make us emotional. Some of Arbus’s most memorable pictures are the ones that make you feel more than think.

Vellam: I’d vote for “Giant” just because it spawned so many people’s idea of portraiture: Katy Grannan, Deana Lawson, Larry Sultan. Like this idea of going into a place — in her case, middle-class suburbia — that you may not even have spent any time in otherwise. I feel like that became its own genre: There’s so much photography that has come out of her idea of going into people’s homes.

Marcoci: If I were to choose just one Arbus, I’d probably choose “Boy With a Straw Hat”: A portrait of an individual that’s this very interesting collective portrait of America, too. There’s this tension between the innocent face and then those buttons: “God Bless America” and “Bomb Hanoi.”

Shikeith: He’s sort of the archetype for the Proud Boys. You can see that smirk on his face.

Meiselas: There were pictures from the R.N.C. [Republican National Convention] four years ago that looked so much like this.

Miller: Stan and An-My both nominated a very different kind of photograph from the Vietnam War era: Malcolm Browne’s picture of Thích Quảng Đức’s self-immolation.

6. Malcolm Browne, the Self-Immolation of the Buddhist Monk Thích Quảng Đức in Saigon, 1963

The AP reporter Malcolm Browne was among the only photojournalists on the scene when the monk Thích Quảng Đức set himself on fire in 1963 in Saigon as an act of protest against the South Vietnamese government’s persecution of the Buddhist majority. As flames engulfed Quảng Đức, hundreds of monks surrounded him, mourning while he burned. The photo, sent out as soon as possible on a commercial flight to reach the AP’s offices, was published on front pages internationally the following morning. When President John F. Kennedy saw it, he reportedly exclaimed, “Jesus Christ!” and then ordered a review of his administration’s Vietnam policy. (He would later say, “No news picture in history has generated so much emotion around the world as that one.”) Browne would share the 1964 Pulitzer Prize for international reporting with David Halberstam of The New York Times. The photograph contributed to the collapse of support for the South Vietnamese president Ngô Đình Diệm, who was assassinated in a coup that year. President Kennedy was assassinated just a few weeks later, and his successor, Lyndon B. Johnson, would escalate the war. Browne’s photograph, which is newly resonant today, enshrined the act of self-immolation as the most extreme form of protest. — Lucy McKeon

Lê: I think it’s one of the most incredible monuments that exists as a photograph. [It documents] an extraordinary act of sacrifice for a cause. These days, you see [some] people protesting, and it’s all about their egos. And here, there’s no ego. It’s one of the few pictures I know that’s so violent and peaceful at the same time.

Douglas: He was there for five minutes, apparently, burning, and just didn’t flinch, didn’t say a word. This is what you do when you have no other recourse, when you feel the suppression is so severe that this is the only way you can get your statement heard.

Meiselas: It makes me think of the Napalm Girl, as well [ Nick Ut’s 1972 image of Kim Phuc Phan Thi , age 9, fleeing a napalm attack in the village of Trảng Bàng]. That moment impacted a generation. The question is, which one mobilized us further?

Lê: The Napalm Girl picture, for me, represents the notion that all Vietnamese are victims of war. I started watching war movies in college, and every time the word “Vietnam” comes up, that is the image that people have in their mind. I think the monk speaks to [something] beyond himself. He’s not a victim.

7. NASA/William A. Anders, “Earthrise,” 1968

On Christmas Eve 1968, aboard Apollo 8 during its pioneering orbit of the moon, William A. Anders photographed the Earth “rising” above the lunar horizon. The picture was the first of its kind — and it was also unplanned. Anders, the youngest of the three astronauts on the spacecraft, had been tasked with taking photographs of the moon’s craters, mountains and other geological features. He spontaneously decided, however, to include Earth in the frame when he noticed how beautiful it was. “Here was this orb looking like a Christmas tree ornament, very fragile,” Anders would recall in a NASA oral history. “And yet it was our home.” His first shot was in black and white. For the next, he switched to color, which emphasized the contrast between the moon’s gray surface and the planet’s blue-green vibrancy. “Earthrise” was the first image most of humanity saw of the planet we live on, a nature photo like none before it and a reminder of how small our world really is, in comparison with the rest of the universe. As Joni Mitchell would sing of the image, on 1976’s “ Refuge of the Roads ”: “And you couldn’t see a city on that marbled bowling ball/Or a forest or a highway/Or me here least of all. …” — E.I.

Lê: “Earthrise” isn’t the first image of the Earth seen from space. There were earlier low-resolution ones in the ’40s , made from unmanned missiles or whatever. There was one made on Apollo 4, in 1967 . But I think this one, taken by a crew member on Apollo 8 the next year with a Hasselblad, is important because it’s humbling: seeing the Earth in relationship to the Moon, and thinking about us not being the only people on this Earth. Perhaps this is when we started thinking about how we should take care of our home.

Miller: Stan, you nominated a later photo, “ Sunset on Mars ” (2005).

Douglas: I’ve always had this knee-jerk response to Apollo being American propaganda somehow, part of the arms race — who’s going to get [to the Moon] first, the U.S. or the Russians? And once the U.S. got there, they lost interest. It wasn’t really about exploration, but dominance. This image on Mars is something quite extraordinary, because in effect, the camera is a prosthesis. It’s both a very artificial one and a human one. We actually extend our vision through it.

8. Ernest C. Withers, “I Am a Man: Sanitation Workers Strike, Memphis, Tennessee,” 1968

In the last weeks of his life, Martin Luther King Jr. took part in a protest of Black sanitation workers striking for safer conditions and decent wages in Memphis, Tenn. In a speech, King emphasized the connection between the United States’ civil rights battle and the struggles of poor and disenfranchised people worldwide, a message that resonated with the crowd. Their protest signs bore the phrase “I Am a Man,” a stark acknowledgment of all the ways this most basic fact was disrespected. “We were going to demand to have the same dignity and the same courtesy any other citizen of Memphis has,” one of the participants, James Douglas, recalled in a 1978 documentary titled “I Am a Man.” The defining photo of the strike was taken by the Black photojournalist Ernest C. Withers, a Memphis native who previously shot the trial of Emmett Till’s killers, and also made famous images of the Montgomery bus boycott , the integration of Central High School in Little Rock, Ark. Withers’s picture became the official record of King’s last major civil rights action. Years later, however, Withers’s own story was revealed to have been more complicated. Like King, the photographer drew the attention of the F.B.I. Unlike King, he became a paid informant. Yet he continued to produce some of the most iconic images of the movement: On April 4, 1968, less than a week after taking this photo, Withers was on the balcony of the Lorraine Motel, photographing the blood stain at the scene of King’s assassination. — L.M.

Shikeith: I think I first saw this image around the time the Million Man March was happening [in 1995]. I have a greater understanding of manhood [now] and how much of it I want to align with, and how much I don’t. But I understand how vital the need to identify as a man was in that moment.

Meiselas: I love the contrast of “I am a man,” singular, and “I am a collective.” It’s just all there: perfect distance, perfect composition. Whether or not Withers was working for the F.B.I. …

Douglas: Was he?

Meiselas: Yeah.

Douglas: And his role was to just …

Meiselas: Report on his fellow men. They paid him to spy on his colleagues. It’s a dark story. But let’s not go there.

9. Blair Stapp, Huey Newton, Black Panther Minister of Defense, 1968

In the summer of 1968, outside of the Alameda County Courthouse in Oakland, Calif., where Huey P. Newton stood trial for the murder of a police officer, supporters held up posters of him that instantly became synonymous with the Black Panther Party. The year before, Newton, the party’s co-founder and Minister of Defense, had collaborated with fellow Panther Eldridge Cleaver and the photographer Blair Stapp to stage a portrait of himself in a black leather jacket and a tipped beret, holding a shotgun in one hand and a spear in the other. He’s seated on a rattan peacock chair that recalls chairs woven by inmates in the United States-colonized Philippines decades earlier. Its oval back piece frames Newton’s head like an oversize halo. Two Zulu warrior shields are propped against the wall. Stapp’s portrait and the peacock chair itself have since become an enduring symbol of Black Power. Michelle Obama sat in one for her 1982 prom portrait . Melvin Van Peebles recreated the photograph in his 1995 film “Panther.” The visual artist Sam Durant memorialized Newton in bronze in 2004 , and Henry Taylor painted it in 2007 . After two hung juries, the murder charges against Newton were dropped in 1971. For him, the struggle was about survival — or as he put it, “survival pending revolution.” — B.E.

Shikeith: I was trying to think of images that my grandmothers revered in a way. I think this is one of those images that exists in a lot of Black domestic spaces as a symbol for strength and determination. And it has this royal demeanor that’s been continuously emulated in Black photographic practice, whether amateur or professional.

Marcoci: The beret is almost [like] Che’s.

Shikeith: You can see people replicating this pose on the wicker chair throughout Black portraiture in the ’80s and early ’90s. I’m really interested in photographs that’ve had a long-lasting effect on our daily lives.

10. W. Eugene Smith, “Tomoko in Her Bath,” 1972

In the Magnum photojournalist W. Eugene Smith’s picture of Tomoko Kamimura, 15, she is being bathed by her mother at their home, in Minamata, Japan. Kamimura had been born with a kind of mercury poisoning that would later come to be known as Minamata disease, caused by a chemical factory contaminating the city’s water and food supply for more than 30 years. Smith and his wife, the photographer and activist Aileen M. Smith, lived in Minamata in the early 1970s, taking thousands of photographs to document the toll of the disaster — 1,784 people died after contracting the disease and thousands were left with severe neurological and musculoskeletal disabilities. Images from the series were printed by Life magazine in 1972, and Kamimura’s portrait became, for a time, one of the most famous images in the world. Amid the public outcry, “rumors began to circulate through the neighborhood claiming that we were making money from the publicity,” Kamimura’s father, Yoshio, would later write, “but this was untrue — it had never entered our minds to profit from the photograph of Tomoko. We never dreamed that a photograph like that could be commercial.” The Chisso Corporation, which owned the factory, has paid damages to some 10,000 victims. Kamimura died in 1977, at the age of 21. Smith died the following year. Twenty years later, after a French TV network wanted to use the photograph, Aileen M. Smith transferred control of it to Kamimura’s family. They haven’t allowed the photograph to be reproduced since. — L.M.

Meiselas: Without this documentation by Eugene Smith, I don’t think Minamata and the mercury poisoning would ever have been confronted. So when you do choose to represent a victim, I hope it’s purposeful.

Douglas: I heartily agree. And it’s a beautiful image of a loving relationship between mother and daughter.

Vellam: Smith documented people, but he was also very conscious of what he was doing while he was documenting them. I think he took a very long time after he shot everyone to figure out what he even wanted to show from them.

Meiselas: He believed that they should be better understood.

11. Photo Archive Group, “Photographs From S-21: 1975-79”

Some photographs, taken in the darkest moments of history, end up saying very different things from what their creators intended — like the images that Stalin’s secret police took during the Great Purge, or the ones white spectators took of lynchings in the United States. One of the more extensive photographic records of an authoritarian regime comes from the Khmer Rouge army, which controlled Cambodia from 1975 to 1979 and whose genocidal purges of minority groups and political opponents led to the murder of almost a quarter of the country’s population. Before killing most of its victims, the army took their portraits, in part to prove to leaders that the supposed enemies of the state were indeed being executed. Of the nearly 20,000 people sent between 1975 and 1979 to what was known as the S-21 death camp, the Khmer Rouge’s most notorious torture center, only about a dozen survived. In 1994, the American nonprofit organization Photo Archive Group cleaned and cataloged more than 5,000 photographs taken of prisoners before their executions. A selection of the images, known as “Photographs from S-21: 1975-79,” was published as a book called “The Killing Fields” in 1996 and shown at MoMA the following year. Who was the girl pictured here? What had she seen? It’s impossible to know. And yet the regime’s photographic record offers a way into humanizing and remembering the victims of one of the most ruthless atrocities of the 20th century. S-21 is now the Tuol Sleng Genocide Museum, where a number of the images from “Photographs From S-21: 1975-1979” are on permanent display. — L.M.

Lê: So these pictures were found in an archive in Cambodia [in 1993]. After the Khmer Rouge took over [in 1975], they went on a rampage, killing teachers and anyone who they felt wasn’t one of theirs. The bodies were buried in different locations. But they photographed these people before killing them. There were thousands of these pictures.

Douglas: If you want to make them disappear, why do you document them?

Lê: But that’s the thing. It’s the banality of evil. It’s unconscionable, right? Civilians being just collateral damage in war. Perhaps there are other ways to speak about violence, and I think this [set of photographs] certainly does.

12. Cindy Sherman, “Untitled Film Stills,” 1977-80

Cindy Sherman was 23 when she began making her “Untitled Film Stills,” a series of 70 black-and-white staged self-portraits that explore stereotypes of women in film and mass media. As a student at Buffalo State College, where she originally studied painting, she became fascinated by performers such as Vito Acconci and Chris Burden, artists who put their own bodies center stage. Sherman also liked to dress up as stock characters for parties, purchasing clothes from flea markets and experimenting with cosmetics. In “Untitled Film Stills,” she plays the career girl, ingénue, librarian , mistress, femme fatale and runaway , alternately heartbroken, hung over, daydreaming or determined to escape a predator as though trapped in some film noir. But which film? That feeling of vague recognition was Sherman’s point, as well as that of other artists of the era experimenting with pictures from mass media, who would eventually be called the Pictures Generation, a name based on a 1977 exhibition curated by Douglas Crimp . They wanted viewers to almost recognize the images, so as to heighten the uncanny nature of their work. Sherman initially sold eight-by-ten prints from “Untitled Film Stills” for $50 out of a binder from her desk at her day job as a receptionist at the nonprofit gallery Artists Space in New York. Douglas Eklund, who organized a Pictures Generation exhibition in 2009, noted that the series “never ceases to astonish, as if Sherman knew how to operate all of the machinery of mass-cultural representation with one hand tied behind her back.” Her intuitive grasp of the self-portrait’s theatrical appeal, especially when that self could be manipulated — decades before anyone could have imagined camera filters on an iPhone — has kept “Untitled Film Stills” relevant ever since. — B.E.

Marcoci: There’s something about the “Untitled Film Stills.” It’s this relationship between still and moving images. Cindy Sherman has the capacity to encapsulate, in a single [work], a narrative. She calls on this pantheon of women’s roles from movies that we think we’ve seen, but none of them are based on an actual film still. There’s one [“Untitled Film Still #13,” 1978] where she looks like Brigitte Bardot in a head scarf from Jean-Luc Godard’s “Contempt” (1963), but she’s a librarian. She’s reaching for a book. She makes the Bardot type into an intellectual, which is [an agency] that most male Hollywood filmmakers of the time, or even a filmmaker like Godard, would not have given the real Bardot. She was able to see something about how we engage with mass media and tweak it.

Douglas: I’m not convinced about Sherman. [There’s] an art-world canonization of the work. How important was it? How influential? I don’t think it was that important or influential outside of a very small area.

Marcoci: On the other hand, if you ask people if they know about Sherman, they probably do.

Lê: They do. Many young women find Sherman’s work empowering.

Marcoci: I never thought that we would just be considering photojournalism.

Meiselas: No.

Douglas: I mean, looking at the art world, I would include Ed Ruscha’s “Every Building on the Sunset Strip” [1966].

13. Ed Ruscha, “Every Building on the Sunset Strip,” 1966

As a teenager in Oklahoma City in the 1950s, Ed Ruscha delivered newspapers by bicycle daily along a two-mile route. He dreamed about making a model of all the buildings on his circuit, he later recalled in an interview with the Los Angeles Times, “like an architect standing over a table and plotting out a city.” After moving to Los Angeles for art school in 1956, Ruscha became obsessed with the city’s architecture, particularly on the Sunset Strip, that part of Sunset Boulevard that stretches for about two miles, like his old paper route, across West Hollywood. In 1966, Ruscha photographed both sides of the Strip by securing a motorized camera to the bed of a pickup truck. The result was “Every Building on the Sunset Strip,” a nearly 25-foot accordion-fold, self-published artist’s book. Today, Ruscha is most famous for his text-based paintings, many of which reference corporate logos and advertising slogans, for which he is widely celebrated as postwar America’s answer to the Dadaist nonsense movement. But his photography shares with the paintings a repetitive, deadpan humor. In addition to the Sunset Strip, Ruscha photographed swimming pools, gas stations, parking lots and apartments, and collected the images into small books that provoked the ire of critics — and fellow photographers — who deemed the work lacking in style and meaning. (“Only an idiot would take pictures of nothing but the filling stations,” the photographer Jeff Wall once complained.) But what he created was a kind of time travel, a meticulous, obsessive visual cartography of a long-lost Los Angeles. He and his brother, Paul, still make the trip to photograph the street every couple of years. — B.E.

Marcoci: I love [Ed] Ruscha, and I think we’ve barely touched on conceptual photography. Obviously superimportant, but is he really the photographer that did so much for photography through that series?

Meiselas: I know what you mean. Of course, because the photographs came way early, we rediscovered them after he became famous for painting.

Miller: Well, he’s certainly not as famous as a photographer as some people on this list, but I don’t know if we need to get hung up on that.

Douglas: I think “Sunset Strip” was extraordinary. Ruscha produces photographs governed by a hard-core conceptual procedure. In the case of “Every Building on the Sunset Strip,” the procedure is in the title and, in order to fulfill it, he had to make hundreds of stops along a Los Angeles street. But I also thought this was too inside the art world.

Miller: Maybe this is a good time to talk about Nan Goldin.

14. Nan Goldin, “The Ballad of Sexual Dependency,” 1979-2004

Nan Goldin originally presented “Ballad,” named after a song from Bertolt Brecht’s satirical musical “The Threepenny Opera,” as a series of 35-millimeter slides shown by a carousel projector in bars and nightclubs and backed by an eclectic soundtrack — from Dean Martin to the Velvet Underground. Goldin’s visual diary is itself a bohemian opera of New York’s downtown counterculture, a community freed from convention yet abandoned many times over by society; it documents sex, addiction, beauty, violence, powerful friendship, the AIDS crisis and the joyful struggle to live beyond the limits of the mainstream. Friends were photographed doing the twist at a party or preparing to inject heroin. In “Nan One Month After Being Battered” (1984), a portrait of domestic abuse, the artist’s bloodshot eye meets the lens head-on. Goldin’s “Ballad” has since been credited with inspiring everything from selfie culture to the raw, diaristic aesthetic and saturated color now commonplace across social media and in fine art. Over the years, Goldin would revise and update the series, presenting it with new images and a different soundtrack, and it would become an ubiquitous presence in galleries and museums. But because the work has so thoroughly permeated the culture, it’s easy to overlook just how radical it was when it debuted. In “ All the Beauty and the Bloodshed ,” Laura Poitras’s 2022 documentary about Goldin, the photographer describes a resistance to her art in the ’80s, “especially from male artists and gallerists who said ‘This isn’t photography. Nobody photographs their own life.’ It was still a kind of outlier act.” — L.M.

Marcoci: We’re talking about an artist who’s very much engaged with youth culture, with the cultures that transgress gender binaries. Also with the ravages of a generation that takes drugs, that loves, that dies young. “The Ballad of Sexual Dependency” is a ballad. It shows this group of people as images set to music.

Meiselas: It was radical, it was very impactful to the photographic medium. But here’s my question: Would we be choosing either Nan [Goldin] or Cindy Sherman if we didn’t know their names?

Marcoci: Did you watch the “Ballad”?

Meiselas: Of course. I watched it in 1985.

Marcoci: How many times?

Meiselas: How many times has she changed it?

Marcoci: But even that I like. You don’t need to choose one picture. It’s interesting for me when photography is not just a moment that’s frozen in time, when it has the capacity to change.

15. Wolfgang Tillmans, “Lutz, Alex, Suzanne & Christoph on Beach (B/W),” 1993

A slightly different, color image of the same people in “Lutz, Alex, Suzanne & Christoph on Beach (B/W)” was first published by i-D magazine in 1993 for an unconventional fashion story about camouflage. The German photographer Wolfgang Tillmans staged the scene in Bournemouth, England, where he’d attended art school the previous year, and captured a whorl of bodies in military fatigues, each person clasping another’s arm, thigh or chest, and all wearing camouflage patterns from different countries — a post-Cold War utopia. The black-and-white version was printed on color paper, which accounts for the warmth of its tone. On the beach, Lutz, Alex, Suzanne and Christoph appear as if from a scene in Charles and Ray Eames’s 1977 short film “Powers of Ten,” which zooms out from a sunny picnic into the farthest reaches of the universe. Tillmans’s photograph “seems to model something like chosen family,” says the curator Phil Taylor, who edited a collection of the artist’s interviews. The way Tillmans envisions family in this early portrait — as a tight embrace amid the implied violence of the outside world — is emblematic of the way he would go on to depict men kissing at gay nightclubs or activists at antiwar demonstrations, each a picture of solidarity against the odds. — B.E.

Lê: I think Wolfgang [Tillmans] captured youth culture — in magazines like i-D and The Face — at a time [the early ’90s] when young people were being captured in a different way: It was very clinical and idealized, and he just came out with this very real [take on] youth culture. The pictures were a little more grainy, and I think it [changed] the way young people are seen. My students always bring up his work. I think it’s a way to photograph your family and friends and turn them into real protagonists. And I see that influence as very long-lasting.

Marcoci: What’s interesting in this image is [that] it’s four friends on a beach, dressed in camouflage. Camouflage immediately makes you think of military uniforms, of obedience, of listening to orders. But in the techno culture of these clubs in the 1990s, it had become a symbol of individuality and freedom: the exact opposite of what the uniform means.

Meiselas: This image, if I didn’t know his name, I would’ve just turned the page.

Lê: I think we need a picture that speaks about youth. And I think even though this picture was made in ’93 …

Miller: … That’s still how young people are photographed today.

16. Lee Friedlander, “Boston,” 1986, From the Series “At Work,” 1975-95

Lee Friedlander is best known for photographing America’s social landscape, from mundane street scenes in the Midwest to nudes of Madonna that were taken in the late 1970s. Between 1975 and 1995, he created six series of photographs depicting employees at different types of workplaces, including Rust Belt factories, a telemarketing call center and a New York investment firm. One of these series, commissioned by the M.I.T. Museum and produced between 1985 and 1986, looks at office workers in the Boston area who used desktop computers for their jobs. At the time, this was a fairly new development, but one that Friedlander presciently recognized would come to define not just corporate life but humanity itself. His subjects are often seemingly oblivious — or indifferent — to the presence of the camera. Likewise, his camera often omits the computers themselves, the ostensible subject of his images. Instead, the workers, sitting at brightly lit desks, are pictured from the chest up, their detached expressions familiar to any of us as they sit engrossed in (or bored by) screens just out of frame. With this series Friedlander had tapped into the dark comedy of the mundane. His influence can be seen in a generation of younger photographers who seek to question everyday life — from Alec Soth to LaToya Ruby Frazier — and whose images would mostly be viewed on screens. — E.I.

Marcoci: I love this series.

Douglas: I love it, too, but I put this in out of guilt for not having more art people in here. It’s images of these people just engaged in the world around them.

Meiselas: In autonomous labor. I remember when I first saw this series of white-collar workers in front of machines.

Lê: No one had done that before.

17. LaToya Ruby Frazier, “The Last Cruze,” 2019

LaToya Ruby Frazier’s series “The Last Cruze,” named after the compact car made by General Motors, follows the 2019 closure of an auto plant in Lordstown, Ohio, that had been open since 1966. Over nine months, Frazier documented the impact one corporation can have on a community, which lost thousands of jobs. A selection of images from the series were first published in The New York Times Magazine in May 2019, and the work was later presented as a multimedia installation: More than 60 portraits and video interviews with union workers and their families were mounted to orange metal trusses at the Renaissance Society in Chicago. In the accompanying monograph, Frazier included essays by artists and critics as well as members of the local chapter of the United Auto Workers union. On its cover is this photograph, which she shot from a helicopter, showing a group of workers and their families protesting the plant’s abrupt shuttering and requesting a new product to work on. Other images show Lordstown residents in various states of mourning — wiping away tears or proudly displaying union memorabilia. Born in a Pennsylvania steel manufacturing town, Frazier embedded herself with the Ohio workers, producing one of the most detailed records of the gutting of America’s working class. “‘The Last Cruze’ is a workers’ monument,” she has said. “It is half-holy, half-assembly line.” — L.M.

Marcoci: LaToya Ruby Frazier is a true artist-activist. These workers were losing their pension plans, their health benefits, you name it. It’s a work that includes more than 60 pictures of union workers along with their testimonies, because she also did these interviews with them.

Miller: I think “The Last Cruze” might be the only complete photographic record we have of the impact that corporate decision-making has on a work force. GM skipped town, cut their costs and the people of Lordstown were left holding the bag. We have another picture, nominated by Susan, that also documents labor.

18. Sebastião Salgado, “Serra Pelada Gold Mine, State of Pará, Brazil,” 1986

One of the most striking aspects of Sebastião Salgado’s photographs of an open-air gold mine in Brazil is the scale. Several thousand men — their bodies hunched and fragile — are rendered miniature against the backdrop of a massive pit in the earth. In the photos, most of the miners are climbing into or out of that pit, holding tools or ferrying sacks up and down narrow ladders and steep slopes. In several shots, Salgado chose not to include the horizon within the frame; the viewer can’t see where the workers’ dangerous journey ends. The photographer, who was born in the state of Minas Gerais (which means “general mines”) in Brazil, spent 35 days at Serra Pelada, living alongside the miners while he took these photographs. When they were published in 1987 in The New York Times Magazine, they revealed a late-20th-century gold rush and the appalling conditions facing those at the bottom of it. In the nearly four decades since, Salgado has gone on to capture the burning oil wells in Kuwait, the genocide in Rwanda and the destruction of the Amazon rainforest. Some critics have labeled him an “aesthete of misery,” using the plight of the poor and disenfranchised to make visually striking pictures. When these images are exhibited in a fine art context, their size is so massive, the sheer aesthetics of the imagery threaten to eclipse the act of documentation. But in a profile in The Guardian this year marking his 80th birthday, Salgado responded, “I came from the third world. When I was born, Brazil was a developing country. The pictures I took, I took from my side, from my world, from where I come from. … The flaw my critics have, I don’t. It’s the feeling of guilt.” — E.I.

Meiselas: The scale of what he presented to us at the time was really quite amazing.

Douglas: It was like, “Holy moly, that’s still going on?”

Meiselas: Exactly.

19. Stuart Franklin, an Unidentified Man Blocking a Column of Tanks in Tiananmen Square, 1989

On June 5, 1989, as a column of tanks rolled into formation on Chang’an Avenue bordering Tiananmen Square, the Magnum photographer Stuart Franklin watched from the sixth-floor balcony of the nearby Beijing Hotel. He was holed up there with several other foreign correspondents, who were all covering the weekslong protests, led by hundreds of thousands of unarmed students, against the Chinese Communist Party. Two nights before, the People’s Liberation Army had cleared the area with force; the next morning, they prevented parents from looking for students lost in the fray, and the soldiers fired live rounds even as medics attempted to rush the injured to safety. (Thousands are thought to have been killed in the protests, although an official death toll has never been released.) Suddenly, around noon on the 5th, a young man in a white shirt and dark pants, holding shopping bags in his hands, approached the first tank. On the video footage, it attempts to maneuver around him. Like a matador taunting a bull, he flings his arms in fury and, when the tank turns back, the man jumps out again. Yet the dramatic photograph Franklin took, with five tanks and a destroyed bus in the frame, draws its power from its stillness, its potential energy. (Four other photographers are known to have captured the same scene, including Jeff Widener, whose tightly framed version for The Associated Press ran on the front page of The Times.) Authoritarian regimes cannot tolerate symbolic images of resistance and, while the Tank Man — whose identity has never been confirmed — became an inspiration for pro-democracy movements across the world, he was snuffed out from official Chinese memory. Today, image searches in China for “Tiananmen Square” only turn up cheerful pictures of a tourist destination. — B.E.

Douglas: Multiple photographers shot this image because they were all in the same corner of a hotel overlooking Tiananmen Square. They couldn’t really shoot anywhere else on the square. The first time I saw this scene, it was a video.

Meiselas: Right, there was a television camera. The stills are very different. And I don’t care whose image it is. I’m thinking about the man in front of the tank and what happens when one man stands up. And I love how this looks alongside Ernest Withers’s “I Am a Man.”

20. Adam Broomberg & Oliver Chanarin, “The Day Nobody Died,” 2008

In 2008, the artist duo Adam Broomberg and Oliver Chanarin were embedded with the British Army in Afghanistan during a period that was, at the time, the deadliest week since the war began in 2001. They brought a lightproof box containing a roll of photographic paper, and, occasionally, exposed six-meter segments of the paper to the sun for 20 seconds at a time. They were creating photograms, which, as opposed to conventional war photographs, display the marks of their making but little else. The resulting works — 12 in total — set out “to create a kind of post-mortem of photojournalistic representation of conflict,” as the artists wrote when the work was first exhibited. They made these images on days when a BBC fixer was executed or a suicide attack killed nine Afghan soldiers. But they also made one on the day that the title refers to — a day with no fatalities. In a literal sense, there isn’t anything to see in the images except splashes of light as abstract as a blurry sonogram. When Broomberg and Chanarin arrived in Afghanistan, the war was in its seventh year and, by then, a surfeit of photographs depicting death and violence had long been circulating. There’s hardly consensus on what to leave out when depicting war, but there is some consensus on the need to bear witness. With their photograms, Broomberg and Chanarin found a new, unexpected, but no less emotional way of doing so. — E.I.

Miller: There were a lot of different kinds of images of war from the George W. Bush era. Nadia, you nominated Adam Broomberg and Oliver Chanarin’s “The Day Nobody Died,” which is very abstract.

Douglas: What is it?

Vellam: They did this project in Afghanistan where they took rolls of photo paper and put them outside, exposing them to the sun or the weather. Whatever would happen while the photo paper was exposed was the work. It’s about a new idea of photography, about it not depicting something specific but creating a mood. And this one was taken, as the title says, on a day nobody died, which is such an interesting and different way to talk about a conflict.

21. Richard Drew, “Falling Man,” 2001

When it was first published by The Associated Press, the photojournalist Richard Drew’s image of a man falling to his death from the World Trade Center on the morning of Sept. 11, 2001, was denounced by many readers as exploitative. Several media outlets published the image once, on Sept. 12 — including The Times, on page A7 — but it then disappeared from circulation, confined to shock websites like rotten.com. There was no shortage of graphic images of 9/11, including footage of the planes flying into the buildings. But Drew’s photo was uniquely unsettling because of its uncomfortable elegance: a single victim, framed by both north and south towers, caught in a fragile stasis before death. The image eventually began a strange afterlife as “one of the most famous photographs in human history,” according to the journalist Tom Junod, who wrote a 2003 essay in Esquire in which he attempts to identify the falling man. He couldn’t — not definitively. No one has. Recalling war photography that valorizes the unknown soldier, “Falling Man” would go on to be one of the inspirations for a novel by Don DeLillo and an opera by Daniel Levy. Long after the dust settled on the former site of the World Trade Center, the photograph of the unnamed man remains, like “an unmarked grave,” in Junod’s words, merely asking that we look at it. — E.I.

Miller: I think “Falling Man” is the defining image from the most violent day in America since the Civil War.

Shikeith: I was in middle school when 9/11 happened. Images from that day seem to seep into you. You carry them for life and they dictate certain fears and anxieties.

Miller: And then there are all the images from what happened in the years to come. The pictures of soldiers torturing detainees at Abu Ghraib military prison are arguably the most famous photographs from the war on terror.

22. Staff Sgt. Ivan L. Frederick II, Abu Ghraib Hooded Detainee, 2003

In early 2004, investigations into abuse of Iraqi prisoners by U.S. soldiers at the Abu Ghraib detention facility had already been reported by news outlets including The New York Times and CNN. But the government had kept all photographs of torture out of view — until leaked images reached CBS. Even then, the news anchor Dan Rather would claim, the network’s executives only granted permission to show them when faced with the threat of a scoop by The New Yorker’s investigative journalist Seymour Hersh. (CBS executives justified holding the photos on various grounds, including the desire to avoid retaliation against American hostages.) The Abu Ghraib photos finally appeared in both outlets later that year. Their subject matter is brutal: men stripped naked and made to form a human pyramid with soldiers grinning behind them; a hooded man standing atop a box, hooked to electrical wires. The fact that American soldiers had recorded these scenes on their personal cameras only made them more disturbing. The photos significantly shifted American public opinion on the war on terror, further demonstrating the power of an image to alter a story. They also speak to a broader shift in news photography, in which everyone — no matter their intentions — is now a potential journalist. — L.M.

Shikeith: Both “Falling Man” and the hooded Iraqi detainee have a hard-core bodily effect on me. I think there was a sort of naïveté to the world I grew up in, just this idea that America is the greatest place on earth. For a moment there, we believed the myth. At least I did. When I started seeing these images, I developed a distrust in a lot of things. It only got worse. I have a very pessimistic outlook, but it sort of begins here, with these images.

23. Carrie Mae Weems, “From Here I Saw What Happened and I Cried,” 1995-96

Carrie Mae Weems’s “From Here I Saw What Happened and I Cried” is a work of appropriation that brings together 34 photographs, many of them of Black Americans, dating from the mid-19th century to the late 1960s, which collectively form a lesson on the history of racism in America. At the heart of the work are four images of people who were enslaved in South Carolina — some of the earliest known images that exist of America’s original sin — taken by the photographer Joseph T. Zealy and commissioned in 1850 by the Harvard University biologist Louis Agassiz. Originally intended to illustrate Agassiz’s baseless phrenological theories of Black inferiority, the pictures were rescaled and reframed by Weems, who also tinted them blood-red, making explicit the violence that allowed for their creation. Stored in Harvard’s archives for more than a century, Zealy’s images fell into obscurity, only to be rediscovered in 1976. After Weems used them without permission, the school threatened her with a lawsuit. “I think that your suing me would be a really good thing,” she told the university, as she later recalled to the art historian Deborah Willis. “You should, and we should have this conversation in court.” Instead of proceeding with the suit, Harvard acquired the work, further complicating the idea of ownership that Weems investigates. — E.I.

Vellam: We should talk about Carrie [Mae Weems].

Meiselas: We should definitely talk about Carrie. There are two very different options [“ Kitchen Table Series ,” 1990, and “From Here I Saw What Happened and I Cried.”]

Lê: I chose the “Kitchen Table Series” [in which Weems poses as the matriarch in various domestic scenes she staged in a single room, containing little else but an overhead lamp and a table]. The kitchen table is symbolic — it’s the intimacy of the home. In a way I always felt these pictures were about people being able to be themselves, being open and visible in a way that they maybe can’t in public.

Marcoci: To me, the “Kitchen Table Series” is a true performance for the camera in a way that Cindy’s is in “Untitled Film Stills.” But “From Here I Saw What Happened and I Cried” is an amazing work because it engages with race, with slavery, with colonialism, through an archive. The subjects here were really originally presented as specimens. But what Carrie does is give a voice back to these subjects, whose voices were completely muted. She enlarges the photographs. She tints them blood-red. The whole thing becomes a poem.

Shikeith: This particular work taught me how to use photographs to tell a story. And the fact that [Harvard threatened to sue her] introduces this whole other issue about who gets to tell what stories.

24. Deana Lawson, “Nation,” 2018

The idea for “Nation” came to Deana Lawson in a dream. She was haunted by a story that George Washington’s false teeth were made from the teeth of enslaved people . For months, she kept an image of Washington’s dentures — held in Mount Vernon’s collection — on the wall of her bedroom. Lawson dreamed about a person wearing a mouth guard and wondered if she might forge a connection between the majesty of gold — the jewelry of hip-hop and the regalia of the Ashanti Kingdom — and the fact that the first president of the United States could only speak the lofty words of liberty through teeth that once belonged to the oppressed. Lawson is known for portraits she stages in homes and other intimate spaces, often decorated with a large array of objects: family pictures, children’s toys, a Michael Jackson poster. In her images, Black men and women, their skin captured in color with meticulous attention to shade and tone, appear not as documentary subjects but as vessels. “Her people seem to occupy a higher plane, a kingdom of restored glory,” the novelist Zadie Smith has written of Lawson’s photography. At the photo shoot for “Nation,” Lawson offered three hip-hop artists a selection of jewelry and a mouth guard, typically worn during dental procedures, painted gold. “Someone said that I’m ruthless when it comes to what I want,” Lawson says in an interview in her self-titled 2018 monograph. “I have an image in mind that … burns so deeply that I have to make it, and I don’t care what people are going to think.” “Nation” presents an endless series of questions about Black lineage, going back centuries before the nation’s founding. Lawson later printed the picture of Washington’s teeth on a card and slipped it into the edge of the work’s golden frame. — B.E.

Miller: Deana Lawson seems to be doing something similar to Weems in “Nation.”

Marcoci: I think that’s an amazing image. It’s actually a collage, with the picture of George Washington’s dentures tucked into the top right corner. She’s said photography has the power to make history and the present speak to each other.

25. Carlijn Jacobs, “Renaissance,” 2022

On July 29, 2022, when Beyoncé released “Renaissance,” the first of what she’s envisioned as a three-act magnum opus (act two, “Cowboy Carter,” was released this March), the public was exhausted after two and a half years of pandemic restrictions and unprecedented change to their daily routines. They were stir-crazy and impatient for the dance floor. Beyoncé embraced the sounds of house music pioneered by Black and queer D.J.s, as well as the subversive, high-gloss styling of ballroom culture. The singer appears on the album’s cover in a Giannina Azar-designed silver rope dress, sitting astride a horse covered in mirrors. The image was taken by Carlijn Jacobs, a Dutch fashion photographer interested in the art of masquerade and maximalist glamour, and alludes to both rodeo and royalty. It also conjures a range of artistic references, including Kehinde Wiley’s painting “ Equestrian Portrait of Isabella of Bourbon ” (2016); Rose Hartman’s snapshots of Bianca Jagger on a white horse at Studio 54 in 1977; and John Collier’s 1890s painting of Lady Godiva, the 11th-century Englishwoman said to have rode her horse naked through the streets as a form of protest. — B.E.

Vellam: Does anybody else feel like we’re missing a pop-culture celebrity moment? If we’re talking about images that go everywhere, and that people who live in the middle of the country all are going to look at, I don’t feel we have that.

Douglas: I think it’s important to include the idea of celebrity culture in photography. I’m not quite sure what that would be.

Lê: There’s the [2017] picture of Beyoncé pregnant with all the flowers .

Miller: Initially, Shikeith had also picked Beyoncé from the album cover of “Dangerously in Love” (2003).

Marcoci: But sorry, why don’t we then just choose a [Richard] Avedon of a celebrity?

Vellam: Marilyn Monroe [from 1957]. But don’t we feel like we have plenty of photographs from the past? Don’t we want to think about what celebrity is now?

Miller: What’s the iconic pop culture image from the last five years?

Douglas: Is there a Kardashian image?

Vellam: I can’t, because I hate them so much. But yes, you want the thing of [Kim Kardashian] when she broke the internet with her butt [an image that ran on the cover of Paper magazine in 2014].

Douglas: I’m going back to Beyoncé, because [you want] an image of a celebrity who’s not a person but an image. She’s like a simulacrum somehow.

Vellam: With her “Renaissance” cover, suddenly she was plastered everywhere. It was all over the city.

Douglas: I’d buy that.

Shikeith: I think it’s very important that she released this album and highlighted Black queer contributions to music in the culture because, very frequently, those same contributions are erased or attributed to someone else. Especially in pop culture.

Marcoci: Can you hold it up on your phone?

Vellam: Yeah. I listen to it all the time.

Top: Gordon Parks, “Department Store, Mobile, Alabama” (1956) © the Gordon Parks Foundation; NASA/William A. Anders, “Earthrise” (1968); Alberto Korda, “Guerrillero Heroico (Che Guevara)” (1960) © Alberto Korda, courtesy of the Alberto Korda Estate; Stuart Franklin, an unidentified man blocking a column of tanks in Tiananmen Square (1989) © Stuart Franklin/Magnum Photos; Deana Lawson, “Nation” (2018) © Deana Lawson, courtesy of the artist and David Kordansky Gallery; LaToya Ruby Frazier, “United Auto Workers and Their Families Holding up ‘Drive It Home’ Campaign Signs Outside UAW Local 1112 Reuther Scandy Alli Union Hall, Lordstown, OH, 2019,” from the series “The Last Cruze” (2019) © LaToya Ruby Frazier, courtesy of the artist and Gladstone Gallery

An earlier version of this article referred imprecisely to the first presentation of LaToya Ruby Frazier’s series “The Last Cruze.” A selection of images from the series ran in The New York Times Magazine in May 2019, and the larger work was later shown as a multimedia installation at the Renaissance Society in Chicago. It was not first presented at the Renaissance Society. The article also misstated the date of the Tank Man photograph by Stuart Franklin in Beijing; it was June 5, 1989, not June 4.

An earlier version of this article referred incorrectly to Malcolm Browne’s Pulitzer Prize in 1964. He shared the Pulitzer for international reporting that year with David Halberstam of The New York Times; he did not win for his photograph of Thích Quảng Đức.

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M.H. Miller is a features director for T Magazine. More about M.H. Miller

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Home — Essay Samples — Geography & Travel — Beach — Descriptive Writing: The Beach

Descriptive Writing: The Beach

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Beach Description Essay

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Looking for simple and beautiful descriptive writing about a beach in summer? The beach description essay below is just what you need! Get inspired for your own creative writing with us.

Introduction

Description of a beach.

Summer is the perfect time for individuals to visit and enjoy the marvelous scenes along the coast. In addition, the feelings and experiences felt on the beach during the summer are always fantastic. Several sceneries and experiences are seen and felt at the beach during summer. These include; the plantation along the beach and inside the sea, the animals, the waters, and the people found on the beach.

The beach appears to be alive and joyful with the presence of the natural vegetation. There are evergreen plantations both along and inside the beach. Images of buoyant seaweeds can be seen along the shore. Palms trees are seen to stand tall along the beach, dancing to the tune of the breeze emanating from the waters of the sea.

The sea grapes and the sea oats are also observed gathered in clusters in the sea next to the shore. Their colored flowers are splendid and brighten at the shining of the summer sun. The sweet scent of the flower grapes sends a signal to the world about the hope brought by nature.

The atmosphere is fully intensified by the aroma produced by the buoyant sea flowers. In addition, from afar, images of leafless trees are also observed. The perfect combination of the vegetation along the beach and inside the sea displays the beauty of nature to the highest peak.

It mesmerizes the eyes to gaze at the beautiful creatures that hover all over the beach and on the deep-sea waters. There are sights of beautiful birds that fly all over the dry shoreland and over the seawaters. Their colored feathers brightened the sea with a marvelous appearance at their illumination by the sun’s rays.

There are varieties of birds that are in the vicinity. For instance, there are pelicans and seagulls. Pelicans are seen hovering over the sand, singing sweet melodies that make the atmosphere at the beach vibrant. The seagulls are also observed to be flying over the seawater in small groups. Some of the birds are gathered in groups spreading the wings that cloaked a soft shadow on the gentle water ripples.

Next to the shore, there are sea turtles that seem to enjoy the summer heat from the sun. Their eggs are also seen to be exposed on the sand by the children that play on the shoreline. Bees are seen flying from one flower to another over the sea grapes. The humming of the bees as they gather nectar from the sea flowers attracts insect-eating birds.

Large crowds are observed all over the seashore. These people come to enjoy themselves on the beach at this period of the year. In the sea, people of all ages and sexes are seen swimming and playing with the cool seawater. The scorching heat from the summer sun is felt on the forehead of all individuals.

This makes the people chill themselves in the cool waters of the sea. The children are seen playing beach ball on the shoreline. Some children are also seen pelt each other with sand on the shoreline. Besides, young boys are observed climbing tall palm trees to gather fruits.

What is more, several activities take place along and inside the shoreline. Vendors are seen carrying ice creams and soft drinks all over the shoreline. Views of homes, hotels, and other buildings that run along the peak of the beach are also seen. On the sand where children play, pieces of shells are scattered.

In most cases, children collect the shells for fun. In the shades built along the shoreline, people are seen reading books, journals, and magazines. Some are seen idling on the sand, while few adults are observed playing football.

However, there is a disgusting scene of plastic bags, cigarette butts, food wrappers, and beer bottles along the beach. These items seem to pollute the entire shoreline and the seawater.

Anglers are also observed far into the sea casting large nets into the waters to have a bulk catch of their prey. Some of the anglers are also observed perching on the edge of the shore carrying sticks in their hands. Their faces displayed the anticipation that they had for their prey.

The deep waters of the sea produce a marvelous view for anyone who gazes at the sea. The water is seen to be slowly running low on the shore. Small waves are also observed crashing on the shoreline. The surface of the sea is seen to appear blue in color.

However, some portions are also seen to have the spectrum that results from the sun’s refracted rays. Deep inside the sea, there are high waves that lift boats up and down mightily. The shimmering waves of the sea that are clear and blue mirror the rays of the hot sun. The refreshing breeze that emanates from the seawater is enjoyable.

In conclusion, the beach has a perfect view and activities that are delightful to experience during the summer. It is a place that everyone would love to be at all times.

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IvyPanda. (2019, April 17). Beach Description Essay. https://ivypanda.com/essays/description-of-the-beach-scene-in-summer/

"Beach Description Essay." IvyPanda , 17 Apr. 2019, ivypanda.com/essays/description-of-the-beach-scene-in-summer/.

IvyPanda . (2019) 'Beach Description Essay'. 17 April.

IvyPanda . 2019. "Beach Description Essay." April 17, 2019. https://ivypanda.com/essays/description-of-the-beach-scene-in-summer/.

1. IvyPanda . "Beach Description Essay." April 17, 2019. https://ivypanda.com/essays/description-of-the-beach-scene-in-summer/.

Bibliography

IvyPanda . "Beach Description Essay." April 17, 2019. https://ivypanda.com/essays/description-of-the-beach-scene-in-summer/.

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How to Write Narrative Essay
10 Lines Essay On Beach In English
Narrative Essay. How to Write a WAEC Standard Narrative Essay. #waec # neco #ghanahotgossip
Day at the Beach: Jack Tempchin (Beach Jams)

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Essay on A Day at the Beach
The beach, a place where the land meets the sea, is a unique space of transition and transformation. Its dynamic nature, constant ebb and flow, and the juxtaposition of permanence and transience, make it an intriguing subject of contemplation. A day at the beach is not just about sandcastles and sunbathing; it's a profound experience that ...
Sample narrative essay
It was a sunny day at the beach. The sand was hot under our feet. My little brother Xoli started crying. "Pick him up, Busi," my mother said. I picked him up. He was so heavy. And his nose was dirty. I didn't want that snot on my summer top! I put him down and he started crying again.
A Day at the Beach Essay
The beach was surrounded by dense trees and it was very clean. My mother sat on the sand under a tree and took out a book to read. My sister and I went to play with the water in the sea. We splashed water on each other and enjoyed the sea waves when they made us go up and down. After some time, we came back. Then I and my sister made a sandcastle.
A Day At The Beach Essay Essay
A Day At The Beach Essay. A day at the beach is a perfect way to relax and enjoy the summer sun. The colors of the sand and sea are so relaxing, and the sound of the waves crashing against the shore is just mesmerizing. Spending a day at the beach is definitely a must-do during the summertime! On a hot, smothering day, my pals and I decided ...
A Day at the Beach: A Personal Narrative Essay of Relaxation and
View Narritive Essays.pdf from PSYCH 203 at City Colleges of Chicago, Wilbur Wright College. Personal Narrative Essay: A Day At The Beach I stretched my arms out and looked up and down the beach.
A Day by the Seaside: Nostalgia and Tranquility
In conclusion, a day by the seaside unveils a symphony of nostalgia and tranquility. The beach, with its sands of memories and the timeless dance of waves, reconnects us with the carefree days of childhood. It becomes a canvas where personalities are reflected, and the sunlit horizon heralds the promise of a new day.
Descriptive Essay : A Day At The Beach
Descriptive Essay : A Day At The Beach. As I stood there, on the beach, glancing at the ocean in awe of the beautiful sight, a sudden gust of wind blew past me. Each individual strand of my hair crossed my face, the sun played peek-a-boo as it made its appearance just above the horizon, as if it were too scared to show its' beautiful light.
A day at the beach
A day at the beach by Thoughtful Learning is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 4.0 ... Grade 1 Grade 2 Grade 3. Mode: Narrative Writing. Form: Narrative Paragraph Personal Narrative. Theme: Travel Play Family Friends. Standards Correlations: The State Standards provide a way to evaluate your students ...
Narrative Writing: A Day At The Beach
10/11/2020. Country code: BS. Country: Bahamas. School subject: Written Composition (1061433) Main content: Drafting a personal narrative (1194664) From worksheet author: Students will write the first draft of their personal narrative on A Day At The Beach.
Descriptive Essay: A Day At The Beach
Descriptive Essay: A Day At The Beach. Decent Essays. 817 Words. 4 Pages. Open Document. As I arrive at the beach, I am greeted by a cluster of familiar faces of fellow family members. I slowly break away from the crowd and reach one particular vantage point from which I can gaze out at the lazy sea. Gently swashing against the shore and ...
Descriptive Essay About A Day At The Beach
The Beach is a written in the style of a narrative as if it is telling a story. It begins "at daybreak" and describes all the people on the beach at this time of day. It continues to talk about all the different folk that come to the beach displaying the disparity between people and the walks of life they come from.
Welcome to the Purdue Online Writing Lab
The Online Writing Lab at Purdue University houses writing resources and instructional material, and we provide these as a free service of the Writing Lab at Purdue. Students, members of the community, and users worldwide will find information to assist with many writing projects. Teachers and trainers may use this material for in-class and out ...
Friday essay: kangaroos and kindred spirits
It was here, writing at the breakneck pace of some 3,000 words a day, that the child-free Lawrence penned his eighth novel, Kangaroo, in a mere six weeks. David and Frieda Lawrence standing at the ...
Personal Narrative Essay: A Day At The Beach
I closed my eyes, letting myself absorb the blistering rays of the sun on a scorching summer day. The beach was oddly quiet for this time of that year, only a handful of people sunbathing. I didn't mind, I was going to enjoy myself. I headed out to the water after setting up my towel. The shock of the frigid water took my breath away and I was ...
A Day Spent at the Beach
On a hot, sunny day a great place to go is to the beach. I would go out to the beach to enjoy the water, the sun, or just to be with family and friends. There are so many things about the beach that makes it a calming and soothing place. The most obvious objects that stand out are the sight...
The 25 Photos That Defined the Modern Age
1. Robert Frank, "Trolley — New Orleans," 1955. Robert Frank used "Trolley — New Orleans" as the original cover of his influential photo book "The Americans," first published in ...
A Short Essay on the Topic of a Day at the Beach
To protect the anonymity of contributors, we've removed their names and personal information from the essays. When citing an essay from our library, you can use "Kibin" as the author. Kibin does not guarantee the accuracy, timeliness, or completeness of the essays in the library; essay content should not be construed as advice.
Story Sequence: A Day at the Beach (elem/upper elem)
Picture Prompts: Football (primary) / Story Sequence. Media Type PDF. Read the story, then number the events as they occur in the story. Write the story again in your own handwriting and draw a picture to go with the text.
A Day at the Beach
A Day at the Beach. This essay sample was donated by a student to help the academic community. Papers provided by EduBirdie writers usually outdo students' samples. It was a sweltering summer day, the kind where it's almost too hot to walk, and most kids were inside playing games or having fun at the beach. But unlike most kids, I was moving ...
Utah Beach
Utah Beach was the westernmost of the five beaches attacked in the D-Day Normandy landings of 6 June 1944 and the one taken with the fewest casualties. Paratroopers were also dropped behind Utah, and despite being widely dispersed and suffering heavy casualties, they managed to secure this western flank of the invasion and liberate the first French town, Ste-Mère-Église.
A Day At The Beach, Short Story
A Day At The Beach. Emelia Garbers, Grade 4. Short Story. 2014. One sunny day I went to the beach with my family. I went with my mum, my dad and my little brother. We had so much fun we built. sand castles,went swimming and splashed each. other we were having the best time ever! until I went for another swim and I didn't realize how far out I was.
Erie a narrative essay titled'A day at the beach'.
Here is a narrative essay titled 'A day at the beach': A hot summer day, the sun was shining brightly in the clear blue sky. I decided to head to the beach to relax and escape the heat. After packing some snacks, a beach chair and umbrella, sunscreen and a book, I headed down to the shore. I arrived at my favorite cove beach and it was tranquil ...
Narrative Essay About Going To The Beach
Narrative Essay About Going To The Beach. It was finally summer vacation and my family and I decided to go to the beach as soon as the last day of school ended. While I sat in my seat in class, the anticipation of going to the beach kept me from concentrating, all I saw was the teacher's familiar mouth formations, speaking to the class about ...
A Day At The Beach, Short Story
A Day At The Beach. Olivia King, Grade 6B. Short Story. 2016. "Come on Jamie! Try and catch me!" my little sister called. We were running on the sand at the beach. My 7 year old sister called holly was looking back at me over her shoulder. "Into the water she goes.".
Descriptive Writing: The Beach: [Essay Example], 716 words
Descriptive Writing: The Beach. The beach is a place of relaxation, peace, and tranquility for many people. Its vast expanse of sand, the soothing sound of waves crashing against the shore, and the gentle sea breeze create an atmosphere that is both invigorating and calming. In this essay, we will explore the sensory experiences and the beauty ...
Narrative essay on a day at the Beach
There were so many things that we had bought for our family day at the beach, like snacks and refreshments and meats and rice and so the list goes on. Now that the day had finally arrived, I was ready to spend a wonderful time with my parents at the beach. On Sunday morning, my mom and dad had been busy cooking the food in the kitchen while I ...
Beach Description Essay: Descriptive Writing about a Beach in Summer
Description of a Beach. The beach appears to be alive and joyful with the presence of the natural vegetation. There are evergreen plantations both along and inside the beach. Images of buoyant seaweeds can be seen along the shore. Palms trees are seen to stand tall along the beach, dancing to the tune of the breeze emanating from the waters of ...