Some photographs are indelibly fixed in the collective consciousness. While the figures in these images can be celebrities – Buzz Aldrin standing on the moon, or Muhammad Ali knocking out Sonny Liston – others are anonymous individuals whose main link with history is they were photographed. The crying girl fleeing napalm in her Vietnamese village, for example, or the man casually eating lunch on a steel beam hundreds of feet in the air. In other cases, the unknown figure stands alongside history and pulls us in – like the Dallas police detective with a shocked expression next to Lee Harvey Oswald after he is shot by Jack Ruby.
You might wonder: Who are these people? And what happened to them after the photo was taken? The answers to these questions are as particular as the individuals themselves – but more often than you might expect, the answers are known. Here are the stories of the people inside some of the most famous photographs of all time, and where life took them after the shutter clicked.
