A picture is worth a thousand words. It may be a total clich, but some photographs really do stand up to this claim. Photography, when used as an artistic format, can be highly expressive, provocative and full of meaning. However, it is when it’s used as a story-telling device – a means of documenting important moments in history – that photography is at its most direct, urgent and compelling. The medium of photography can be used to force the world to take notice of injustice or suffering, but it can also spread messages of hope and possibility.

Often, when photographers find themselves in warzones or at scenes of natural disasters, they are thrown into a challenging moral predicament. Their journalistic instinct is to document what they see and bring it to the attention of the wider world, but this often means they are watching terrible things happen and not intervening to prevent the suffering they witness. At the same time, photographers often put their own lives on the line, and many have paid the ultimate price in their efforts to get to the centre of the action.

One image perfectly epitomises the moral dilemma war photographers have to struggle with, whilst also giving some impression of the dangers they face. Taken in Vietnam by Nick Ut in 1972, it shows a group of Vietnamese children running in panic from a US napalm attack. At the centre of the photo is an unclothed girl named Kim Phuc, shrieking in desperation having been severely burned. The photo hit a nerve around the world, displaying the shocking consequences of America’s tactics, and giving further impetus to the anti-war movement.

World-changing photos aren’t only taken by journalists. In 1941, an SS soldier captured an image now known as The Last Jew of Vinnista. Discovered in one of his personal albums after the war, this sickening image shows a gaunt Jewish man sat on the edge of a pit of dead bodies, with a guard stood behind him with a gun to his head. All 28,000 Ukranian Jews from the city of Vinnista were killed during WWII.

The power of photos like these derive their power from an uncompromising depiction of humankind at its worst, but many images also exist which celebrate the great things humans have achieved, and they deserve an equal place in history. Just take a look at Buzz Aldrin’s shot of the first human footprint on the Moon, taken in 1969, and marvel at the human spirit of adventure and discovery.

Sapphire Studios is the place to go for unforgettable photos.