Photography has the ability to create a profound impact on the way we think, feel and live. A good photograph can shake our perspective, but great ones serve as a testimony to life, culture and everything that’s happening beyond the image’s frame. To some extent all we will ever know is our own experience of life but photos allow us a unique glimpse into different windows of the world. For eras they have been uniting all of humanity through the wide range of emotions we have in common – love, sadness, fear, joy, despair, inspiration, desire and hope. We’re all doing the best we can and sometimes struggle against the adversity and uncertainty that life presents us.
These photographs reflect the beauties and horrors of this world. We hope they will inspire, mesmerize and rattle your cages. The titles are compiled from speeches made by Charlie Chaplin in The Great Dictator and Professor Louis Levy in Crimes and Misdemeanors. Take a look we are sure you won’t forget them anytime soon.
The way of life can be free and beautiful.
Protester and riot police crying together Sofia, Bulgaria, 2013.
But we have lost the way.
Man falling from the World Trade Center on 9/11.
Greed has poisoned men’s souls – has barricaded the world with hate; has goose-stepped us into misery and bloodshed.
Orthodox priest attempting to prevent a clash between protestors and police in Kiev, Ukraine, 2014.
We think too much and feel too little.
Man finding out his brother was just killed.
More than machinery we need humanity.
After following them for miles, the puppy was picked up and carried in a Marine’s drop pouch.
More than cleverness, we need kindness and gentleness.
Marine Sergeant Frank Praytor feeding a two-week old kitten after her mother was killed.
Without these qualities, life will be violent and all will be lost.
After saving thousands of lives during the Mumbai serial blasts of March 1993 by detecting more than 3,329 kgs of the explosive RDX, 600 detonators, 249 hand grenades and 6406 rounds of live ammunition, Zanjeer was buried with full honors in 2000.
Don’t fight for slavery, fight for liberty.
A rose offered from an anti-government activist to a soldier in Bangkok, Thailand, 2013.
You are not machines.
Ohio track athlete helping an injured competitor across the finish line at a state meet.
You are not cattle.
Afghan man giving tea to U.S. soldiers.
You have the love of humanity in your hearts.
A women lying in the Warsaw ghetto, starving to death in Poland, 1941.
In this world there is room for everyone and the earth is rich and can provide for everyone.
After serving in Iraq for seven months, Terri Gurrola is reunited with her daughter.
We all want to live by each other’s happiness…
Young boy giving a heart-shaped balloon to riot police in Bucharest, Romania, 2012.
…not by each other’s misery.
After finding her inside his destroyed Alabama home following a tornado in March, 2012, Greg Cook hugs his dog Coco.
We don’t want to hate and despise one another.
Russian soldier playing a piano in Chechnya, 1994.
We all want to help one another, human beings are like that.
Concentration camp prisoner learning of her liberation in 1945.
You the people have the power…
A man standing in front of a column of tanks on June 4, 1989, the morning after the Chinese military had suppressed the Tiananmen Square protests of 1989 by force.
…the power to create machines…
Inside of an Auschwitz gas chamber.
…the power to create happiness.
Heart surgeon after a successful heart transplant that took 23 hours. His assistant is sleeping in the corner.
You the people have the power to make life free and beautiful…
Corporal Yukio Araki, age seventeen, holding a puppy with four other young men of the 72nd Shinbu Corps the day before their departure on a Kamikaze mission in Okinawa.
…to make this life a wonderful adventure.
Boy running after his father in New Westminister, Canada on October 1, 1940.
We are all faced throughout our lives with agonizing decisions, moral choices.
A starving boy and missionary.
Some are on a grand scale…
Man stuffing flowers into soldiers’ guns.
…most of these choices are on lesser points.
Retired Philadelphia Police Captain Ray Lewis is arrested for joining the Occupy Wall Street protests in 2011.
But we define ourselves by the choices we have made.
Alcoholic father with his son.
We are, in fact, the sum total of our choices.
Couple found embracing in the rubble of a collapsed factory.
Events unfold so unpredictably, so unfairly.
Woman crying amidst the wreckage caused by a massive earthquake and tsunami in Natori, Japan, March 2011.
Human happiness does not seem to have been included in the design of creation.
12 year-old Brazilian boy Diego Frazão Torquato, playing the violin at his teacher’s funeral.
It is only we, with our capacity to love that give meaning to the indifferent universe.
The Earth is seen rising above the lunar horizon from the Apollo 8 spacecraft.
