9 Powerful Photos That Tell a Story

Sichuan Earthquake

A man is crying while he flips through a family album he found in the rubbles of his old house.

Afghan Girl

Sharbat Gula was one of the students in an informal school within the refugee camp; McCurry, rarely given the opportunity to photograph Afghan women, seized the opportunity and captured her image.

She was approximately 12 years old at the time. She made it on the cover of National Geographic next year, and her identity was discovered in 1992.

Starving Boy and Missionary

Wells felt indignant that the same publication that sat on his picture for five months without publishing it, while people were dying, entered it into a competition.

He was embarrassed to win as he never entered the competition himself, and was against winning prizes with pictures of people starving to death.

(World Press Photo of the Year: 1980 Mike Wells, United Kingdom. Karamoja district, Uganda, April 1980).

The Head of a Male Student

The head of a male student, still alive, trapped under the debris is pictured at the scene of the church school that collapsed on the outskirts of Haiti’s capital Port-au-Prince, November 7, 2008.

Photo: REUTERS/Joseph Guyler Delva

At least 30 people were killed when the three-story La Promesse school building collapsed while class was in session and some of the walls and debris crushed neighboring homes in the Nerettes community near Port-au-Prince.

Huge Wave

Kerby Brown rides a huge wave in an undisclosed location southwest of Western Australia July 6, 2008

Photo: REUTERS/Andrew Buckley

In this picture released November 7, 2008 by the Oakley-Surfing Life Big Wave Awards in Sydney.

Child Labor. Bangladesh

Child labor is not a new issue in Bangladesh as children here remain one of the most vulnerable groups living under threats of hunger, illiteracy, displacement, exploitation, trafficking, physical and mental abuse.

Although the issue of child labor has always been discussed, there is hardly any remarkable progress even in terms of mitigation.

17.5 percent of children aged 5-15 are engaged in economic activities.

Many of these children are engaged in various hazardous occupations in factories.

Construction Worker, Soweto Township

Final construction at the Maponya mall in Piville township, Soweto.

The 650 million Rand mall is one of the largest shopping centers in South Africa, and its opening is a sign of the commercial awakening of Soweto.

Gold Price

In Wall street, a man holds a placard of ” We Buy Gold”, as the gold price has increased due to the current financial crisis or economic melt-down.

New York, Oct 13, 2008.

Swiss Pilot Yves Rossy

he world’s first man to fly with a jet-powered fixed-wing apparatus strapped to his back, flies during his first official demonstration

Photo: Fabrice Coffrini/AFP/Getty Images

May 14, 2008 above Bex, Switzerland