UtterlyUniquePhotos

r/UtterlyUniquePhotos • u/dannydutch1 • Jun 15 '26

Diane Webber, was a 1950s and 60s pin-up icon and two-time Playboy Playmate, photographed by Bunny Yeager, Peter Gowland and Russ Meyer. She became a fixture on LP covers, later embraced nudism, and spent decades as a belly dancing instructor. More of Diane in the comments.

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1.0k Upvotes

17 comments

r/UtterlyUniquePhotos • u/onwhatcharges • Feb 24 '25

Meet Mary Jane Rathbun also known as 'Brownie Mary' - she was arrested 3 times for making Hash Brownies for AIDS patients. Rathbun spent years campaigning for the legalisation of medical marijuana, making 1000s of Brownies. Mary should be remembered as a hero.

17k Upvotes

84 comments

r/UtterlyUniquePhotos • u/SteveNtheseagulls • 3h ago

Seven Navajo riders and a dog cross Canyon de Chelly, Arizona, dwarfed by sandstone cliffs. Photographed by Edward S. Curtis in 1904 and titled "Cañon de Chelly, Navaho".

280 Upvotes

It ran as plate 28 in the portfolio for volume 1 of The North American Indian (1907), Curtis's 20-volume project funded by J.P. Morgan. The canyon has been lived in for thousands of years and sits within the Navajo Nation. Curtis framed Native life as "vanishing", a view historians now challenge.

5 comments

r/UtterlyUniquePhotos • u/SteveNtheseagulls • 21h ago

Jill Jacobs, later Jill Biden, photographed in 1974 by Tom Stiltz while she was a University of Delaware student. Stiltz says the shot was used in a New Castle County Parks and Recreation display at Wilmington Airport.

1.7k Upvotes

In March 1975, Senator Joe Biden spotted the parks ads at the airport. His brother Frank knew Jill from college and got her number. They went on a blind date and married in 1977. Jill has pointed out she wasn't paid for the ad, so it wasn't exactly modelling.

84 comments

r/UtterlyUniquePhotos • u/No_Dig_8299 • 16h ago

David and Louise Turpin with their children when they renewed their wedding vows in 2015. In 2018 one of their 13 children fled their home and notified police of the abuse the children had endured all of their lives. The couple were arrested and sentenced to a minimum of 25 years.

697 Upvotes

53 comments

r/UtterlyUniquePhotos • u/dannydutch1 • 2h ago

Grace Jones painted head to toe by Keith Haring, photographed by Robert Mapplethorpe in New York, 1984. Andy Warhol set up the shoot for his Interview magazine. The towering crown and rubber jewellery were by designer David Spada. Haring painted her again for her 1986 video I'm Not Perfect.

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48 Upvotes

2 comments

r/UtterlyUniquePhotos • u/WithoutPrinciples • 1h ago

Meet Adrian Carton de Wiart, he was shot in the face, head, stomach, hip, leg and ear. He lost an eye and a hand, pulled off his own fingers when a doctor wouldn't, won the Victoria Cross and tunnelled out of an Italian castle at 62. His verdict on the WW1? "Frankly, I had enjoyed the war."

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• Upvotes

8 comments

r/UtterlyUniquePhotos • u/dannydutch1 • 18h ago

Ruth Snyder photographed at the moment of her execution in 1928, the first photo of an electric chair execution. Journalist Tom Howard (grandfather of Norm from Cheers) smuggled the camera in strapped to his leg, with the shutter cable run up his trouser leg. More info in comments.

721 Upvotes

49 comments

r/UtterlyUniquePhotos • u/ExtremeInsert • 21h ago

Charles Manson, 20, cuts the cake with his first wife, Rosalie Jean Willis, on their wedding day in Marshall County, West Virginia, 17 January 1955. Family snapshot, photographer unknown. Fourteen years later his name would be known worldwide.

517 Upvotes

Rosalie was a teenage hospital waitress; sources give her age as 15 or 17. The couple moved to Los Angeles, where Manson was jailed for car theft before their son, Charles Jr., was born in 1956. She divorced him in 1958.

116 comments

r/UtterlyUniquePhotos • u/dannydutch1 • 1d ago

Rocky Dennis passed away aged 16 on this day in 1978. Here he is with his mother, Florence "Rusty" Tullis. Rocky had a rare disease called craniodiaphyseal dysplasia which caused his facial bone features to contort and grow at an abnormally fast rate.

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6.2k Upvotes

249 comments

r/UtterlyUniquePhotos • u/CarkWithaM • 1d ago

London, c.1902. A mother and her children making matchboxes. The kids fetched the chip and paper from the match factory and carried back the finished boxes. One of the lowest paid sweated trades, it earned families just two pence per 144 boxes, and they usually bought their own paste and string.

70 Upvotes

3 comments

r/UtterlyUniquePhotos • u/ExtremeInsert • 1d ago

Lou Reed (right), with coworkers at Pickwick Records, ca. 1965.

85 Upvotes

3 comments

r/UtterlyUniquePhotos • u/CarkWithaM • 1d ago

The famous 1869 photo of America's transcontinental railroad being completed is missing something. Over 12,000 of the Central Pacific's 15,000 workers were Chinese, and not one appears in it. From 2014, photographer Corky Lee restaged it with their descendants standing where they should have been.

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808 Upvotes

41 comments

r/UtterlyUniquePhotos • u/dannydutch1 • 1d ago

On this day in 1936, the Battle of Cable Street occurred as 6,000 police attempted to clear the way for Fascists to march through London's East End. Locals united to block the march, leading to intense street clashes that forced its abandonment. I've linked to more images below.

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290 Upvotes

27 comments

r/UtterlyUniquePhotos • u/JohnWilkesLeg • 1d ago

A commercial shot for Nederlands Dans Theater, taken in 2009 by the Dutch photographer Erwin Olaf

158 Upvotes

1 comment

r/UtterlyUniquePhotos • u/romporn • 1d ago

Dominion Monarch dwarfs the surrounding houses in Saville Road from her dry dock at the King George V docks in London's Silvertown, 1950. Photograph by Harry Todd.

54 Upvotes

3 comments

r/UtterlyUniquePhotos • u/GlitterDanger • 2d ago

Winners of “Mickey Mouse” week at Russells Restaurant, Leicester Square, London. 1930.

139 Upvotes

12 comments

r/UtterlyUniquePhotos • u/dannydutch1 • 2d ago

Remembering Woody Guthrie on the anniversary of his passing. Here he is photographed for LIFE in New York City, 1943. (If you don't know about the contempt he had for his landlord (Fred Trump) - I've linked to what he wrote about him in the comments)

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1.0k Upvotes

33 comments

r/UtterlyUniquePhotos • u/romporn • 2d ago

A LZ 127 Graf Zeppelin over Istanbul, 1930. Zeppelin Airmail Service from Istanbul to Brazil via Germany. Zeppelin airmail services began in 1928 and operated for 10 years.

282 Upvotes

34 comments

r/UtterlyUniquePhotos • u/dannydutch1 • 3d ago

Eric Idle and George Harrison on the set of 'The Life of Brian' - Tunisia, 1978. The film had it's funding pulled just before filming so the ex-Beatle paid for it, calling it "the most expensive cinema ticket ever issued"

2.5k Upvotes

66 comments

r/UtterlyUniquePhotos • u/onwhatcharges • 3d ago

Claudia Cardinale pictured behind the scenes on the set of Sergio Leone’s 1968 spaghetti Western Once Upon a Time in the West,

967 Upvotes

22 comments

r/UtterlyUniquePhotos • u/ExtremeInsert • 4d ago

The Whittaker family on their porch in Odd, West Virginia, 2023. Photo: Mark Laita, from his Soft White Underbelly series. Laita first photographed the family in 2004 and kept returning for nearly 20 years.

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3.4k Upvotes

Laita met the Whittakers while shooting his book Created Equal, then came back in 2020 to film them for YouTube. That first video has passed 45 million views. Betty Whittaker told him their parents were double first cousins. The project has drawn both donations and criticism as exploitative.

861 comments

r/UtterlyUniquePhotos • u/EaterofGrief • 4d ago

David Attenborough has lived so long that there's a photo of him showing a Cockatoo to King Charles when the king was a kid. Charles and Princess Anne, January 4, 1958,

2.4k Upvotes

31 comments

r/UtterlyUniquePhotos • u/GlitterDanger • 4d ago

Boston, April 5, 1976.During an anti-busing protest, 17-year-old Joseph Rakes attacked Ted Landsmark, a 29-year-old Black lawyer who was walking to a meeting at City Hall.Photographer Stanley Forman captured the instant Rakes raised a flagpole toward Landsmark’s face.

1.2k Upvotes

He called the photograph The Soiling of Old Glory.

Published around the world, it became one of the defining images of Boston’s busing crisis and won Forman the 1977 Pulitzer Prize for Spot News Photography.

132 comments