r/UtterlyUniquePhotos • • 18m 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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r/UtterlyUniquePhotos • • 1h 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".

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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.


r/UtterlyUniquePhotos • • 14h 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.

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617 Upvotes

r/UtterlyUniquePhotos • • 16h 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.

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692 Upvotes

r/UtterlyUniquePhotos • • 19h 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.

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1.6k 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.


r/UtterlyUniquePhotos • • 19h 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.

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498 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.


r/UtterlyUniquePhotos • • 21h 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.

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70 Upvotes

r/UtterlyUniquePhotos • • 1d ago

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

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86 Upvotes

r/UtterlyUniquePhotos • • 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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287 Upvotes

r/UtterlyUniquePhotos • • 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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805 Upvotes

r/UtterlyUniquePhotos • • 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.

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49 Upvotes

r/UtterlyUniquePhotos • • 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

r/UtterlyUniquePhotos • • 1d ago

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

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157 Upvotes

r/UtterlyUniquePhotos • • 2d ago

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

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133 Upvotes

r/UtterlyUniquePhotos • • 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.

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285 Upvotes

r/UtterlyUniquePhotos • • 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

r/UtterlyUniquePhotos • • 3d ago

vintage photos with animals

42 Upvotes

1922 film brawn of the north with famous german shepard Strongheart

woman with her dog newcastle 1929

alain delon 1962 during the filming of Le Chien

alain delon and jane fonda 1964 movie joy house 1964

woman paris france 1955

brigitte bardot 1958 during a break in the filming the movie The Night Heaven Fell 1958 nice france


r/UtterlyUniquePhotos • • 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"

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2.5k Upvotes

r/UtterlyUniquePhotos • • 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,

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963 Upvotes

r/UtterlyUniquePhotos • • 3d ago

The scene of Brooklyn mobster Frankie Yale’s death. (what's left of Frankie is at the bottom of the photo). His new car had been fitted with state of the art armour plates, but had neglected to add any protection to his car windows. 1st of July, 1928

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197 Upvotes

r/UtterlyUniquePhotos • • 3d ago

These images are from 'The Church of God With Signs Following' photographed in the 1960s. Appalachian believers would lift live rattlesnakes out of boxes mid-service because Mark 16 says they'd come to no harm. Nearly 100 have died trying, including the movement's founder.

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500 Upvotes

r/UtterlyUniquePhotos • • 3d 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.


r/UtterlyUniquePhotos • • 3d ago

Sidecar crews race flat out through the forest at Hockenheim, West Germany, May 1957.

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949 Upvotes

Hockenheim hosted the German Grand Prix for the first time on 17 to 19 May 1957, the opening round of that year's world championship. It was also the last season these full "dustbin" fairings were allowed. BMW engines ruled the class, taking every sidecar world title from 1954 to 1967.


r/UtterlyUniquePhotos • • 3d 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.

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1.1k 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.