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The United States was founded in 1776, but did not begin to see itself until the autumn of 1839, when daguerreotypes, the first form of photograph, reached American cities. You could argue the US began again on the morning it could look at its own face.

At first photography seemed to answer the democratic promise of 1776. A portrait was no longer reserved for the rich; almost anyone could now leave a trace of their existence. The gold rush became one of the first great American dramas to find the camera: ordinary diggers squinting into the lens, looking beyond it for gold. A more emblematic American scene can scarcely be imagined: what would be called the American Dream, a lottery everyone plays and very few win. The myth was not that they all found gold – it was that the search itself made them American.

The camera began fixed in a studio, but soon moved outward to the places where the country was inventing itself. Carleton Watkins helped invent the story of the west as the nation’s destiny, empty and sublime. Lewis Wickes Hine, Dorothea Lange and Gordon Parks turned labour, poverty and segregation into evidence and indictment. Robert Capa landed with the first wave at Omaha beach on D-day, and died on assignment a decade later, his camera still in his hand. Photography did not simply record the American story; it interpreted and created it. Now we live within a constant stream of images. We no longer encounter events first and photos second: for most, the image has become the event.

Photography became the US’s perfect art form because truth and myth could occupy the same frame. They coexist more easily than we like to think. Even the US’s most truthful images mix fact with invention. The body of the whip-scarred man in The Scourged Back (1863) was turned into evidence of slavery’s brutality for the world to see. Magazine editors merged him with another escaper to create a single abolitionist hero and a tale of redemption. The cruelty was real, the narrative around the image partly made up.

In the 1869 Champagne Photo of the transcontinental railroad, two locomotives meet, bottles are raised and the nation imagines itself joined from sea to sea. But the Chinese workers who laid much of the track are absent, their erasure an echo of the human cost of the labour.

A few decades later, two white men in suits posed on a mountain of bison skulls bound for industrial processing. The photograph records not only slaughter, and the elimination of the plains nations, but a worldview: animals as raw material, destruction as enterprise. The myth was the land’s inexhaustibility. The men are mistaking extinction for triumph.

The same fantasy of endless land helped produce the Dust Bowl, which deepened the Great Depression of the 1930s. Farmers tore up deep-rooted prairie grass, bringing drought; the dry soil rose in black storms and blew east. The catastrophe was most often photographed through its victims: Dorothea Lange’s exhausted faces; the road west; the mother made emblematic. Florence Owens Thompson, the woman in Lange’s Migrant Mother, spent the rest of her life resenting the photograph that made her the face of American poverty. The image gave the nation an icon; it did not give its subject control over what she had come to mean.

Almost a century after The Scourged Back, another image confronted the US with the realities of racial violence. When 14-year-old Emmett Till was murdered by two white men in 1955, his mother chose an open casket to force white America to look at what had been done to her son. When the mainstream white press would not print the photographs, she found a Black photographer and made the image testify.

Some pictures are able to expose what a nation refuses to see; others are recruited into stories that simplify what they show. In 2025, World Press Photo suspended Nick Ut’s authorship attribution for The Terror of War, the photograph long known as “Napalm Girl”, after a rival claim that the photo was taken by a Vietnamese stringer. The napalm had been dropped by a South Vietnamese plane, her own side. Only the devastated child in the frame, Phan Thi Kim Phúc, remains beyond dispute.

In Julio Cortez’s 2020 photograph from Minneapolis following the murder of George Floyd, a protester carries the stars and stripes upside down, turning a patriotic symbol into a signal of distress. The image asks a question we are left to answer in the US’s 250th year: is showing the nation its own violence a betrayal of its promise, or the only way to keep it?

Not every myth is a lie. The workmen eating lunch on a girder high above New York in 1932 are a breathtaking image of aspiration mixed with nonchalance, even if the photograph was probably staged rather than spontaneous. The sailor kissing a woman in Times Square on V-J Day can still hold the joy of victory, even now that it is shadowed by her words, “It wasn’t my choice.” The legendary musicians in 1958’s A Great Day in Harlem far exceed the society that narrowed where Black brilliance was allowed to gather. Woodstock was mud, hunger, commerce, youth, anger, hope, the stubborn belief that another US might be possible.

Iconic photographs do more than show the US what happened. They show the country inventing itself from evidence, denial, desire, grief. Every image asks not only what was made visible, but what a nation needed it to mean.

• Sarah Churchwell’s most recent book is The Wrath to Come: Gone With the Wind and the Lies America Tells.

Picture captions by Felix Bazalgette and Alice Robb

* * *

Gold rush miners, 1852

By Joseph Blaney Starkweather

In January 1848, workers building a sawmill in a remote part of California found flakes of gold in a stream, sparking a gold rush and an explosion in the fledgling state’s population. One newcomer was New York daguerreotypist Joseph Blaney Starkweather, who took this portrait of workers operating a sluice box, used for filtering gold out of river water. FB

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Yosemite, 1861

By Carleton Watkins

When photographer Carleton Watkins trekked into the Yosemite valley in 1861 – with a dozen mules bearing tripods, glass plates and a darkroom tent (weighing in at nearly 1,000kg) – few Americans, apart from the indigenous Ahwahneechee, had seen Yosemite in person; then-president Abraham Lincoln had never been to California.

The resulting 30 images – of granite mountains, waterfalls, foggy peaks – caused a sensation when they were shown in New York in 1862, and increased support for the nascent conservation movement. In 1864, Lincoln passed legislation to preserve Yosemite “for public use, resort, and recreation”, laying the groundwork for the 1916 creation of the National Park Service. AR

* * *

The dead of Antietam, 1862

By Alexander Gardner

In October 1862, an exhibition unlike anything seen before opened on the corner of Broadway and 10th Street in New York. Up until then, much war photography had focused on posed officers in clean uniforms and famous moments staged or recreated for the camera. Alexander Gardner rejected this romanticism and instead turned his lens on the decomposing corpses spread across the battlefield in the days after a civil war battle reckoned by many to be one of the bloodiest in American history, with more than 22,000 killed on 17 September 1862. With his gruesome, forensic images, it was as though, one journalist later wrote, Gardner had “brought the bodies and laid them in our dooryards and along the streets”. FB

* * *

The Scourged Back, 1863

By William D McPherson and J Oliver

Little is known about the man some sources call “Peter” whose wounds galvanised the abolitionist cause – only that he escaped a Louisiana plantation, that his back bore the scars of savage beatings and that he enlisted in the Union Army in 1863. When The Scourged Back appeared in Harper’s Weekly on 4 July 1863, it was a “visualisation of just how violent and inhumane the institution of slavery was” and “changed northern understandings” of its inhumanity, says Barbara Krauthamer, a history professor at Emory University in Atlanta, Georgia, and co-author of Envisioning Emancipation: Black Americans and the End of Slavery. The US had been embroiled in the civil war for two years by then and it had, she adds, “clearly become about ending slavery”. The image remains contentious, with reports last year that a national park had taken it down from an exhibition in line with an executive order from the Trump administration calling on institutions to do away with materials that disparage “Americans past or living”. AR

* * *

East and West Shaking Hands at Laying of Last Rail (“The Champagne Photo”), 1869

By Andrew J Russell

On 10 May 1869, the final spikes of the transcontinental railroad were hammered into the tracks, ending a six-year project to unite the east and west coasts. “It was seen as a symbol of US ingenuity and progress,” says Julia H Lee, professor of Asian American Studies at the University of California, Irvine and author of The Racial Railroad.

At Promontory Summit in the Utah desert, an engineer from the Union Pacific Railroad company, which laid the tracks from Nebraska to Utah, and one from the Central Pacific Railroad, which was responsible for the western half, reached across with a bottle and glasses. The men seen here are administrators, investors, engineers – “the folks who made the money when the railroad was completed”, Lee says. The thousands of Chinese workers who shovelled rocks and dug tunnels were, she points out, “not memorialised in the same way”. AR

* * *

Bison skull mountain, 1892

Photographer unknown

In the 19th century there was an unprecedented slaughter of wild animals by white settlers in the US. Billions of prairie dogs and passenger pigeons, and tens of millions of beavers were hunted to the point of extinction. Whole ecosystems, and the human cultures based around them, were irrevocably altered. Perhaps the most famous near-extinction was the bison’s: a population possibly as high as 60 million in 1800 was down to a few hundred by 1892. Cree scholar Tasha Hubbard argues that this was intimately tied to the genocide of indigenous peoples, pointing to a popular saying at the time: “Every buffalo dead is an Indian gone.” FB

* * *

Italian Family Seeking Lost Baggage, Ellis Island, 1905

By Lewis Wickes Hine

Almost a million people passed through the Ellis Island immigration processing centre in 1905, and roughly 20% were detained: stowaways, unaccompanied women, anarchists, Bolsheviks, criminals … Lewis Hine, a sociologist, teacher and photographer who began visiting the island, hoped his portraits would combat anti-immigrant feeling. FB

* * *

12,000 employees outside Ford Motor Company Highland Park Plant, 1913

By CR Vallin

Inspired by the workflow at slaughterhouses, Henry Ford in 1913 implemented the moving assembly line in his Michigan factory, cutting the production time on a Model T car from over 12 hours to 93 minutes, and turning skilled labourers into cogs in a machine. Perhaps those workers were grateful to be given two hours away from the conveyor belt to pose for this photo. Hailed as the most expensive picture ever taken, due to the hours of labour lost, it circulated for years on picture postcards and Ford brochures, a symbol of the new age of mass production. AR

* * *

Police emptying barrels of beer during prohibition, 1920

By George Rinhart

In 1920 the US embarked on a sociopolitical experiment never attempted before, or since: a national prohibition on the sale, manufacture and transportation of alcohol. Brought about after more than a century of campaigning by the temperance movement, the policy – which ran until 1933 – is now regarded as a disaster; the government lost out on tax revenue after the alcohol industry was pushed underground, into the hands of violent organised crime groups; and expenditure on enforcement measures soared. This image, by press photographer George Rinhart, shows police officers emptying seized alcohol down the drain. FB

* * *

Lunch Atop a Skyscraper, 1932

By Charles C Ebbets

It was the height of the Great Depression and the Rockefeller Center developers feared their 67-storey RCA Building, nearing completion, would sit vacant, like the Empire State Building a few blocks south. So a photoshoot was set up, and the image of 11 construction workers perched on a steel beam, schmoozing over lunch 260 metres up, came to symbolise a certain brand of New York nonchalance. AR

* * *

Migrant Mother, 1936

By Dorothea Lange

When Franklin D Roosevelt was elected president in 1933, four years into a decade of economic dysfunction, unemployment rates stood at 25% and a series of droughts and dust storms across the south central area of the country had led up to 2.5 million people to head west in search of work.

One such migrant was Florence Owens Thompson, a Cherokee woman photographed by Dorothea Lange in 1936, while she was living in a temporary camp with her children in Nipomo, California. Though the photograph became iconic, its subject, who remained unnamed until the late 1970s, later told a reporter that she “can’t get a penny out of it”. FB

* * *

At the Time of the Louisville Flood, 1937

By Margaret Bourke-White

In January 1937, the Ohio River flooded, leaving a million people homeless and turning Louisville, Kentucky, into “a beleaguered castle surrounded by a moat”, Margaret Bourke-White, Life’s first female staff photographer, recalled in her memoir. She captured these Black flood victims queueing for supplies from a relief agency, while an apple-cheeked white family looms over them. The billboard was one of thousands the National Association of Manufacturers hoped would lower support for FDR’s progressive New Deal. The photo has often been misunderstood as a generic Depression-era bread line, and was even used as anti-America propaganda by Nazi minister Joseph Goebbels with the caption, “Thank God, we have a better way.” AR

* * *

American Gothic, 1942

By Gordon Parks

Ella Watson’s husband died in 1927, leaving her as sole provider for her family. By 1942, aged 59, she was supporting them on an annual wage of $1,080, working as a cleaning lady in the offices of the Farm Security Administration in Washington DC. Here she met Gordon Parks, a young African American photographer who had just arrived in DC. Furious at the violent system of segregation in the nation’s capital, he wanted “to photograph every rotten discrimination in the city”.

Parks learned that Watson had joined the FSA at the same time as a white woman of similar background and education in the late 1920s; over the years the white employee had risen up the ranks, and Watson was now cleaning her office. That summer he made about 100 photographs with Watson, documenting her life and work, including this, whose bitterly acerbic title references Grant Wood’s painting of 1930. FB

* * *

D-day landing, 1944

By Robert Capa

Early on 6 June 1944, war photographer Capa – his cameras packed in oilskin bags – boarded the USS Samuel Chase and joined the allied invasion of Nazi-occupied Normandy. “Bullets tore into the water around me,” Capa wrote in his 1947 memoir Slightly Out of Focus. Eleven photos survived; the captions in Life attributed their blurriness to his trembling hands. AR

* * *

Raising the flag on Iwo Jima, 1945

By Joe Rosenthal

The island of Iwo Jima was the first piece of Japanese territory to be conquered when the Americans invaded in 1945, four years after the Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor. Marines landed in February and quickly claimed Mount Suribachi, raising a flag so the ships below could see it. Hours later, it was decided it should be swapped with a larger one; Associated Press photographer Joe Rosenthal’s image of this second flag-raising earned him a Pulitzer prize and formed the basis for the US Marine Corps War Memorial in Arlington, Virginia. Only three of the six soldiers in the photo survived the war. FB

* * *

V-J Day in Times Square, 1945

By Alfred Eisenstaedt

The iconic photo of two anonymous figures kissing on Victory over Japan Day “combined all the right elements: the returning soldier; the woman who welcomed him back; and Times Square, the crossroads that symbolises home,” wrote the art critic Michael Kimmelman. At least 11 men have come forward claiming to be the sailor, while the strongest claim for the woman belongs to Greta Zimmer Friedman, then a 21-year-old dental assistant and Austrian refugee whose parents died in the Holocaust.

For decades the image was celebrated for its depiction of spontaneous passion and joy, even inspiring couples to recreate it at an annual event in Times Square. But in recent years the photo has been re-evaluated amid shifting notions of consent; in 2019, a statue of the couple in Florida was graffitied with the slogan “#MeToo”. “It wasn’t my choice to be kissed,” Friedman said when she was in her 80s, though she still seemed to take pride in her place in history – exchanging Christmas cards with the man she believed to be the sailor. AR

* * *

Mushroom Cloud Over Nagasaki, 1945

By Charles Levy

On 6 August 1945, the US air force dropped the atomic bomb known as Little Boy’ on the Japanese city of Hiroshima, killi an estimated 120,000 people within the first four days following the blast VM. Days later, a second bomb, codenamed Big Boy’, was dropped on Nagasaki, which suffered an immediate death toll of more than 70,000 civilians. In the aftermath of the bombing, photographs such as this one, taken by air force photographers on a nearby observation plane, were reprinted by newspapers all around the world. More visceral photographs of the devastation on the ground, however, were suppressed for years by US government officials, as was information about the radiation poisoning that claimed many more lives in the years after the bombings. FB

* * *

Billie Holiday at the Downbeat Club, New York, 1947

By William Gottlieb

Gottlieb’s intimate portrait of jazz singer Billie Holiday, captured mid-croon at Manhattan’s Downbeat Club in 1947, is emblematic of a shift in Americans’ relationship with celebrity – away from staged studio shots and artificial perfection, towards raw authenticity and emotional display. Gottlieb, who specialised in jazz music, shot equally revealing photographs of Duke Ellington warming up on the piano and Frank Sinatra with his tie undone.

Still, the naked aggression of the paparazzi era was a long way off. In his memoir, The Golden Age of Jazz, Gottlieb recalls when, in 1948, he found Holiday – who struggled with drugs and alcohol – in her dressing room, “half-dressed and immobile”. Gottlieb responded by returning his notebook to his pocket and placing the lens cap back on his camera. AR

* * *

Actors standing in front of the Capitol, 1947

Photographer unknown

By 1947, the wartime alliance between the US and the Soviet Union had deteriorated, and anxiety about communist influence was growing into full-blown paranoia. On 27 October a group of celebrities descended on Washington to protest against the House Committee on Un-American Activities’ aggressive mission to purge the entertainment industry of anyone with communist sympathies. Front and centre is a glamorously righteous 23-year-old Lauren Bacall; the other protesters include her husband, Humphrey Bogart, and director John Huston. It was an early attempt at celebrity activism – but ultimately an ineffective one. During the Red Scare era of the late 1940s and early 50s, hundreds of livelihoods and careers were destroyed by (often anonymous) insinuations, and Hollywood studio heads, hoping to avoid censorship, retaliated against actors and writers who refused to cooperate. AR

* * *

Audience watching premiere of Bwana Devil with 3D glasses, 1952

By JR Eyerman

“A lion in your lap! A lover in your arms!” So went the advertising slogan for the feature-length 3D movie Bwana Devil, a romantic man- eating lion adventure that premiered in Hollywood on 26 November 1952. A Life photographer called JR Eyerman was at the cinema to photograph the formally attired, strangely bespectacled audience. The film was “dull”, said the article that accompanied the photographs, and “the audience itself looked more startling than anything on the screen”.

This image’s curious second life began when a radical Detroit publisher called Black & Red used it on the cover of a translation of Guy Debord’s 1967 critical theory text Society of the Spectacle. The image gradually became a countercultural metaphor for the eerie conformity produced by mass media such as cinema and television. FB

* * *

Marlboro Man ad campaign, 1954-1999

By unknown photographer, 1958, and Grzegorz Czapski, 1992

A powerful fantasy invented by Chicago ad agency Leo Burnett in 1954, Malboro Man was credited with a 3,000% leap in sales of cigarettes previously marketed to women under the slogan “Mild as May”. The campaign ran in a golden age of ad photography, with print and billboard images in the 60s joined by TV in the 70s (this ad is from 1992). At least five of the men in the ads died of smoking-related illnesses, earning the brand the nickname “cowboy killers”. FB

* * *

Opening day at Disneyland, 1955

By Allan Grant

Around 11,000 people were invited to the July opening of Disney’s first theme park, in Anaheim, California; twice as many turned up, some with fake tickets, jamming car parks and charging the gates of Sleeping Beauty’s castle. With its spotless streets and permanently cheerful employees, Disneyland soon became an emblem of American optimism and soft power. AR

* * *

Emmett Till’s funeral, 1955

By David Jackson

After Emmett Till, a 14-year-old African American boy, left his home in Chicago to visit family in Mississippi, he was beaten to death by two white men. His mother, Mamie, is seen at his funeral. It was her decision to keep the casket open and to allow the Black-run magazine Jet to publish graphic photos of his body. “People had to face my son,” she later wrote, “and realise just how twisted, how distorted, how terrifying race hatred could be.” FB

* * *

Trolley, New Orleans, 1955

By Robert Frank

“Opinion often consists of a kind of criticism,” wrote Robert Frank in 1957. “But criticism can come out of love. It is important to see what is invisible to others.” Frank was defending his documentary photography project The Americans, which was published in France in 1958 and would be published in the US in 1959 to great controversy. The Swiss-born Frank had been on a Guggenheim-funded road trip with his camera and produced, according to one incensed critic, “a wart-covered picture of America”.

In a series of uncanny and surreal images, Frank showed an anxious, divided, unequal country at a time when the economy was booming and the military was at its cold war height. This photograph formed the cover of the book and showed passengers on a segregated trolley car, mapping out the strictly enforced racial hierarchies of American life, from left to right. After its initial unpopularity, Frank’s book has continued to find new audiences. Its enduring relevance, argued curator David Campany, is “to do with the bitter feeling that the USA has not made the progress it could have, should have”. FB

* * *

Department Store, Mobile, Alabama, 1956

By Gordon Parks

This image of six-year-old Shirley Blackwell and her aunt outside a segregated store appeared in Life magazine in 1956 (Parks was its first Black staff photographer). Shirley’s mother, a teacher, was quoted as saying that “integration is the only way through which Negroes will receive justice”. As a result, she lost her job and her husband’s life was threatened. FB

* * *

A Great Day in Harlem, 1958

By Art Kane

“It was just sheer happiness,” double bass player Milt Hinton recalled, in the documentary A Great Day in Harlem, of the August morning when 57 jazz musicians – including Art Blakey, Dizzy Gillespie and Thelonius Monk – gathered for a photoshoot outside a brownstone on East 126th Street in Manhattan. In the 1920s and 30s, Harlem had been the site of a renaissance in Black art, music and culture. It was the era of zoot suits, dance halls and jazz, and drew Black migrants from the Caribbean and the American South, where segregation was still entrenched. Art Kane’s photo, which appeared in Esquire in January 1959, helped change the mainstream perception of jazz and has inspired numerous re-creations, including Gordon Parks’s 1998 A Great Day in Hip Hop, in which 177 hip-hop artists assembled in front of the same brownstone in Harlem. AR

* * *

At First-Aid Center During Operation Prairie, 1966

By Larry Burrows

In October 1966, just south of Vietnam’s demilitarised zone, English photojournalist Larry Burrows witnessed a moment of connection amid the carnage: a marine gunnery sergeant with a bloodied bandage tied around his head reaches out toward his injured comrade, who lies immobile on the ground, his face covered in dirt. Burrows travelled to Vietnam repeatedly over the course of nine years, embedding with combat units and even living in military camps. His editors at Life tried to tempt him with less dangerous assignments, but “he would do them and go back to the war,” wrote the magazine’s managing editor, Ralph Graves. This photo, which came to be known as Reaching Out, was not published until 1971, five years after it was shot – alongside Life’s obituary for Burrows. He died at 44, alongside three other war photographers, in a helicopter crash in Laos. AR

* * *

Robert F Kennedy’s funeral train, 1968

By Paul Fusco

On 5 June 1968, Sirhan Sirhan assassinated the politician as he left the Ambassador hotel after winning the California Democratic presidential primary. Kennedy’s body was flown to Manhattan for his funeral, then taken by train to its final resting place, Arlington National Cemetery. James Fusco, a photographer with the Magnum agency, went along on the train to document the journey. It should have taken only a few hours, but it turned into over eight, because of the crowds who spontaneously turned out to line the tracks. In his now famous series of photographs, Fusco turned his camera on these “endless numbers of mourners”, creating a group portrait of the nation one spring day in 1968. FB

* * *

Apollo 11, 1969

By Neil Armstrong

On 20 July 1969, Buzz Aldrin planted an American flag on the moon. Early victories in the cold war space race had gone to the Soviets: first unmanned satellite; first animal; first human in space. But the Apollo mission – watched on television by 650 million people – decisively won the contest for the US. “One small step for man,” as Neil Armstrong, who photographed Aldrin, said, “one giant leap for mankind.”

The moon landings were not met with universal acclaim at the time. Gil Scott-Heron’s 1970 hit Whitey on the Moon criticised the costly programme in light of earthly social problems. Humans have not been back since Nasa halted its moon-landing programme in 1972, but this year astronauts orbited it on the Artemis II mission. FB

* * *

Woodstock Couple, 1969

By Burk Uzzle

Nearly 200,000 people bought tickets to the Woodstock Music and Art Fair, billed as “three days of peace and music”, in August 1969. But the crowd more than doubled when throngs of hippies and music-lovers stormed the fences, transforming it into a free festival – and an experiment in communal living. Attendees bartered for food, shared drugs and bathed in the local pond.

Photographer Burk Uzzle, staying with his family on a nearby campsite, woke at 4.30am on 17 August and wandered the grounds, searching for his shot. His intimate photo of a young couple huddling in a mud-stained quilt became a defining image of the 1960s counterculture. AR

* * *

Jeffrey Miller shot at Kent State University protest, 1970

By John Filo

In 1970, aged 14, Mary Ann Vecchio ran away from her home in Florida and began hitchhiking across the country. On 4 May she found herself in Ohio, and decided to check out a student protest against President Nixon’s decision to invade Cambodia. Ten minutes after she arrived and began talking to a young man, shots rang out. The National Guard had fired on the protest, killing four unarmed students, including 20-year-old Jeffrey Miller, the man next to Vecchio. As she sank to her knees and screamed, a student photographer called John Filo took her picture. Surrounding students called him a vulture. “No one’s going to believe this happened,” he shouted back.

When the photo was published, it immediately galvanised the anti-war movement and won Filo a Pulitzer prize. Vecchio meanwhile, at an extremely polarised time in the country’s politics, was swiftly identified by hostile newspapers and received death threats. “I was kind of mad at him for a long time,” Vecchio said of Filo, though the two met and reconciled in 2009. FB

* * *

The Terror of War, 1972

By Nick Ut

Phan Thi Kim Phúc recalls playing in the temple courtyard in her South Vietnam village, then a low-flying plane, a terrible sound, and excruciating pain. The photo of her fleeing a napalm attack, published in the New York Times on 9 June 1972, “probably did more to increase the public revulsion against the war than a hundred hours of televised barbarities”, Susan Sontag wrote in On Photography in 1977. Though who took the photo has since been disputed, Vietnamese-American photojournalist Nick Ut won the Pulitzer prize for it in 1973. AR

* * *

Dolly Parton, 1978

By Ron Galella

On 22 May 1978, country star Dolly Parton celebrated a successful concert at Studio 54, the Manhattan nightclub where drag queens and downtown eccentrics mingled with celebrities such as Andy Warhol and Truman Capote. It was a moment of carefree excess: the Vietnam war was over; millions of women were on birth control for the first time; and the Aids epidemic was still years away.

Parton, who grew up poor in rural Tennessee, won millions of fans with her ballads of heartbreak and sexual rivalry. With her platinum wigs and surgically enhanced breasts, her undying optimism and her multimillion-dollar empire, Parton is, to many, the embodiment of the American dream.

This was not the first time Studio 54 had imported a white horse. Bianca Jagger had ridden one on the dance floor at a birthday party the previous year. AR

* * *

Mexicans arrested while trying to cross the border to the US, 1979

By Alex Webb

Though the first US immigration controls were brought into law in the late 1800s, from the 1960s came a change in policy: the start of what academic Adam Goodman has called “the age of mass expulsion”. The Bracero Program, which had legalised labour migration across the southern border, was cancelled and a cap on migration figures was instituted. The 1970s saw the establishment of new narratives that portrayed migration as both a crisis and a threat. America, wrote the Commissioner of the Immigration and Naturalization Service in 1976, was “confronted by a growing, silent invasion of illegal aliens”. The construction of purpose-built detention centres began in the early 1980s. FB

* * *

Petra Alvarado, factory worker, El Paso, Texas, on her birthday, 1982

By Richard Avedon

From 1979 to 1984, Richard Avedon – known for photographing French couture and celebrities such as Marilyn Monroe – spent five years in the American west, turning his lens on ordinary people. The characters Avedon (a lifelong New Yorker) finds in Texas, New Mexico, Colorado and Montana capture something specific about the region. Here, a factory worker in Texas poses with dollar bills pinned to her shirt – birthday presents from family and friends. AR

* * *

Jill and Polly in the bathroom, 1987

By Tina Barney

Born into a wealthy New York City family in 1945, Tina Barney began photographing the domestic rituals of the East Coast elite in the 1970s – often using her own friends and family as models, and their opulent houses as backdrops. This image, of her sister and niece, captures something familiar – the tension between a mother and daughter – as well as something strange: the meticulous aesthetic of matching bathrobes, floral soap dish and curtains suggests even the bathroom is a site of display. In highlighting the excesses of American privilege, Barney’s work also calls to mind an absence – the struggling Americans who are out of frame. AR

* * *

Michael Jordan, 1987

By Walter Iooss Jr

In July 1987, Sports Illustrated photographer Walter Iooss Jr perched on a cherry picker in suburban Illinois and asked the Chicago Bulls’ Michael Jordan – famed for his gravity-defying vertical jumps – to dunk a basketball 15 times. In the resulting image, Jordan appears to be suspended in mid-air, his muscles taut, his 6ft 6in frame casting a long shadow. “When we did this shot I didn’t know he would become such a legend,” Iooss told the Guardian in 2021. But Jordan had already signed the deal that would pave the way for his billionaire status and break new ground for Black athletes: when he teamed up with Nike for Air Jordan sneakers, he negotiated a share of all future profits. AR

* * *

Ku Klux Klan rally, Arkansas, 1990

By Carl De Keyzer

“If you’re white, you can come,” said Ku Klux Klan leader Thomas Robb to Belgian photographer Carl De Geyzer in 1990, after he requested to photograph a “cross lighting” ceremony. Founded by Confederate officers after the civil war, by the 1920s the KKK had up to five million members. By 1990, though, it seemed like a historical curio, and now it has been superseded by more modern far-right groups with links to the establishment, such as the Proud Boys, whom Trump famously instructed to “stand back and stand by”. FB

* * *

Mijanou and Friends, 1993

By Lauren Greenfield

At first glance, 18-year-old Mijanou looks a paragon of cool.

But closer inspection reveals something prematurely jaded, even melancholy, about her. The Beverly Hills High homecoming queen was struggling, says photographer Lauren Greenfield. She couldn’t afford the same flashy cars and designer clothes as her friends, and was “recognising that beauty was her passport”.

Though she later moved “as far away from that lifestyle as she could”, prints of her still hang in museums – and even in Kendall Jenner’s LA mansion. AR

* * *

View from Williamsburg, Brooklyn, on Manhattan, 9/11, 2001

By Thomas Hoepker

As the World Trade Center towers collapsed on 11 September 2001, veteran photographer Thomas Hoepker was in his car trying to reach southern Manhattan via Brooklyn. Passing the recently redeveloped Williamsburg waterfront, he spotted a strange scene: a group of young people lounging on a bench as a cloud of black smoke drifted into the blue sky behind them. He snapped a picture from a distance, without their knowledge or consent, adhering to his old-school documentarian beliefs: “If you started a conversation or asked permission,” he later said, “you would change any authentic situation in an instant.”

In the weeks after 9/11 the image seemed tonally wrong, and he withheld it until 2006, when it was released as part of a retrospective of his work and immediately garnered attention, initially focused on the supposed callousness of the subjects. Two wrote to Slate magazine to defend themselves: “We were in a profound state of shock and disbelief,” wrote Walter Sipser, the man on the right. “Had Hoepker walked 50 feet over to introduce himself, he would have discovered a bunch of New Yorkers in the middle of an animated discussion about what had just happened.”

In the years since, the photograph has become one of the key representations of that day, compared to Bruegel’s Landscape With the Fall of Icarus in its unsettling resistance to sentimentality. FB

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Torture at Abu Ghraib, 2003

Photographer unknown

When 24-year-old US sergeant Joe Darby asked his colleague, military guard Charles Graner, if he had any pictures of their time in Iraq, he did not expect to discover – on the CD-Roms Graner handed over – photographs of Iraqi prisoners seen naked, blindfolded and beaten by American guards. In this image, which was broadcast on 60 Minutes in April 2004, a hooded detainee – later revealed to be Abdou Hussain Saad Faleh – stands on a cardboard box, with electric wires affixed to his hands. T

The release of the photo “served as the public’s first glimpse of the vast detention and torture programme the United States was carrying out around the globe,” says Richard Beck, author of Homeland: The War on Terror in American Life. The CBS broadcast “marked a turning point in how Americans understood the war they had launched just after the catastrophe of September 11”. AR

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Poca High School and Amos Coal Power Plant, West Virginia, 2004

By Mitch Epstein

In 2003, photographer Mitch Epstein witnessed a town being wiped off the map by one of the US’s largest utility companies, American Electric Power. After residents of Cheshire, Ohio complained about the health effects of a nearby plant, AEP responded by instituting a gag order, buying up the town and razing it to the ground. “I was not the same after this trip,” Epstein remembered.

This image is from the five-year project he then embarked on, exploring “the grave results of fossil fuel production on human life and our ecosystem”. FB

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Too Long at the Fair, McArthur, Ohio, 2004

By Susana Raab

At a small-town street fair in Appalachian Ohio, photographer Susana Raab used a paper towel roll to create a funnel-like spotlight, then trained it on a rubbish bin overflowing with discarded Pepsi cups and french-fry containers. “There was a lot of ridicule among the crowd at the time – ‘What are you doing taking a picture of this trash can?’” she recalls. But to her, the image captured something about the “ugliness and litter” Americans are steeped in: “We’re literally living in the waste of our own consumption, and we can’t stop.” AR

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Protester with upside-down flag, 2020

By Julio Cortez

When Associated Press photographer Julio Cortez arrived in Minneapolis on 28 May 2020, he found fire spreading, protesters tearing down fences, and the local police precinct under attack.

“I was afraid for my safety,” Cortez recalls. But when he spotted a lone protester carrying an upside-down flag past a burning liquor store, he decided to track him. They were only a few miles from where, three days earlier, 46-year-old Black man George Floyd had been killed by a white police officer, setting off riots and a global reckoning with racism. Though the image went viral, the identity of the protester remains a mystery. AR

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Virginia Christman, Southern California, 2023

By Matika Wilbur

Virginia Christman is Kumeyaay and a citizen of the Viejas Band of Kumeyaay Indians. A retired nurse, mother, grandmother and respected cultural knowledge keeper, she comes from a family of singers, prayer leaders and dancers who have carried Kumeyaay ceremonial traditions across generations. In this portrait, she performs Ash Takook (Bird Dance), a traditional storytelling practice shared by communities. She often speaks about the importance of mentorship, language preservation and passing cultural knowledge to younger generations.

The image was created as part of Project 562, photographer Matika Wilbur’s ongoing effort to document the lives of each of the federally recognised Native American tribes in the US (562 at the start of her project in 2012; 574 today). The project culminated in Wilbur’s New York Times bestselling book, Project 562: Changing the Way We See Native America. Through collaborative portraiture and storytelling, the work challenges stereotypes and highlights the diversity, resilience and continued presence of Indigenous Nations. FB

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President Trump’s inauguration, 2025

By Shawn Thew

In January 2025, the US’s then three richest men – Elon Musk, Jeff Bezos and Mark Zuckerberg – were pictured seated prominently at Trump’s inauguration, closer to him than his incoming cabinet members. The sight of the tech industry’s leading figures paying homage dramatically illustrated both the resurgent power of the president and the new dominance of his far-right brand of politics among US elites.

Bezos, Musk, Tim Cook and Sundar Pichai, who had all criticised Trump’s divisiveness in the past, now lavished praise upon him. “You would not believe the texts I got from these tech guys,” Trump is reported to have said. FB

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Separated By ICE, 2025

By Carol Guzy

Last year, after Trump came to power, ICE agents began haunting the corridors of courthouses, looking to abduct people attending immigration hearings. Photojournalist Carol Guzy was in New York to cover Coney Island’s Mermaid Parade when she heard about the raids: “Six months later, I had been every day.”

At the courthouse on 26 August, she spotted Luis, an Ecuadorian man, and his family. “They had this sense of foreboding. The girls were hugging their father.” As ICE agents wrenched Luis away, Guzy took this picture of his children clinging to him. “I lost my dad when I was six,” she says. “So I know the hole it leaves in a child’s heart.” FB

• These 48 images show key moments in the 250-year history of the United States. Which others come to mind for you? Email saturday@theguardian.com