Images of the Moments That Changed History Through the Lens

Wednesday is still going ahead.

Now on BBC News, Through the Lens.

Sometimes, history's shaped not over

the course of years or decades,

but in a single day.

I'm Rebecca Jones and I'm

here at the Magnum photo print room

in London in this special series

celebrating the 70th anniversary

of the agency Magnum photos.

I'm going to introduce

you to some of the world's

greatest living photographers.

Coming up, the British photographer

who was in Berlin the night

the wall came down.

The American who captured

the shock and terror of 9/11.

And the Iranian who wasn't afraid

to show the violence on both sides

of the revolution.

But first, let's meet Ian Berry

he was the only photographer

to witness the Sharpeville massacre

in South Africa in 1960.

A turning point for

the anti-apartheid movement.

News came through that the police

had shot a guy in this township,

Sharpeville.

I got there and chatted

to the protesters and what have

you and they were

all friendly enough.

In fact it all seemed a bit dull.

And I'd more or less given up,

I walked back to the car

and the cops opened fire.

You can see here that the guy

standing on the tank

in the background, standing

on an armoured vehicle,

and they started to fire.

And at this point, I saw these kids

running towards me and initially

I thought they were just shooting

blanks or shooting over

the head of people.

And this guy was holding his jacket

up as though to protect

himself from bullets.

And only as they started to fall

around me did I realise

that they were shooting real bullets

into the back of people.

70 odd people were dead.

And the police charged

the wounded with an affray.

And when it came to the court case,

I was the only witness.

The police said they hadn't

reloaded, and I had pictures of them

reloading their automatic weapons.

They said they'd only

fired on the crowd.

Most of the people

were shot in the back.

As they were running away.

Anyway, the only good thing

was that the wounded,

the case was dismissed against them.

In the early days in South Africa

it was very difficult to photograph

the black- white relationships,

because, essentially,

there were none.

I came across this car

and in it was a white child asleep

on the back-seat and an African

nanny, a child herself,

had been left to look

after the baby.

I'd gone there to work and I kind

of accepted in a way,

I suppose, subconsciously,

the way of life there.

And that picture started me off

thinking about South Africa

and about the politics and really

set me off on a path of looking

at the country

through different eyes.

During the election that

brought Mandela to power,

although I shot a load of stuff

on him, somehow this

was a bit more symbolic.

He was on his way to a university

to speak, and on the way down,

driving through this town,

I saw this enormous poster of him.

And people climbing up

on the poster just to wave to him

as he went through.

I was on a white beach in Cape Town.

It's almost unbelievable,

but there were beaches for whites,

beaches for Africans,

and you weren't supposed to be

an the wrong beach, as it were.

And I saw this white couple

walking along the beach.

And a couple of Africans sort

of fooling around in the background.

And I kind of thought,

wait a second, and if they go past

and I get the two together,

there'll be an incident.

The whites are going to at least

swear at this couple of Africans.

Anyway, the Africans went

by in front and the whites didn't

say a word.

And I kind of realised then

things were changing fast.

And it was more or less

the end of apartheid.

Ian Berry whose outsider status

enabled him to document sections

of South African society

that others could not.

Insider knowledge, however,

can also give photographs

a particular potency.

Between 1978 and 1980, Abbas

recorded the revolution in Iran.

In two pictures the Iranian

photographer captured the moment

a mob attempted to lynch

a woman in the street.

You're photographer,

that means you know,

the historian of the present.

But you're not shooting for history,

your shooting for today.

It's important when the

event is developing.

That's the difference.

You have history and you have

the history of the present.

Well, Iran was a genuine revolution,

which means a total

change of regime.

They knew even when it was happening

that only once in my life time,

you know, I will be not only

concerned, but I was also involved,

at least in the early stages.

The Shah left the country.

Bakhtiar was the Prime Minister.

Khomeini had not arrived yet,

so there was a demonstration

in favour of Bakhtiar and,

of course, of the Shah.

Militants gathered around

the stadium and started beating up

the people coming out.

Beating them hard.

Suddenly I see this woman running

towards me and being lynched,

you know, by the mob.

And of course, again,

in a time like this you don't think

you just shoot.

So I was running back, shooting.

And somebody would say,

don't take pictures, you know,

I would always answer in Farsi,

you know, this is for history.

As a photographer you shoot.

But the problem was,

should I show this picture then?

Because in the evening I'd get

together with my friends

and they said, Abbas,

you can't show this picture

because it shows the dark

side of the revolution.

I said, I'm sorry, this

might be my country,

my people in my revolution,

but I'm also a journalist,

which is a historian of the present,

so we have to show this picture now.

And in retrospect

I think I was right.

Because if you look at the faces,

you know, lots of the violence

and the hate that would serve

as later on during the revolution

is already rich in their

on the faces of the militants.

And then the next picture is when,

you know, the army intervenes.

So the woman fence.

She was carried away, she was saved.

Then of course I hide my camera,

I tried to take a picture

on the sly, but then this

soldier saw me and he came,

there was a grenade on his gun,

he was pushing it to my face.

As I was afraid, he let it go,

if he let it go, I wouldn't be here.

To him I didn't say,

this is for history,

I just left.

The day the revolution became

victorious, Khomeini had

headquarters in a school.

Around the school lots

of things were happening.

So I'm just around there

and suddenly I see a mullah in a car

with a gun in his hand.

And thought, it really said it all.

People say, OK, you were a prophet.

No, but I wasn't...

Maybe I was a prophet,

but I didn't have any

merit, you know.

Having covered the Iranians

revolution for two years,

I could see that the wave

of religious passion raised

by Khomeini within Iran was not

going to stop at the board of Iran.

It spread in the Muslim world.

When it did spread in the Muslim

world, it spread all over the world.

Abbas, a photographer who sees

himself as a journalist,

a historian for the present.

Mark Power stumbled upon one

of the defining moments

of the 20th century.

When he was an accidental witness

to the fall of the Berlin Wall.

The British photographer captured

the joy and confusion of people

caught up in that extraordinary

event of November 1989.

Photographs are so powerful

that they become the memories

in themselves.

So, you know, my memory of Berlin

that night is these black

and white pictures.

So I flew to Berlin on November nine

1989 with my friend George,

and we were both really tired,

but I'd never been to Berlin before.

George had.

I said, look, let's go out,

let's go out for a walk.

So which ambled down

to Checkpoint Charlie.

There seem to be a few

people milling about.

So I asked a fellow what was going

on and he said that he'd seen

something on the news that there's

strong possibility that the wall

would actually be open

for passage this evening.

So I looked at George and he looked

at me and we realised we didn't have

much camera equipment with us,

so we got in a taxi and we went back

to the youth hostel,

grabbed all our stuff and went

straight back to Checkpoint Charlie.

Bang on midnight, the door right

in front of us opened and the first

East Berlin came through and gave

George a big bear hug.

And a succession of very emotional

East Berlins pastors and,

you know, waiting

throng in the West.

The pictures to show

a range of emotions.

There is a fantastic mixture

of jubilation and complete

the world and.

The border guards were so bewildered

but at the same time quite excited

by what was going on,

they also recognised

that they were at a momentous

point in history.

That particular picture really does,

I think, show quite clearly

the sense of wonder

they were feeling.

We have to remember that

when the Berlin Wall fell

it was completely unexpected.

When you're jettisoned to a major

news event like that,

it's hard to know how to react,

because let's face it,

I was there completely by mistake.

The next day I remember not having

much sleep the night before,

being pretty tired, but walking back

to the wall again and,

amazingly, people were standing

and sitting on the wall.

It seemed very much a matter

of defiance, what I was looking at,

it was quite interesting.

I think in a way more interesting

than the people on the wall

are the guards at the bottom,

you know, contrary to everything

they've ever been told all believed

in, then suddenly this

is all happening in front of them,

what are they supposed

to do about it?

It's very rare, isn't it,

to be in a major news event

like that, which is actually

a happy thing, you know.

It's not a tragedy.

Mark Power, the right

person in the right place

at the right time.

Remember, you can watch the whole

series at BBC.com/throughthelens.

Now to China.

And the massacre in Tiananmen Square

in 1989 when the Chinese authorities

crushed the popular movement

for democracy in Beijing.

The former Magnum photos President,

Stuart Franklin, was there.

Coming to the sort of last moments

of the event in Tiananmen Square

in June 1989, I was sort of lying

down, squatting down

and photographing between the kind

of balustrades of the balcony.

And as the tanks rolled

through the now cleared crowd,

a guy, a single guy,

white shirt, black trousers,

two shopping bags, one in each hand,

stood in the middle of the road.

As the row of tanks,

the column of tanks, approached.

I felt very distant.

In fact, so distant that I thought

the picture was really of note

interest at all particularly.

On the other hand, I was persuaded

by a journalist that this

was a significant moment.

It was unusual, you know,

in those days in China

for there to be

a mass demonstration.

In what is still, I think,

the largest public square

in the world.

The sort of centre

of the Chinese state.

While I was on the balcony trying

to photograph the tanks coming down

the street, actually

where I was keen to be

was in the hospital is trying

to understand how many people had

been either killed or wounded

the night before.

At about 2pm some of us managed

to leave the hotel and go

to a couple of hospitals.

You know, the situation

was pretty chaotic, really.

So what was most noticeable

were the rows of young people

from little mattresses

and treated for bullet wounds.

By being able to get

in there and photograph that,

you know, there was real evidence,

material evidence, which is one

of the challenges of journalists

actually trying to tell the story

of what happened.

I was going to the square pretty

well every day to try and photograph

the various demonstrations,

and one day there was an intense

summer storm, sort of prophetic

dark clouds appeared.

And then this guy got up on top

of one of the balustrades and,

you know, bore his chest

and put his arms up in the air and,

for me, it was very emotional

and a defining moment.

I felt good about it,

I felt it expressed,

you know, the emotion behind

the protest movement

in China that time.

I think one of the things

that we try to do in news

photography is to find an image that

crystallises the event,

or the spirit of a series

of events in one image.

As Stuart Franklin said,

it was by visiting hospitals

in Beijing that he discovered

the true extent of the Tiananmen

Square massacre.

But for the New Yorker Susan

Meiselas, there was no need to seek

out the story, it came

to her on the morning of September

the 11th 2001 when one of the planes

that hit the World Trade Center flew

low over her home.

So much of history has

been shaped by that day.

Nothing of this scale had

happened in New York.

I actually remember hearing

the plane coming very,

very low over the part

of Manhattan where I live,

Little Italy.

Riding my bicycle down,

I've seen a television programme,

very unclear what's happened.

I ride my bike down to that area

of New York, I live not that far

away, and it's one of the first

photographs I made,

just people looking.

That photograph is really just

a passer-by making a souvenir

photograph of something that at that

moment in time we had no idea

what had happened.

The first plane had gone

into one of the Twin Towers.

It's this strange photograph for me

that marks that everyone

becomes a photographer.

This, I think, is very

much of its time.

It stands for a moment

in time perhaps.

I was probably two blocks

from the tower when it actually,

the last real drop of the tower.

And that led to this massive escape.

So I was standing still and trying

to move closer, as close as I felt

I could, as people were

just racing past me.

And actually I've tried

to reconstruct that photograph,

I tried to find people

who were in that moment of time.

The photograph of the statue,

which many people didn't realise

when they first saw the photograph

was a statue, and I'm not even sure

I did when I made the photograph,

I was focused on the fact

that there was all this

what looks like confetti,

but were torn up papers

and dust filling the air

as the towers came down.

And when I looked at Liberty Plaza

there was this statue which,

at the moment, looked

so lifelike, it is life-size.

Of a man burying himself

in a briefcase that could have been

any man at that moment.

We were all kind of not knowing

where our things were,

what was happening.

So he kind of personified everyone,

and the anxiety everyone had

at that moment.

There is a photograph

of the firefighters.

So as I start to pull away and just

get some distance on what happened,

along with the West side Highway,

which was completely evacuated,

no cars, no people, this group

of firefighters were retreating

and probably just regaining

confidence to go back,

no doubt, and they were washing

their faces on this fire hydrant.

They had opened it up

and they were just flushing

their faces and their lungs probably

come up with the water.

I was just struck,

they were the real heroes

of that day.

This photograph haunts me

in a different way,

the skeleton that remained.

That's kind of the last memory

of that day, these two phenomenal

towers that every time you flew

into New York you would look out,

you know, the plane,

and see them standing

there at the tip of the island,

they were reference points

from so many points in the city.

We didn't yet, I mean when I'm

making my photograph,

no idea how that even was possible.

It was just inconceivable.

So, you know, everyone took away

from that day their own experiences,

a combination of what they heard

them what they saw on television,

what they saw in books,

and what continues to happen

as a result of that action.

Susan Meiselas remembering 9/11.

The German photographer

Thomas Dworzak was in Iraq

during the American led invasion

of the country in 2003.

He's the president of Magnum photos

and he captured the emotions

of Iraqis in the days both before

and after the fall of Baghdad.

Something makes you a good war

photographer when you're young

and eager and crazy.

And when you get older

and you've seen a lot,

you get more scared

and you get more...

It's not so easy.

I was in Iraq before the war,

it was very controlled,

it really didn't feel like a very...

Felt like a scary country.

People were afraid

of making a mistake.

It was like a couple of months

before the war when Saddam suddenly

decided for I don't remember

what reason that this was the day

of clemency and all the prisoners

were allowed everybody

was allowed out of prisons.

With criminals in it,

all the political prisoners,

everything, just open up the entire

prison, which was this huge,

I think at the time the biggest

prison in the Middle East.

They just ran out.

They didn't escape.

The gates were open

and everybody left.

I think it was surreal because I'd

heard about it so much

and because it had this...

I never thought I would

ever get into it.

We didn't know anything,

anybody if asked, because it

was so off-limits.

Right after the fall

of Baghdad there was this,

there were tonnes of Saddam statues,

so people went out, they took

off their shoes and they stood

there like it was this never ending

beating of metal and concrete

statues with shower sandals.

And somebody brought

in sledgehammers, they brought

in the bigger machinery

and blew them into pieces.

The foundation, and then

they change them...

There was a whole ballet

of all kinds of things you can do

with dismantled Saddam statues.

The fall of Saddam was a relief

for people, of course there was no

plan, of course it all

went crazy afterwards.

But initially there was this, OK,

now it's over, thank good.

So there was definitely a mood

of celebration and of course

there was a lot of looting

after and mayhem and chaos,

but this was right after

when the Americans took over one

of the old palaces.

When the swimming pool

was still there and they have

recruited some kids on the street

who were translators,

spoke some English.

This is one of them

jumping into the pool.

This was still a time when Americans

would drive around walk around

Baghdad, I think they had body

armour but they had open Humvees,

nobody was expecting ideas...

There was still a kind of...

There was this really

post-war relief.

Didn't last.

Thomas Dworzak looking back

on his time in Iraq.

To see the rest of the series,

do go to BBC.com/ThroughTheLens.