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Ara Güler, Turkish photographer and journalist, is born on this day in 1928.

Hiroshi Hamaya, Japanese photographer, is born on this day in 1915.  He started taking photos in the 1930s and 40s, contributing to photo magazines such as   Front. He focused on themes surrounding the  rituals of Japanese agrarian life said filmmaker Linda Hoaglund. He was “aware that they were doomed to obsolescence amid the onslaught of Western convenience.”  One of his most famous photos, “Under the Cherry Tree,” was part of the 1956 Family of Man photo exhibit.

Roger Fenton, famed 19th century photographer, is born on this day in 1819.  Fenton was a lawyer and studio artist who, in 1851,  saw his first exhibit of photographs.  He traveled to Paris where he learned the waxed paper calotype process of William Henry Fox Talbot, modified by Gustave Le Gray. In 1852 his photos of British landscapes and architecture were exhibited. Fenton also helped organize the Royal Photographic Society in 1853. That same year  he traveled to the front lines of the Crimean War and took a series of photos like the one above.   

Konrad Schumann — An East German border guard — vaults over the Berlin Wall and into iconic Cold War history on this day in 1961. The stunning moment was caught on film by  Peter Leibing, a photographer with Contiepress. As a new border guard, Schumann had been  appalled at the way the Soviet controlled East Germans were setting up barriers that made Berlin look like a concentration camp.  He whispered to a West German that he was going to jump, and photographers and police were on hand were there when he did. This angered some East Germans and even Schumann’s family, who thought he had given the Americans and their allies a propaganda coup. People in the West saw it as an act that revealed the human need for freedom and fight against repression in the Soviet Union. Still,  the weight of history was too much for Schumann, who took his own life in 1998. In May 2011, the photograph of Schumann’s “Leap Into Freedom” was inducted into the UNESCO Memory of the World programme as part of a collection of documents on the fall of the Berlin Wall.

Dorothea Lange, American photojournalist, is born on this day in 1895. Lange was one of the 20th century’s great photographers, and was especially known for the 1936 Migrant Mother photo that characterized the human struggle during the Great Depression.

As Lange told the story behind the photo, she had been on assignment for a month and was driving home when she said she noticed a “pea pickers camp” sign “out of the corner of my eye.” She drove on in the rain for another twenty miles, convincing herself that she didn’t need to go back to take one more set of photos. And then:

Almost without realizing what I was doing, I made a U-turn on the empty highway. I went back those 20 miles and turned off the highway at that sign, PEA-PICKERS CAMP. I was following instinct, not reason; I drove into that wet and soggy camp and parked my car like a homing pigeon. I saw and approached the hungry and desperate mother, as if drawn by a magnet. I do not remember how I explained my presence or my camera to her, but I do remember she asked me no questions. I made five exposures, working closer and closer from the same direction. I did not ask her name or her history. She told me her age, that she was thirty-two. She said that they had been living on frozen vegetables from the surrounding fields, and birds that the children killed. She had just sold the tires from her car to buy food. There she sat in that lean-to tent with her children huddled around her, and seemed to know that my pictures might help her, and so she helped me. There was a sort of equality about it.

The next day, Lange and her editors alerted federal relief authorities, and food was rushed to the camp. The subject of the Migrant Mother photo, Florence Owens Thompson, survived the Depression and raised her children in California. Thompson’s daughters said she had avoided publicity until 1978 because she was ashamed at having been an icon of poverty. But FSA photos like the Migrant Mother gave no hint that the subjects had brought misery on themselves through any fault of their own. Instead, they portrayed good people as victims of a flawed system.

Controversy over Minamata disease begins on this day in 1956 with a medical disclosure in the seaside city of Minamata, Japan.  The neurological disease stuck quickly, according to the doctor who spoke out on the environmental problem,  Dr. Hajime Hosokawa.  The disease first affected with cats, then older humans, then children and newborns. Uncontrolled twitching, convulsions and screaming are among the symptoms. Hosokawa and others suspected the Chisso Chemical Corp.  (They were right. Chisso had been dumping large quantities of waste mercury into the bay).  But Minamata disease was mostly ignored by the news media until the 1970s. It became  an international symbol of industrial recklessness with toxic chemicals, especially after Life Magazine printed photos of victims by W. Eugene Smith in June of 1972. These included the photo, above, of Tomoko Uemura’s hand, and another very famous photo of Tomoko in the bath. There is a controversy about displaying the more visually striking photo of Tomoko in the bath, and the controversy is described here. In retaliation for his work, Smith was badly beaten by thugs from Chisso and struggled with his health for the remaining few years of his life.

Edward Curtis, a photographer of the American West, is born on this day in 1868.  While working as a photographer in Seattle, Curtis became fascinated with Native Americans.  In a decades – long project sponsored by the  Smithsonian, Curtis  made over 10,000 recordings of Native American language and music and took over 40,000 photos of people from  80 tribes. According to his Wikipedia entry, he recorded tribal lore and history,  as well as   foods, housing, garments, recreation, ceremonies, and funeral customs. He wrote biographical sketches of tribal leaders. His material, in most cases, is the only written recorded history of many tribes.

Execution of Nguyễn Văn Lém, a photo  by American photographer Eddie Adams, is taken on this day in 1968. The Pulitzer-prize winning photo galvanized the antiwar movement in the US by depicting the brutality of war.   Adams later testified in support of Gen. Nguyen Loan (left, with pistol) during deportation hearings in the US. “Two people died in that photograph,” Adams wrote in later years.   “The general killed the Viet Cong; I killed the general with my camera.”

 O. Winston Link, American photographer, is born on this day in 1947.

Alfred Eisenstaedt, a Life Magazine staff photographer, is born on this day in 1898.  Eisenstaedt began his career in Berlin with the Associated Press in the 1920s and then  joined a host of talented emigres fleeing Nazi oppression in the 1930s.  His most famous photo, V-J Day, was taken Aug.   14, 1945, in Times Square, but he is also known for a human touch and a penetrating style in over 2,500 other photos published in Life.