What happened to these strangers immortalized in collective memory thanks to the photographer's eye?
The answer in images.
The Afghan with green eyes
In 1984, Sharbat Gula was only 12 years old when American reporter Steve McCurry photographed her in the chaos of a Pakistani refugee camp.
He will find her in 2002. Steve McCurry / Magnum Photos
Her gaze, strikingly beautiful, is one that pierces you. In 1984, Sharbat Gula was only 12 years old when American photojournalist Steve McCurry imprinted on his film his grave face with hypnotic eyes, in the chaos of a Pakistani refugee camp. Like millions of Afghans driven out by the war then raging between Soviets and Mujahedin, the young orphan fled her country on foot, with her brothers, sisters and grandmother. His portrait, first published on the front page of National Geographic magazine in June 1985, will tour the world.
But her name will remain unknown until McCurry finds her trace in 2002, and has her pose again.
Expelled from Pakistan, where she was living in hiding, "the Afghan with green eyes," as the entire planet calls her, returned to her homeland in 2016. Greeted with great fanfare by President Ashraf Ghani - too happy to do so of her the symbol of the return to the land of refugees - this widow is raising her four children alone in a house offered by the government.
At 49, she is now one of the few Afghan women who own their home.
But her strong notoriety continues to expose her to danger, because in the land of the Taliban, many conservatives take a dim view of this attention given to a woman.
Athletes raised fist
The protest gesture of African-American sprinters Tommie Smith and John Carlos (center and right) at the Olympic Games in Mexico in 1968 made history. STF / AP / SIPA, Sait Serkan Gurbuz / AP / SIPA
Mexico City, 1968 Olympic Games. On October 16, African-American sprinters Tommie Smith and John Carlos finished first and third respectively in the 200m. But it is not their performance that will go down in history. The next day, stepped onto the podium to receive their medals - gold and bronze - and as the first notes of the American anthem ring out, Smith and Carlos raise a black-gloved fist while lowering their heads to their feet. dressed in socks also black. This gesture of revolt, made in front of cameras around the world, aims to denounce racial discrimination in the United States. In the midst of the Vietnam War, the country is experiencing great tensions, exacerbated by the assassination of black leader Martin Luther King on April 4 of the same year.
Less famous, the third man in the photo, Australian silver medalist Peter Norman, stands in solidarity: he also wears a badge from the Olympic Project for Human Rights, which fights against segregation.
He was the one who gave the idea of the black gloves.
Qualified as a manifestation of “Black Power”, this raised fist is a “salvation for human rights,” said Tommie Smith in his autobiography, published in the United States in 2007. The gesture is in any case scandalous, and the International Olympic Committee believes that such a political event has no place at the Olympics.
The athletes are suspended, and banned from competing for life.
They even receive death threats, but still succeed in pursuing coaching careers.
Read alsoHow the knee on the ground became a sign of protest
Reunited in 2016 at Georgetown University in Washington, Carlos (bottom, left) and Smith, 72 and 71, are proud to see sportsmen, such as American football star Colin Kaepernick, take up their torch in kneeling during the anthem before a match in protest against racial and police violence.
The policeman facing Cohn-Bendit
Daniel Cohn-Bendit, 23, was summoned to the Sorbonne for a disciplinary council in May 1968. In front of him, the helmeted authority of the police officer Christian Le Padellec.
Gilles Caron Foundation / Clermes, François Destoc / Le Télégramme / Maxppp
Monday, May 6, 1968, 9 a.m., place de la Sorbonne, in Paris.
Police officers and journalists supervise the arrival of eight students summoned before the disciplinary council of the university.
Daniel Cohn-Bendit, 23, is one of them.
In front of the lens of reporter Gilles Caron, whom he himself invited, he mockingly challenges the helmeted authority.
Fifty years later, the retired policeman Christian Le Padellec remembers, on the set of the program "C politique", this meeting and the orders of the prefect Maurice Grimaud: "Take everyone ... except him!
The agent therefore remained stoic in the face of "Dany le Rouge", leader of this historic movement.
The little napalm girl
The photo of Kim Phuc Phan Thi, badly burned with napalm, running on the road in June 1972 has been around the world.
Nick Ut / AP / Sipa, Kevin Rivoli / AP / Sipa
On June 8, 1972, Nick Ut, a 21-year-old Vietnamese photojournalist, was reporting to Trang Bang, in South Vietnam, when he met Kim Phuc Phan Thi.
Severely burned with napalm after the bombardment of her village, the 9-year-old girl runs, terrified, on the road.
She asks for help, yells "Nong qua!"
Nong qua!
("Too hot! Too hot!").
Devastated by pain, Kim loses consciousness.
The photographer takes her to the hospital where she will stay for fourteen months.
Known today as the Napalm Girl, the photo, originally titled The Terror of War, depicts the horror of war and its consequences for the innocent.
It won its author the prestigious World Press Photo Award in 1972 and the Pulitzer in 1973.
As for the young girl, she will be used for a long time by the communist regime for propaganda purposes, and will eventually flee to Canada in 1992, where she still lives.
She now devotes her life to promoting peace, notably through the Kim Foundation, which helps children who are victims of conflict.
Kim Phuc Phan Thi has kept in touch with the photographer, whom she affectionately calls “Uncle Nick, my savior”.
Jackie Kennedy's bodyguard
Clint Hill, Jackie Kennedy's bodyguard, jumped on the president's car in an attempt to save him in the terrorist attack that claimed his life in 1963. James W. Altgens / AP / SIPA, Joyce Marshall / Fort Worth Star-Telegram / Tribune News Service / Getty
On November 22, 1963, a crowd flocked to Dealey Plaza in Dallas. Clint Hill, the bodyguard in charge of Jackie Kennedy's protection, is stationed in the car following the limousine where the 35th President of the United States, John Fitzgerald Kennedy, and his wife are seated. At 12:30 p.m., a shot was fired and the man in black rushed towards the presidential couple. The first lady dove on the chest, in an instinctive movement, recovering in her hands fragments of the skull and brains of her husband, fatally shot by an unidentified gunman.
A tear for Clint Hill, who devoted his life to protecting the guests of the White House, until his retirement in 1975. Gnawed by guilt, he returned to the scene of the tragedy in 1990 and discovered the place of 'where Lee Harvey Oswald shot.
He then realizes that he could never have thwarted the killer's plan.
The little Parisian with a baguette
Jean Brosseron was 5 years old when the French photographer Willy Ronis immortalized him running in the street with his baguette under his arm.
Ministry of Culture / Architecture and Heritage Media Library / Dist.
RMN-Grand Palais / Willy Ronis, Laurent Martinat / NIce Matin / MAXPPP
Paris, 1952. That Saturday, the sun floods the streets. In front of a bakery in the 8th arrondissement, little Jean Brosseron, 5, is approached by a man with glasses who is holding a camera - a curiosity at the time. The man, who is none other than the French photographer Willy Ronis, would like to immortalize him riding on the sidewalk, a baguette under his arm. Jean blithely lends itself to the exercise and, after just a few strides, the picture is in the box. When he tells, all excited, his adventure on returning home, no one believes him. However, the cliché will remain as one of the most famous of so-called “humanist” photography.
Sixty-four years later, Jean Brosseron, who in the meantime became a silk merchant, agreed to replay the scene in the streets of Hyères (Var), his adopted city.
Behind the lens, this time, the photographer Frédérique Burois.
The "dust lady" of September 11
On September 11, 2001, Marcy Borders was working in his office on the 81st floor of the World Trade Center, which a plane hijacked by Al Qaeda terrorists crashed into.
Stan Honda / AFP
In this snapshot of September 11, 2001, taken by AFP photographer Stan Honda, Marcy Borders is 28 years old.
This Bank of America employee fled her office on the 81st floor of the World Trade Center, which a plane hijacked by Al Qaeda terrorists had just crashed into.
After the towers collapse, the young woman wanders, dazed, in a hell of smoke and ashes, which will earn her the nickname of Dust Lady (the "dust lady").
Traumatized, without financial or psychological support, Marcy Borders fell into depression and addiction before going up the slope in 2011. A short respite.
The one whose image still haunts America died on August 26, 2014, at the age of 42, of stomach cancer that she attributed to this heavy dust inhaled thirteen years earlier.
The migrant mother
Known as the “Migrant mother”, immortalized by photographer Dorothea Lange in 1936, Florence Owens Thompson became the face of the Great Depression. Right, pictured with her daughters in 1979. Dorothea Lange / Library of Congress, 1979 & 2021 by Bill Ganzel
On the side of Highway 101, between Los Angeles and Watsonville, a woman has just breastfed her baby in a makeshift tent. We are in March 1936, in California. Her car broke down and her husband, accompanied by two of her elders, went to town to have the radiator repaired. Stayed with her youngest children, she waits. It is during this suspended moment that Dorothea Lange comes to meet her. At the request of the Farm Security Administration, the photographer travels the country to document the ravages of the economic crisis and the government's action in favor of "migrants", these farmers traveling in search of work. On leaving the Nipomo camp, where 2,500 pea collectors live in miserable conditions, his gaze is drawn to this woman with drawn features.
Published in the San Francisco News, the portrait became the symbol of the Great Depression, which began in 1929, and of this white and deprived America. However, the image is far from reality. In 1978, a journalist interviews the anonymous person in the photo. Her name is Florence Owens Thompson, she was 75 at the time and lived in a mobile home in Modesto, California. She is not white, and has never been a migrant. Cherokee Indian, she had lived in California for over ten years when her path crossed that of Dorothea Lange. “I regret that she took this photo,” she says.
The cliché will still help Florence Owens Thompson at the end of her life. In 1983, when she was diagnosed with cancer, her children appealed for donations to pay for medical costs: 35,000 dollars and expressions of affection poured in. She died a few months later, a little reconciled with the notoriety.