0A Mother with a portrait of her missing son, 1984, Sicily (Letizia Battaglia)

Letizia Battaglia began her photography career in the early 1970s and started photographing the Sicilian Mafia in 1974, even receiving death threats. As the photography director of L’Ora, Palermo’s left-wing daily newspaper, she or one of her assistants was present at every major crime scene in the city until shortly before the paper folded in 1990. From these assignments, Battaglia and her long-time partner Franco Zecchin produced many of the iconic photographs that have come to represent Sicily and the Mafia throughout the world. - International Center of Photography

Mother running with her fatally wounded child after napalm attack, Trang Bang, Vietnam June 8, 1972 (David Burnett, Time/LIFE)

In the summer of 1972, I was a 25-year-old photojournalist working in Vietnam, mostly for Time and Life magazines. As the United States began winding down its direct combat role and encouraging Vietnamese fighting units to take over the war, trying to find and tell the story presented enormous challenges. On June 8, a New York Times reporter and I were going to explore what was happening on Route 1, an hour out of Saigon. We visited a small village that had seen some overnight fighting, but were told by locals that there was a bigger battle going on a few kilometers north.

There, at the village of Trang Bang, I waited and watched with a dozen other journalists from a short distance as round after round of small-arm and grenade fire signaled an ongoing firefight. I was changing film in one of my old Leicas, an amazing camera with a reputation for being infamously difficult to load. As I struggled, a Vietnamese air force fighter came in low and slow and dropped napalm on what its pilot thought were enemy positions…”   (continue) 

Mother protests draft in Los Angeles, Oct. 20, 1967 (Herald Examiner)

[Muslim female beggar holding a card written in Urdu saying she is a widow with two children and no one to support her], Dehli, 1946 (Margaret Bourke-White. Time/LIFE]

Maria Padiska still weeps, four months after the Germans killed her mother in a massacre at the Greek town of Distomo, 1944 (Dimitri Kessel, Time/LIFE)

[Woman and child refugees, French internment camps for Republican exiles, Argelès-sur-Mer, France], 1939 (Robert Capa)

Mairie de Castries, façade sur rue, March, 1945 (Marcel Bovis)

WWII Soldier with his mother, c1940 (Mike Disfarmer)

Studien Der Mensch [Grandmother and Child], c1919 (August Sander) 

Mother, Wife and Sweetheart Watching Boys of the Seventh Regimen as They Marched Away to War, New York, 1917 (Underwood and Underwood)