Today is Photography Day. While most people take photos of family gatherings, festivals, vacations, etc., there are those that take photography much more seriously. These few special people manage to capture a world of emotion through the lenses of their individual cameras.


We’ve decided to put together a collection of powerful photographs for you that bring up positive or negative emotions. You’ll find photographs of war and disaster in both emotional categories. We all know these situations can be horrifying or sad, but what we find amazing is how certain people put in these situations can restore our faith in humanity through their actions or reactions.

So flip through these photos a page at a time; really get a sense of what the photographer was trying to show you and make you feel. Above all, these pictures should make you proud to be human. Even in the darkest of times, people find a way to move through them and come out stronger.
Here are the top 10 most powerful photographs ever taken.

[new page= #10]

Jewish prisoners run to join the troops after being liberated from an internment camp train in 1945.


[new page= #9]

12 year old Diego Fazao Torquato plays his violin at his teacher’s funeral; the teacher saved him from violence and poverty through music.


[new page= #8]

These Christians protected praying Muslims during the 2011 uprisings in Cairo, Egypt.


[new page= #7]

After being fitted with an earpiece, Harold Whittles hears sound for the first time.


[new page= #6]

Sergeant Frank Praytor cares for a kitten whose mother was killed by mortar attack in Korea.


[new page= #5]

Prisoner of war, Horace Greasley, bravely faces down Nazi commander Heinrich Himmler during a camp inspection. Greasley later escaped from the camp, but repeatedly stole back in to visit the German girl he loved, hundreds of times.


[new page= #4]

The graves of a Protestant man and his Catholic wife, who weren’t allowed to be buried in the same cemetery. Netherlands, 1888.


[new page= #3]

This photo of Jane Rose Kasmir placing a flower on Pentagon guards’ bayonets during a Vietnam War protest was taken by Marc Riboud and became a symbol of the flower power movement.


[new page= #2]

This WWII Russian tank veteran found his old tank placed in a Russian town as a monument to the war.


[new page= #1]

During the 2009 Black Saturday bushfires in Australia, this firefighter quenches the smoke ravaged throat of a displaced koala bear.