Historic Photos Once Banned From Publication
A photograph is a small thing. A rectangle of paper, a few square centimetres of film.
And yet governments, armies and editors have spent enormous effort making sure certain pictures never reached the public. Sometimes the reason was security.
More often it was fear of what people would feel once they saw the truth. A casualty list is easy to skim. A face is not.
The photographs below were banned, impounded, erased or quietly kept off the page. None of them appear here.
Each one is described in words, with care, because several record real suffering. Read through them and you will start to see a pattern in what the people in charge wanted hidden, and why they usually failed.
1. Abraham Lincoln Lying in State, 1865
After Lincoln’s assassination in April 1865, his body travelled by train from Washington to Springfield, Illinois, stopping in cities along the way. In New York, the photographer Jeremiah Gurney Jr. set up his camera at City Hall and took a picture of the open coffin, with an honour guard standing at either end.
Secretary of War Edwin Stanton was furious. He ordered the plates seized and destroyed.
One print, sent to Stanton himself, somehow escaped. It vanished into the papers of Lincoln’s secretaries and stayed lost for 87 years.
In 1952, a 14-year-old boy named Ronald Rietveld found it while doing research in the Illinois State Historical Library. The only known photograph of Lincoln in death had been sitting in a file the whole time, waiting for a curious teenager.
2. Snapshots From the Western Front, 1915
In the first months of the First World War, plenty of British soldiers carried small folding cameras to France. Their pictures of trench life found their way into newspapers back home, including scenes from the famous Christmas truce of 1914, when soldiers from both sides met in no man’s land.
The army hated it. In early 1915, the War Office banned soldiers from carrying cameras at all.
From then on, the public saw the war mostly through a small number of official photographers, whose images were checked by censors before release. That ban shaped how an entire generation pictured the war.
The official images showed order, discipline and cheerful men. The muddy, frightening reality those soldiers lived through rarely made it onto the page while the fighting lasted.
3. The Commissar Who Disappeared, 1937
Nikolai Yezhov ran the Soviet secret police during the worst of Stalin’s purges. In 1937 a photographer captured him walking beside Stalin along the banks of the Moscow–Volga Canal, two powerful men out for a stroll.
Then Yezhov fell. He was arrested in 1939 and shot in 1940.
And the photograph changed. In later versions, Yezhov is gone.
Retouchers painted him out and filled the space with water and sky. Stalin walks alone by the canal, as if he always had.
This was standard practice in the Soviet Union. Officials who fell out of favour vanished from group portraits, sometimes one by one, until a crowded image held only a few survivors.
The original, unedited photograph became a dangerous thing to own. Today the before and after versions sit side by side in history books, and the empty patch of water says more than Yezhov ever did.
4. Dorothea Lange’s Internment Photographs, 1942
Dorothea Lange was already famous for her Depression-era work when the US government hired her in 1942. Her assignment was to document the forced removal of Japanese Americans from the West Coast to internment camps.
The government expected neat, reassuring pictures. Lange gave them the truth.
She photographed families wearing identification tags like luggage, waiting to be loaded onto buses. She photographed a schoolgirl with her hand on her heart, pledging allegiance to the flag of the country about to lock her up.
She photographed a grocery store in Oakland with a huge sign reading “I Am An American”, put up by its Japanese American owner the day after Pearl Harbor.
The army impounded the images. Most went into the National Archives and stayed largely unseen for decades.
A large selection was finally published together in book form in 2006. What makes these photographs so strong is their quietness. Nobody screams.
Nobody fights. People simply stand in line with their suitcases, and you feel the injustice in your stomach.
5. Three Soldiers on the Beach at Buna, 1943
For nearly two years after the United States entered the Second World War, American censors did not allow newspapers or magazines to show photographs of dead American soldiers. The war on the home front was told through maps, statistics and smiling troops.
George Strock, a photographer for Life magazine, took a picture during the fighting at Buna in New Guinea. It shows three American soldiers lying on the sand near the waterline.
Their faces are not visible. A landing craft sits half-sunk in the background.
The image sat with the censors for months. Life’s editors pushed for its release, and President Roosevelt eventually agreed, partly out of concern that Americans were growing complacent about the cost of the war.
Life published it in September 1943, alongside an editorial explaining why.
The reaction was enormous. For the first time, families across the country saw what the telegrams they dreaded actually meant.
6. Hiroshima and Nagasaki, 1945
On 6 August 1945, a newspaper photographer named Yoshito Matsushige was in Hiroshima when the atomic bomb exploded. He walked through the city with his camera that day and took a small number of photographs.
He later said he could barely bring himself to press the shutter. These are believed to be the only photographs taken in Hiroshima on the day of the bombing.
Three days later, Nagasaki was hit. The next morning, an army photographer named Yosuke Yamahata arrived and spent hours photographing the destroyed city and the survivors he met.
Neither set of pictures could be published. After Japan surrendered, the American occupation authorities introduced a press code that kept tight control over what Japanese media could print about the bombings.
Images of the human cost were kept out of public view. The occupation ended in April 1952. Later that year, Life magazine ran a feature of photographs from both cities under a headline promising readers they were seeing them uncensored for the first time.
Seven years had passed. The people in those pictures had waited a long time to be seen.
7. The Emperor and the General, 1945
On 27 September 1945, Emperor Hirohito visited General Douglas MacArthur at the American embassy in Tokyo. An army photographer took a picture of the two men standing side by side.
MacArthur looks relaxed, in open-collared khaki with his hands at his hips. He towers over the emperor.
Hirohito stands stiffly in a formal morning coat, arms at his sides. To many Japanese, the emperor was still regarded as sacred. Seeing him beside a casual, taller foreign general was a shock.
The Japanese government tried to ban newspapers from printing the photograph and ordered copies confiscated. The occupation authorities overruled them, and the picture ran.
That single image told the Japanese public, more plainly than any announcement could, who held power now.
8. Roosevelt in His Wheelchair
Franklin Roosevelt contracted a paralysing illness in 1921, widely diagnosed as polio, and could not walk unaided for the rest of his life. Yet he served as president from 1933 until his death in 1945, and most Americans never saw him in a wheelchair.
No law banned those pictures. The restriction was an unwritten agreement.
Press photographers generally did not shoot him being lifted from cars or wheeled between rooms, and the Secret Service was known to step in when someone tried. Roosevelt’s team carefully arranged his public appearances so he appeared standing, gripping a podium or the arm of an aide.
Only a handful of photographs showing him seated in his wheelchair are known to exist. One, taken privately in 1941, shows him with his dog Fala and a young family friend.
It reads as an ordinary family moment, and that is exactly what makes it striking. The most powerful man in the world spent twelve years making sure nobody saw him sitting like that.
9. Ernest Cole’s House of Bondage, 1967
For South African readers, this is the one closest to home.
Ernest Cole was born in 1940 near Pretoria and started working as a photographer for Drum magazine as a teenager. He set out to document what apartheid looked like from the inside, day by day.
The problem was that a black photographer moving freely through white areas with a camera attracted attention.
So Cole did something extraordinary. He managed to get himself reclassified as “coloured” under apartheid’s race laws, which gave him a little more freedom of movement.
He used it to photograph pass raids, crowded trains, mine recruitment, segregated hospitals and the endless small humiliations of daily life under the system.
He knew the images could never be published at home. In 1966 he left the country, and in 1967 a New York publisher released his work as a book called House of Bondage.
South Africa banned it. Cole was effectively exiled and never came back.
He died in New York in 1990, just days after Nelson Mandela walked out of prison. The story did not end there.
Decades later, tens of thousands of Cole’s negatives turned up in a Swedish bank vault. In 2024, the filmmaker Raoul Peck released a documentary about him called Ernest Cole: Lost and Found.
If you live in Gauteng, the Apartheid Museum near Gold Reef City and the Hector Pieterson Museum in Orlando West both give you a strong sense of the world Cole photographed. Go on a weekday when it is quiet and give yourself at least half a day.
10. The Girl on the Road From Trang Bang, 1972
On 8 June 1972, a South Vietnamese plane dropped napalm near the village of Trang Bang. Associated Press photographer Nick Ut captured a group of children running down the road towards the camera, soldiers walking behind them.
At the centre is a nine-year-old girl, Phan Thi Kim Phuc, unclothed because she had torn off her burning clothes, crying out in pain.
The AP nearly did not send it. The agency had a policy against publishing frontal images of unclothed people, and some editors argued it should be rejected.
Horst Faas, the AP’s photo chief in Saigon, insisted that the news value outweighed the rule. The photograph went out on the wire and ran around the world.
It won the Pulitzer Prize and helped turn public opinion further against the Vietnam War. Kim Phuc survived after months of treatment and many operations.
She later settled in Canada and became an advocate for children affected by war.
The ban came back decades later in an unexpected form. In 2016, Facebook deleted the photograph from a Norwegian writer’s post because it broke the platform’s rules on images of unclothed children.
The editor of Norway’s largest newspaper wrote a front-page open letter to Mark Zuckerberg in protest, and Facebook reversed its decision. A rule designed to protect children had nearly erased one of the most important records of what war does to them.
11. South Africa’s Emergency Blackout, 1985–1990
Most of the bans in this list target a single picture. In the mid-1980s, the South African government tried to ban a whole category of them.
As resistance to apartheid grew, the state declared a state of emergency in parts of the country in July 1985 and extended it nationwide in June 1986. Emergency regulations restricted journalists from photographing or filming unrest and the actions of the security forces.
Publishing such images without permission became a criminal offence. The goal was simple. If the world could not see the violence, the pressure on the government would ease.
Television footage from the townships had been shaping opinion abroad, and the authorities wanted it to stop. It did not fully work. Photographers kept shooting.
Members of the Afrapix collective, among others, documented resistance and repression while working around the rules, and many images reached foreign publications. Inside the country, some newspapers made the censorship itself visible.
The Weekly Mail became known for printing pages with blacked-out passages, so readers could see exactly how much they were not being told. Sometimes the blank space was the story.
12. The Man Who Stood Before the Tanks, 1989
On the morning of 5 June 1989, the day after Chinese troops cleared Tiananmen Square in Beijing, a column of tanks rolled along Chang’an Avenue. A lone man carrying shopping bags walked into the road and stood in front of the lead tank.
It tried to go around him. He stepped in front of it again.
Several photographers captured the moment from the upper floors of the nearby Beijing Hotel, including Jeff Widener of the AP and Stuart Franklin of Magnum. Security officers were searching rooms for film.
One photographer, Charlie Cole, hid his roll in the cistern of a toilet so it would not be confiscated. The image became one of the most recognised photographs of the 20th century everywhere except the country where it was taken.
Inside China, it remains heavily censored to this day, and many young people there have never seen it. The identity and fate of the man are still unknown.
13. An Iraqi Soldier on the Road to Basra, 1991
In the final days of the Gulf War, American aircraft attacked a long column of Iraqi vehicles retreating from Kuwait along the highway towards Basra. The stretch of road became known as the Highway of Death.
Photojournalist Kenneth Jarecke reached a nearby road soon after and photographed the remains of an Iraqi soldier inside a burned-out truck. The image is hard to look at, and it does not need to be described further here.
American editors refused to run it. The AP pulled it from its wire service.
Coverage of the war on American television had been dominated by footage from smart bombs and briefings with maps, a clean, almost bloodless picture of modern war. Jarecke’s image did not fit. The Observer in Britain published it, as did Libération in France.
In the United States, it stayed largely unseen for years. Jarecke later said he took it so that nobody could pretend war looked like a video game.
14. Flag-Draped Coffins at Dover, 1991–2009
In 1991, at the start of the Gulf War, the US government banned the media from photographing the coffins of American service members as they arrived at Dover Air Force Base in Delaware. Officials said the ban protected the families’ privacy.
Critics said it hid the human cost of war.
In April 2004, a cargo worker named Tami Silicio took a photograph inside a transport plane in Kuwait. It showed rows of coffins draped in American flags, secured for the flight home.
The Seattle Times published it. Within days, Silicio and her husband had lost their jobs.
Around the same time, a freedom of information request forced the Pentagon to release hundreds of its own images of coffins arriving at Dover.
The ban was finally lifted in 2009. Defense Secretary Robert Gates changed the policy so families could decide whether the media would be allowed to photograph their loved one’s return.
Many said yes.
15. The Falling Man, 2001
On the morning of 11 September 2001, AP photographer Richard Drew photographed a man falling from the North Tower of the World Trade Center. In the frame, the man appears almost calm, upright and headfirst, set against the vertical lines of the building behind him.
No government banned this one. Newspapers banned it themselves.
Several papers printed it on 12 September, and readers responded with anger and grief. Many found it intrusive. Editors pulled back, and the image largely vanished from American publications for years afterward.
Drew always defended it. He saw it as a record of a choice that hundreds of people faced that morning, a choice most coverage avoided.
The man’s identity has never been confirmed. A photograph meant to be forgotten instead became one of the defining images of that day.
What the Censors Could Never Hold
Look back over these stories and you will notice something. Almost every banned photograph eventually surfaced.
A print slipped out of a file. A negative turned up in a bank vault.
A cargo worker pressed a shutter. A teenager opened the right folder in a library.
The bans bought time, nothing more. They kept people comfortable for a few months or a few decades.
But images have a stubborn way of outliving the people who tried to bury them. There is something useful in that for you, too.
The next time a picture makes you uncomfortable, ask who would rather you had not seen it, and why. In South Africa, an entire generation grew up with blank spaces where the news should have been. Ernest Cole’s camera, the Afrapix photographers and the editors who printed black bars all knew the same thing.
A picture someone fights to hide is usually the one you most need to look at.
More from Go2Tutors!
- The Romanov Crown Jewels and Their Tragic Fate
- 13 Historical Mysteries That Science Still Can’t Solve
- Famous Hoaxes That Fooled the World for Years
- 15 Child Stars with Tragic Adult Lives
- 16 Famous Jewelry Pieces in History
Like Go2Tutors’s content? Follow us on MSN.
