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On est dans un TGV qui a eu un petit accident, mais ca va, plus de peur qui de mal🤷🏽‍♀️

Conrad Schumann became famous in the instant his boots left East Berlin, but the photograph never showed the weight that landed with him. He escaped over barbed wire before the Wall became concrete, and spent the rest of his life trying to live beyond that jump.

He was nineteen, a young East German policeman from Saxony, assigned to guard the new border in Berlin just days after it had been sealed. On August 13, 1961, East Germany began closing the line between East and West Berlin with wire, armed men, and hurried orders. The official language spoke of protection from fascism. The street told another story. Families were separated overnight. Windows were bricked up. Subway lines changed. People stood on opposite pavements, close enough to see one another, suddenly far enough to become history.

🔴 The conflict began at Bernauer Strasse, where the border cut through ordinary life with unusual cruelty. Buildings stood in the East, but their front doors or windows opened toward the West. Some residents jumped from windows before they were sealed. Others watched guards take positions where neighbors had once crossed freely. Schumann was posted near the corner of Ruppiner Strasse and Bernauer Strasse on August 15, 1961, when the barrier there was still mainly barbed wire. He was meant to protect the border. Instead, he began studying it, perhaps noticing that the line was not yet stone, only metal, orders, and the nerves of men with rifles.

The moment was not planned like a military operation. West Berliners shouted from the other side. A police van waited nearby. Photographer Peter Leibing, sensing that something might happen, focused his camera on the wire. Schumann stood with his submachine gun, young enough to look almost swallowed by the uniform, old enough to understand what the uniform now required. He was guarding a cage that had been built for people like himself.

🔴 The turning point lasted only seconds. Schumann pressed down the barbed wire, threw away his weapon, and leapt. Leibing captured him midair, knees high, face turned forward, the gun falling behind him. The image would become one of the most famous photographs of the Cold War: a border guard escaping the border he had been ordered to defend. On the western side, police pulled him into the van and drove away. The escape was over almost as soon as it began. The photograph was just beginning its life.

For the West, Schumann became a symbol of freedom. For East Germany, he became a deserter. That division followed him more faithfully than any passport. He eventually settled in West Germany, built a life in Bavaria, married, had a family, and worked far from the border that had made him known. Yet fame did not make exile simple. Behind the famous frame was a man who had left parents, siblings, comrades, and a homeland that could no longer be visited safely. Until the Wall fell in 1989, he feared the reach of the East German state. After it fell, reunification did not return everything that had been lost.

The cruelty of Schumann’s story is that his leap was remembered as pure liberation, while his life after it remained more complicated. Freedom solved the border, but not the loneliness of crossing it. Some accounts of his later years describe depression, strained ties with people from his past, and the burden of being turned into a symbol by a single fraction of a second. He had not chosen to become an icon. He had chosen to leave. The world kept returning to the airborne young man in the photograph, while the older man had to keep living after the landing. The border had been crossed once by the body, and then again, for decades, by memory. Decades later, murals, exhibitions, and memorial walks would return to that single movement, as if the city were still trying to understand the difference between the instant of escape and the lifetime that followed it.

🔴 The end of the story came in 1998, when Conrad Schumann died in Bavaria at the age of 56, in what was reported as su***de. The Wall had already been gone for years. Germany was reunited. The Wall had made him visible to history, but visibility was not the same as being understood. That was the part no camera could freeze. The photograph remained in books, museums, documentaries, and memory, still bright with motion. But the man inside it had learned that escape and peace are not the same thing. The lasting detail is the gap beneath his boots: a few inches of air above barbed wire, wide enough for history to enter, and not wide enough to carry the whole weight of a life.

Palestinian photographer Saher Alghorra, a New York Times contributor, won a Pulitzer Prize on Monday for Breaking News Photography for his documentation of Israel's genocide in Gaza. Alghorra’s works include images of released Palestinian prisoners returning to Gaza, a building being bombed, a mass grave, and a starving child.

En 1936, W***y Ronis a 26 ans. Fils d’un photographe de quartier, il découvre dans la rue et les mouvements sociaux une autre manière de regarder.
Le Front populaire lui offre un sujet décisif : les usines occupées, les cortèges, les ouvriers en grève, mais aussi les moments de pause, les repas, les jeux, les discussions. Ce qu’il photographie, ce n’est pas seulement la revendication. C’est une société ouvrière qui se rend visible.
➡️ https://l.franceculture.fr/YO2

The same man, nearly 80 years between photos.

This is Prokop Vejdělek, at age 22 and 101.

Photographer Jan Langer's portrait series "Faces of Century" features side-by-side photos of people over 100-years-old with their younger selves. They're shown as human beings aged by years of experience, but at their deepest level, unchanged by the passing of time.

In the series, Langer recreates each subject's original pose and lighting as closely as he can — he wants us to see them not just as they are now, but how they have and haven't changed over time. That is the key to the series. See 11 more examples below.