An Alternative History of the US in 10 Photographs

In 1907, the pioneering modernist photographer Alfred Stieglitz shot this photograph aboard the SS Kaiser Wilhelm II. This photograph was regarded as emblematic of the era and the nation: welcoming to the poor immigrants from the Old World and offering the chance of a new life.

But the backstory tells a different tale. The ship was actually sailing from America to Europe. It has been suggested that some of the people pictured here were being deported, having failed to pass stringent immigration tests, passed in to law only months earlier.

During the Great Depression, photographer Dorothea Lange was working for the Farm Security Administration, documenting the devastating causes and effects of poverty in the rural United States. On March 6, 1936 she shot one of the most famous images of the 20th Century.

The photo came to stand for the economic injustice of the era. But as the years passed, Florence Owens Thompson, the so-named Migrant Mother, came to resent the image. Thompson disputed Lange's recollection of events, and said it wasn't representative of her personal experience.

As attention turned to the battles across the seas, the injustices of home were often overlooked. But African American photographer Gordon Parks never stopped searching for images that defined his experience of the Land of the Free.

Working as an associate of the Farm Security Administration, Parks travelled the nation documenting daily life. One day in 1942 while at the FSA offices, he asked Ella Watson, a cleaner, to stop for a moment and pose in front of the star spangled banner.

Parks' image recalls Grant Wood's painting of the same name, inverting the sentiment from white, rural farmers, to urban, black, female workers. For four months, Watson and Parks worked together, taking more photographs at work, at home, and at her church.

By 1966, English photographer Larry Burrows had been following the conflict in Vietnam for five long, bloody years. On 5 October, 1966, the US Marine detachment he was shadowing were ambushed on Mutter's Ridge.

US Marine Gunnery Sergeant Jeremiah Purdi walks, with wounded head, across the ravaged mud-soaked hillside. Among the carnage, he seems to be reaching out to his comrade with wounded leg who sits in the mud before him.

Ben Cosgrove, editor of LIFE.com summarised it thus, "Larry Burrows made a photograph that, for generations, has served as the most indelible, searing illustration of the horrors inherent in that long, divisive war — and, by implication, in all wars."

In 2008, Barack Obama made history as the first African American to be elected president, capping a meteoric rise in politics and concluding a campaign that encouraged progress and optimism. For many, his election signaled increasing racial unity.

But by the time Obama left office in 2016, the feelings of solidarity, which had been fostered in his campaign, languished, and political divides had grown.

Artist Chuck Close took two large-format photographs of President Obama in 2013, one smiling, one serious, reflecting his time in office. Close later used these images to create double portraits in a variety of mediums, including these Woodburytypes.