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Letizia Battaglia risked her life to tell these grim stories of violence and corruption, considering it her duty to show the brutal truth.

These greeting cards from the late 19th and early 20th-century celebrate the New Year with lucky pigs, foxes fleeing for their lives and at least one drunk frog.

These illustrations of 花火, Hanabi (fireworks or "fire flowers"), advertised Japan's Hirayama Fireworks and Yokoi Fireworks companies in the late 19th century.

These ads created during the years after WW2 were almost works of art and skillfully created by hand by wonderfully talented artists and illustrators who worked tirelessly for hours if not days to achieve almost perfect results.

The Documerica Project was put together by the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency in 1971 essentially to document the adverse effects of modern life on the environment.

One of the most successful of these campaigns came from Camel, whose parent company RJ Reynolds launched the ad above in 1946 touting a nationwide survey showing that "More Doctors Smoke Camels Than Any Other Cigarette!"

Santa is jovial, jolly and sexless with rolls of adipose flesh tucked into his ironed gatkes and an itch-free beard. Those other Santas, the imposters, we can't vouch for.

In June 1942, Office of War Information photographer Alfred T. Palmer visited Fort Knox, Kentucky, to photograph the 1st Armored Division making ready for battle.

In 1989, Michael Galinsky, then a 20-year-old student, took a month to cross the USA. Everywhere he went, he photographed America's shopping malls.

These mugshot portraits — we'd call them pictures but their style demands more — are part of 2500 "special photographs" taken by New South Wales Police Department photographers between 1910 and 1930.

Men wore hats and carried black umbrellas and briefcases. Women wore furs and tights the color of stewed tea. Boys wore shorts all year round. Tobacco and gin were the drugs of choice.

In 1959 photographer Bruce Davidson spent several months with NYC gang The Jokers.

Housed in the University of Glasgow's Special Collections is the only known surviving manuscript copy of the 15th century French book "Cent Nouvelles Nouvelles," an anthology of 100 lewd and lascivious stories to entertain the toffs at the court of Philip the Good, Duke of Burgundy.

CW Cushman loved traveling and most years would take photographs of the Ringling Bros and Barnum & Bailey Circus, the so-called Greatest Show on Earth.

At 10:00 AM on October 22, 1964, a bomb was detonated in Mississippi. Local were encouraged to leave their homes in the area. Adults were paid $10 a day and children $5 to stay safe.

Between 1942 and 1945 the Germans defended the west coast of France, the Netherlands, Norway, Belgium, Denmark and the occupied Channel Islands from the threat of Allied invasion with a string of concrete forts, barriers and gun emplacements.

"I wanted a slow, intense pace through the book so I decided to create one illustration a day, every day, for every single one of the 552 pages of my Signet Classics paperback, and on August 4, 2009 I began."

Though he's spent two decades as a designer and teacher, the 42-year-old Brussels  illustrator and graphic artist was only recently discovered in the United States, thanks to a number of high-profile awards and marquee commissions, including a 2013 screenprint of "Jaws," which caught the eye of the film's director, Steven Spielberg.