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Friday Photos: Changing the World Edition

It's hard to deny the visceral power that images have. The most iconic photography of the last century -- the return-from-war kiss, Muhammad Ali towering over his KO'd competitor, and a thousand other images -- are so well-known because they communicate intense emotion and inspire an emotional response in the viewer in return.

Jonathan Klein, the co-founder and CEO of Getty Images, delivered a TED talk recently about the power of images. As Klein argues, photography can do more than evoke emotions: photography can change the world.

The examples of powerful photography that Klein uses are those that alert the broader international community to human rights offenses, such as in the Abu Ghraib prison, or to the suffering of a population as in the aftermath of Hurricane Katrina.

As Klein argues, images have so much power because they inspire people to make change:

"When we are confronted with a powerful image, we all have a choice. We can look away, or we can address the image... Images often push us to question our core beliefs and our responsibilities to each other."

When we look at some of the publishers that use ISM's technology, we see that they understand and have harnessed the power of the image, which leads us to our Friday Photos feature. Two of our publishers, Design You Trust and AdPunch, have recently featured creative and effective anti-smoking campaigns that, like Klein says, push us to question our beliefs and change the way we look at the world.

First up, AdPunch recently published a feature "25 Ads You Should See Before You Light Up a Cigarette," and we've included some of the most interesting and evocative.

Courtesy of AdPunch