The good boy/bad boy drama played out in these paired images parallels the split between Mapplethorpe's elegant celebrity portraits and flower photos, on the one hand, and his often shocking photographs on sexual themes.

As a plastic surgeon, Morgan was accustomed to taking shocking and graphic photographs for evidence, and she says she never dreamed what the results would be.

Concerning the abuses at Abu Ghraib, the impact was magnified by the fact the shocking photographs were aired throughout the world in April 2004.

Choc, meaning "Shock" is geared towards publishing shocking photographs.

Several galleries and books have exhibited shocking photographs as "works of art."

Media in Papua New Guinea posted what were described by ABC Radio Australia's News as "shocking photographs of bodies hanging out of the mangled wreckage of the two buses".

While Howard's fourteen paintings reference The Passion, the creation of the series was in fact provoked by one of the most shocking photographs to emerge from the Abu Ghraib prison in Iraq.

Secretary of Defense Donald H. Rumsfeld, who has taken responsibility for the abuse scandal but resisted pressure from antiwar critics to resign, has said many more shocking photographs and videos of the abuse exist.

Even the most shocking photographs are tamed by the permission implicit in them.

There was the famous stark and shocking photograph of emaciated concentration-camp inmates looking curiously at the camera from their bunk beds.