Over 12 million copies of Farrah Fawcett’s red swimsuit poster were sold back in the 70s.
Its included in pretty much any “most famous photographs” list. I don’t think it gets spoofed or recreated as much as other photos already mentioned though, so its probably not a contender for the answer to the OP.
Plus on every US Military base there would be many copies.
There was once an American large magazine called ‘Life’, in either that or one called ‘Esquire’ ( quite respectable despite the name ) as a child there was an old copy about kept since it dealt with the assassination of President Kennedy, which was a big deal at the time. I recall the kind of horrified disapproval of the journalist that on the same night military base officers removed the official portraits of Kennedy and replaced them with ready official portraits of Johnson.
I originally thought of “copied” as in made a duplicate somehow of the original, and then reprinted elsewhere. By that criteria, it has got to be the Bliss photo from Windows XP. I would bet a good 25-50% of the population of Earth has seen that photo.
But as far as most re-created/parodied, then it’s gotta be Abby Road.
In terms of reproductions, Snowdon’s portrait of the Queen used on currency would be a clear winner.
The photo has been reproduced on every coin of a dozen or so countries, in addition to 50 years of British stamps, in addition to usage in government stationary and miscellaneous other usages.
That has got to beat out images of Che or Windows images by a long margin. Even if we just restrict it to the the copies on stamps, and assume that 10 million Poms purchased 3 postage stamps a year, there were more copies of that image sold by 1965 than all the copies of XP ever sold.
Once you also add in the continued use on stamps over the next 50 years, together with 40 or so years of use on coins and notes, and all the international usage, usage on stationary and so forth, then that photograph must have been reproduced trillions of times.
It’s hard to imagine what other photograph could possibly come close.
If we are just interested in the number of tributes and parodies rather than reproductions, then Abbey Road is a possible winner, just because of the number of personal recreations.
However I can think of one photo that gives it a run for its money, and thathas certainly been the subject of many more “professional” parodies and reproductions, the portrait of Kitchener used for WWI recruiting posters would be a clear winner. It has been reproduced an parodied ceaselessly for 100 years now. And it was parodied on hundreds of thousands of US posters as the Uncle Sam recruitment poster, which has itself been parodied a billion times. Even today, and even in the US, the Kitchener photo and the Uncle Sam meta-parody are parodied and referenced far, far more often than the flag raising on Iwo Jima. And of course it is not just restricted to the US, so it’s going to beat out the flag raising by a huge margin.
That Abbey Road image is also copied on every one of the tens of millions of albums sold, posters, t-shirts, bootlegs, magazine articles, compilations etc etc etc. I really think that by almost any measure this photo has to be considered the most seen/copied/parodied.
Edited to add: yes the Queen’s head is a very good shout. Although its arguable whether it is photographic and also it should be noted that the head gets updated as the Queen ages.
Over ten billion of these pictures were printed in the last decade; similar ones have been made since the early 1950’s. Other similar portraits are printed across the world; in the UK it is estimated there are more than 28 billion.
And I see in preview that Blake has just usurped my answer. But I have numbers!
If “official” reproductions are making a difference, then Abbey road won’t even be close. Tens of millions of albums worldwide is good, but to put it in perspective, it’s about average newspaper circulation for New York State. Any widely reproduced newspaper photograph, such as the Tienanmen tank man or one of the iconic moon landing shots, will sell more copies before lunchtime than all the Abbey Road albums, posters, t-shirts, bootlegs, and compilations ever produced. And while Abbey Road has been widely used in various newspaper and magazine articles over the years, the other photographs have also been used in those same newspapers and magazines, in addition to appearing in every single newspaper in the world on the day they were shot.
Abbey Road is only a contender if we count the number of *different *tributes and parodies. If we are just counting the sheer number of images made that are recognisably a copy of it, then I doubt it would make the top 1, 000.
And this is where these questions tend to become meaningless. Are we discussing photographs, or reproductions of photographs? The iconic Che image on a T-shirt isn’t a photograph, just a reproduction of one in a different medium.
Not on stamps. And even on coins, the images were still produced. The question wasn’t how many copies exist, it is how many were made. I doubt that more than 1% of all the Che or Windows images ever produced still exit right now.
As mentioned above by me and drewtwo99, think about “Bliss” from Windows XP for “most seen.”