Blogging about The Onion’s mystery Men on the Street the other day started me thinking: what about the “People on the Street” in other, even more famous photographs?

In most famous news photos, it’s not an issue. The guy with glasses holding up the “DEWEY BEATS TRUMAN” edition of the Chicago Tribune? Well, that’s Harry Truman. The pumped-looking gentleman towering over a supine Sonny Liston? His name was Cassius Clay. And that’s…the rest of the story.

But not every iconic news photo subject is so well-known. For some of them, the decades of fame/notoriety must change their lives substantially. There was even a fairly successful movie last year on the topic.

Some of them are internationally famous, yet still unknown. For example:

This protestor was actually chosen as one of Time magazine 100 most influential people of the 20th century…and no one knows his name, and (given the tragic fate he either befell or would befall if he announced his identity) probably never will. (Anyone remember the other nameless entry on Time’s list?)

Like the weirdos who write into newspapers fraudulently confessing to be serial killers, dozens of aspirants have claimed to be the kissers in this famous V-J Day photo, many in response to a 1980 Life magazine article in which one Edith Shain came out as the nurse. This guy has been kissing strangers for years on the strength of his claim–including, he says, the wife of Chief Justice John Roberts! Sounds sort of skeevy to me. (“If I told you I had a beautiful body in 1945, could I hold it against you?”)

What about the two Little Rock teens seen in this famous school integration photo, the hateful Hazel Bryan and the stoic Elizabeth Eckford? Wikipedia to the rescue. This gaping wound in our national psyche was, it turns out, healed in 1997 by–who else?–Oprah Winfrey. The Arkansas Democrat-Gazette says a repentant Bryan was finally able to apologize to Eckford, but I’m a little skeptical. Was Bryan’s humble pie motivated by racial enlightenment, or was she, a Southern girl of the 1950s, merely mortified at her forty years caught in the spotlight while committing the ultimate sin of being un-ladylike?

The name of Dorothea Lange’s famous Migrant Mother was unknown until Florence Owens Thompson revealed her identity to the Modesto Bee in the late 1970s. Her photo had changed public and government awareness of the plight of the Dust Bowl poor, and even inspired Steinbeck’s The Grapes of Wrath, but had she seen a penny? She felt exploited, especially because, she said, Lange never even asked her name.

National Geographic didn’t make the same mistake. In 2002, they tracked down Sharbat Gula, the Afghan girl whose striking green eyes have made them a jillion dollars over the years and, the article implies, paid her off and promised never to come back…in return for one more interview, of course.

In the Internet age, of course, an Edith Shain or a Florence Thompson wouldn’t have stayed silent for long. Witness this recent Slate article, in which a New Yorker calls “Liar liar pants on fire” on a stupid Frank Rich column about 9-11 callousness. Nowadays, Edith Shain could kiss and tell on MySpace. Hazel Bryan would be insisting on her blog that her mouth was just twisted somewhere between the syllables of “You go, girl!”

What famous photos of non-celebrity celebrities did I miss? Suggest your favorites on the message boards. (All photos above are copyright the respective rights holders, of course, and are used only for non-commercial–nay, scholarly–purposes.)