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10 Amazing Photos of the Most Powerful People

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Long before the mugshots, the trophies and the Nobel-worthy speeches, these icons were just kids standing in front of a camera.

A new video compilation strips away the polish and puts twelve of the most recognizable names in modern history back in their earliest, least-famous form. These are the photos taken years — sometimes decades — before the White House, the Vatican, or the cover of Forbes, when a future Pope was just a teenager in Buenos Aires and a future Microsoft co-founder was getting booked by police in Albuquerque.

• Oprah Winfrey appears at age 17 in 1971, holding her “Miss Fire Prevention” trophy in Nashville, more than a decade before The Oprah Winfrey Show existed.
• Bill Gates’ 1977 Albuquerque police mugshot, taken at age 22 after a traffic violation, comes just two years after he co-founded Microsoft.
• Queen Elizabeth II is shown at 19 in 1945, working as a mechanic and driver in the British Auxiliary Territorial Service during World War II.

Oprah’s Trophy and the Obamas’ Law Firm Days

The clip opens on Oprah Winfrey at 17, clutching a “Miss Fire Prevention” trophy in Nashville in 1971 — a small-town pageant win with no hint of the media empire she’d eventually build through her syndicated talk show and roles like the one in The Color Purple. It’s a reminder that even the most dominant personalities in broadcasting started with local, unglamorous milestones.

From there the video jumps to Barack and Michelle Obama as a young couple, photographed not long after they met at a Chicago law firm in 1989. More than two decades separate that photo from their eight years in the White House, and the video leans on the contrast: two law associates versus the most photographed couple on the planet.

Faith and Resistance Before the Titles

Martin Luther King Jr. shows up as a boy in 1930s Atlanta — back when he was still named Michael King, before the name change and long before the March on Washington. Pope Francis, born Jorge Mario Bergoglio, is pictured as an ordinary Buenos Aires teenager, decades removed from becoming the 266th Pope of the Catholic Church.

Mahatma Gandhi’s photo is one of the sharpest contrasts in the whole reel: a late-19th-century portrait shows him in full Western business attire during his early career as an attorney-at-law, nothing like the loincloth he’d later wear during hunger strikes for Indian independence. Nelson Mandela gets a similar treatment — a 1937 portrait at 19, dressed in a suit during his student years at the University of Fort Hare in South Africa, long before Robben Island and the presidency.

Albert Einstein rounds out this stretch with an 1893 portrait taken at age 14. He’s got neat dark hair, nothing like the wild gray mane and mustache the world would come to know, and the video notes his early speech difficulties and rebellious streak in school — details that don’t exactly match the popular image of an effortless genius.

Wartime Service and Early Business Hustle

Queen Elizabeth II’s photo may be the most unexpected of the bunch: in 1945, at 19, the future monarch is pictured in coveralls as a mechanic and driver in the British Auxiliary Territorial Service, doing wartime service like any other young Brit — a far cry from the tiaras and state visits that would define her seven-decade reign. It’s the kind of image that fits right alongside the palace history covered in looks at royal family members who turned out nothing like their public image.

Donald Trump appears at 30 in 1976, inside his penthouse apartment on Manhattan’s Upper East Side, right at the start of his real estate career and years before “Trump” became shorthand for luxury towers and reality TV. Bill Gates closes out the business side with that 1977 Albuquerque mugshot — 22 years old, freshly arrested on a traffic violation, and only a couple years removed from starting Microsoft with Paul Allen.

A 22-year-old Bill Gates got booked by Albuquerque police over a traffic stop in 1977 — two years after he’d already co-founded Microsoft.

Taken together, the twelve photos work because none of them look like foreshadowing. Nobody in a “Miss Fire Prevention” sash or an ATS coverall looks destined for a Nobel Prize or a throne, which is exactly the point of stacking these images side by side — the kind of before-and-after gap you also see in other childhood-to-fame transformation breakdowns.

The Gandhi photo in particular tends to stop viewers cold — a sharply dressed young attorney in a three-piece suit, decades before the loincloth and the hunger strikes that made him globally recognizable. That single image, more than any of the others, is the one people replay.