Photos depicting 1987 ‘Black Monday’ stock market crash are authentic

Claim:

Photos authentically depict the 1987 stock market crash known as Black Monday.

Rating:

Photographs purporting to authentically depict stock traders’ reactions to the historic Oct. 19, 1987, stock market crash known as “Black Monday” circulated online in April 2025.

Black Monday was a catastrophic financial event that, according to news coverage at the time, many people feared would result in another Great Depression. 

The alleged Black Monday photographs surfaced amid discourse about the April 2, 2025, stock market crash that resulted from global concern over U.S. President Donald Trump’s announcement of expansive global tariffs, most of which the president later paused.

One internet user shared the photos in a popular gallery on Reddit. Some of the photos also made their way to Instagram (archived) and Facebook (archived). 

“Black Monday” in 1987, one of the worst stock market crashes in history. Worldwide losses were estimated to be $1.71 trillion.
byu/zadraaa inHistoricalCapsule

All five photographs shared in the Reddit thread were authentic, and none showed evidence of any digital manipulation or use of artificial intelligence. 

Four of the five photographs show scenes at the New York Stock Exchange and are the work of photographer Maria Bastone according to Getty Images, a major supplier of editorial photographs to media outlets. 

The captions for two of the photographs read, “A trader (c) on the New York Stock Exchange looks at stock rates 19 October 1987 as stocks were devastated during one of the most frantic days in the exchange’s history. The Dow Jones index plummeted over 200 points in record trading.”

However, one of the photographs on Getty has a date of Oct. 16, 1987 — the Friday before the stock market crash that would become known as Black Monday. That Friday saw what was, at the time, “the largest one-day drop in the history of the DJIA,” according to Federal Reserve History, and is considered one of the early indicators of what was to come the following week. 

Because one of these photos was from a different date, it is not technically correct to say all of the photos in the claim authentically depict Black Monday. For this reason we’ve determined this claim to be mostly true. 

(The New York Daily News, Oct. 20, 1987)

The fifth photograph shared in the Reddit post, credited to photographer Tim Clark, can be found on The Canadian Press‘ image database. Unlike the other four, it does not depict the NYSE, but the Toronto Stock Exchange. The photo’s caption reads, “An exhausted trader slumps in his chair at the Toronto Stock Exchange October 19, 1987, known as Black Monday.” 

Reverse-image searches on Google Images and TinEye returned multiple instances of these photographs in publications such as The Wall Street Journal, The Globe and Mail, NPR, The Denver Post, Yahoo Finance and Financial Post. 

An article in the New York Daily News from Oct. 20, 1987, described the previous day’s events: 

The market free-fall easily eclipsed the crash of Black Tuesday, 1929. The Dow Jones Industrial Average plummeted 508 points, more than four times the “old” record of 108.35 set Friday. The blue-chip stocks that make up the Dow lost 22.62$ of their value, easily topping the 12.82% decline of Oct. 28, 1929.

As a result of Black Monday, stock exchange organizations implemented new restrictions on the markets. These trading curbs, also called circuit breakers, are meant to automatically halt trading for a period of time should an unexpected massive drop occur. 

These fail-safes were implemented during the stock market crash in March 2020 that stemmed from fears of the unfolding COVID-19 pandemic.

Sources