We introduce the EMC algorithm for reconstructing a particle's three-dimensional (3D) diffraction intensity from very many photon shot-noise limited two-dimensional measurements, when the particle orientation in each measurement is unknown. The algorithm combines a maximization step (M) of the intensity's likelihood function, with expansion (E) and compression (C) steps that map the 3D intensity model to a redundant tomographic representation and back again. After a few iterations of the EMC update rule, the reconstructed intensity is given to the difference-map algorithm for reconstruction of the particle contrast. We demonstrate reconstructions with simulated data and investigate the effects of particle complexity, number of measurements, and the number of photons per measurement. The relatively transparent scaling behavior of our algorithm provides an estimate of the data processing resources required for future single-particle imaging experiments. © 2009 The American Physical Society.