(LA Times)
ML Cavanaugh June 02, 2019 3:05 AM
Some photos must be taken, some images must be seen. These thoughts must have motivated photographer Robert Capa 75 years ago as he plunged off a landing craft and onto Omaha Beach with an early wave of the D-day landings.
“If your pictures aren’t good enough,” Capa famously advised, then “you’re not close enough.”
He was close enough on June 6, 1944, to secure what are now known as the Magnificent Eleven, the surviving images on four rolls of film delivered from Normandy to London just a day and a half after the Allied assault on Europe began. Five of the photos — “slightly out of focus,” in Capa’s words — were published in the next issue of Life magazine, dated June 19, 1944: Battle scenes in blurred black and white; frenzied, grim.
The stark face of a helmeted soldier caught in swirling water, often cited as the iconic image of the “longest day,” captured the landing’s essential danger: drown or fight. Capa’s D-day shots reportedly inspired director Steven Spielberg’s wrenching, realistic take on the landings in “Saving Private Ryan.” To pierce Hitler’s Atlantic Wall, more than 16,000 Americans would die and 40,000 would be wounded by the end of July.
Great photos matter. They do two things, simultaneously: zoom us in on some frozen moment, and then widen our apertures to the world in a way that transcends words alone.
Often the pictures that hit us hardest depict violence. Of the 133 winners of the Pulitzer Prizes for photography, more than half — 69 — have been connected in some way to man-made conflict. Given a choice, the prize-givers honor such images because, as graphic and grisly as they may be, they are crucial to public understanding in a dangerous world.
Comments