The Magnificent Eleven are a group of photos of D-Day (6 June 1944) taken by war photographer Robert Capa. Capa was with one of the earliest waves of troops landing on the American invasion beach, Omaha Beach. Capa stated that while under fire, he took 106 pictures, all but eleven of which were destroyed in a processing accident in the Life magazine photo lab in London, although the accidental loss of the remaining negatives has been disputed. The surviving photos have since been called the Magnificent Eleven. The pictures have been widely celebrated, and Steven Spielberg is said to have been inspired by them when filming Saving Private Ryan . [1]
Capa came ashore with the men of the 16th Infantry Regiment of the 1st Infantry Division on 6 June 1944 (D-Day) in an early wave of the assaults on Omaha Beach (reported variously as the "first wave" [2] or thirteenth, though just an hour behind the first wave [3] ). He used two Contax II cameras mounted with 50 mm lenses and several rolls of spare film, and returned to the United Kingdom within hours in order to meet a publication deadline for Life magazine's next issue.
Life magazine printed five of the pictures in its June 19, 1944, issue, "Beachheads of Normandy: The Fateful Battle for Europe is Joined by Sea and Air." [1] Some of the images had captions that described the footage as "slightly out of focus", explaining that Capa's hands were shaking in the excitement of the moment. Capa denied this in his biography, but also Capa stated that his "empty camera trembled in my hands", preventing him from loading a new roll of film. [4] Capa used this phrase as the title of his autobiographical account of the war, Slightly Out of Focus.
The captions were written by magazine staffers, as Capa did not provide Life with notes or a verbal description of what they showed. [3] The captions have since been shown to be erroneous, as were subsequent descriptions of the images by Capa himself. [3] For example, men described by Life as soldiers taking cover behind a hedgehog obstacle were members of Gap Assault Team 10 – a combined US Navy/US Army explosives demolition unit tasked with destroying obstacles and clearing the way for subsequent landing craft. [3] [5]
According to Capa, he took 106 pictures in the first two hours of the invasion. Capa returned with the unprocessed films to London, where a staff member at Life made a mistake in the darkroom; he set the dryer too high and melted the emulsion in the negatives in three complete rolls and over half of a fourth roll. Only eleven frames in total were recovered. [4] [6] Accounts differed in blaming a fifteen-year-old lab assistant named Dennis Banks, or Larry Burrows, who would later be known for his photography but worked in the lab at this time. [7]
Historian and critic A. D. Coleman has suggested that this famous and widely disseminated story is implausible, because (among other things) the temperatures used by such driers would not have been hot enough to melt or set fire to film. He claims instead that Capa might have only stayed on the beach long enough to make the ten surviving exposures and then left. [3]
Towards the end of his life, Capa's former editor, John Morris, conceded that the story may be false, saying: "It's quite possible that Bob just bundled all his 35 [mm film rolls] together and just shipped it off back to London, knowing that on one of those rolls there would be the pictures he actually shot that morning." [8] [9]
For many years the soldier in the most well-known of the photographs was identified as Edward Regan. Another soldier, Huston Riley, has also been put forward. Riley himself remembers meeting a photographer who helped him out of the water: "I was surprised to see him there. I saw the press badge and I thought, 'What the hell is he doing here?' He helped me out of the water and then he took off down the beach for some more photos." The combat engineer behind the hedgehog is believed to be James E. Terrell, who remembered Capa pointing a camera at him, as the man next to Terrell was alive in the first photo and was killed by the second photo. [10] [11] More recent identification of the specific section of beach where the pictures were taken suggests that Regan and Riley were on different beach sections. [3]
Prints of the photographs are kept at the International Center of Photography, in New York. [12]
Robert Capa was a Hungarian-American war photographer and photojournalist. He is considered by some to be the greatest combat and adventure photographer in history.
Magnum Photos is an international photographic cooperative owned by its photographer-members, with offices in Paris, New York City, London and Tokyo. It was founded in 1947 in Paris by photographers Robert Capa, David "Chim" Seymour, Maria Eisner, Henri Cartier-Bresson, George Rodger, William Vandivert, and Rita Vandivert. Its photographers retain all copyrights to their own work.
Photojournalism is journalism that uses images to tell a news story. It usually only refers to still images, but can also refer to video used in broadcast journalism. Photojournalism is distinguished from other close branches of photography by having a rigid ethical framework which demands an honest and impartial approach that tells a story in strictly journalistic terms. Photojournalists contribute to the news media, and help communities connect with one other. They must be well-informed and knowledgeable, and are able to deliver news in a creative manner that is both informative and entertaining.
Ernst Haas was an Austrian-American photojournalist and color photographer. During his 40-year career Haas trod the line between photojournalism and art photography. In addition to his coverage of events around the globe after World War II Haas was an early innovator in color photography. His images were carried by magazines like Life and Vogue and, in 1962, were the subject of the first single-artist exhibition of color photography at New York's Museum of Modern Art. He served as president of the cooperative Magnum Photos. His book of volcano photographs, The Creation (1971), remains one of the most successful photography books ever published, selling more than 350,000 copies.
David Seymour, or Chim, was a Polish photographer and photojournalist.
Edward Thomas Adams was an American photographer and photojournalist noted for portraits of celebrities and politicians and for coverage of 13 wars. He is best known for his photograph of the execution of Nguyễn Văn Lém, a Viet Cong prisoner of war, for which he won the Pulitzer Prize for Spot News Photography in 1969. Adams was a longtime resident of Bogota, New Jersey.
The International Center of Photography (ICP) is a photography museum and school at 84 Ludlow Street on the Lower East Side of Manhattan in New York City. ICP's photographic collection, reading room, and archives are at Mana Contemporary in Jersey City, New Jersey. The organization was founded by Cornell Capa in 1974. It is located at 84 Ludlow Street, within the Lower East Side.
Steve McCurry is an American photographer, freelancer, and photojournalist. His photo Afghan Girl, of a girl with piercing green eyes, has appeared on the cover of National Geographic several times. McCurry has photographed many assignments for National Geographic and has been a member of Magnum Photos since 1986.
Gerta Pohorylle, known professionally as Gerda Taro, was a German war photographer active during the Spanish Civil War. She is regarded as the first female photojournalist to have died while covering the frontline in a war.
Cornell Capa was a Hungarian-American photographer, member of Magnum Photos, photo curator, and the younger brother of photo-journalist and war photographer Robert Capa. Graduating from Imre Madách Gymnasium in Budapest, he initially intended to study medicine, but instead joined his brother in Paris to pursue photography. Cornell was an ambitious photo enthusiast who founded the International Center of Photography in New York in 1974 with help from Micha Bar-Am after a stint of working for both Life magazine and Magnum Photos.
Ralph Theodore Morse was a career staff photographer for Life magazine. He photographed some of the most widely seen pictures of World War II, the United States space program, and sports events, and was celebrated for his multiple-exposure photographs. Morse's success as an improviser led to his being considered Life magazine's specialist in technical photography. Former managing editor George P. Hunt declared that "If [the] equipment he needed didn't exist, [Morse] built it."
Maria Eisner was an Italian-American photographer, photo editor and photo agent. She was one of the founders of Magnum Photos, and the first head of its Paris office.
Taxis to Hell – and back – Into the Jaws of Death is a photograph taken on June 6, 1944, by Robert F. Sargent, a chief photographer's mate in the United States Coast Guard. It depicts soldiers of the U.S. Army's 1st Infantry Division disembarking from an LCVP from the U.S. Coast Guard-crewed USS Samuel Chase at Omaha Beach during the Normandy landings in World War II.
The Falling Soldier is a black and white photograph by Robert Capa, claimed to have been taken on Saturday, September 5, 1936. It was said to depict the death of a Republican soldier from the Libertarian Youth (FIJL) during the Battle of Cerro Muriano of the Spanish Civil War. The soldier in the photograph was later claimed to be the anarchist militiaman Federico Borrell García.
Bob Henriques (1930–2011) was an American photojournalist who was active in the 1950s and early 1960s. He was an Associate of Magnum Photos, and a free-lance photographer for Life Magazine. He is best known for his photos of movie stars, particularly Marilyn Monroe, the civil rights movement of the early 1960s, and the Cuban Revolution.
Robert Hariman is an American scholar of rhetoric and public culture. He received his BA from Macalester College in 1973, and received his MA in 1975 and PhD in 1979 from the University of Minnesota. He was a member of the faculty at Drake University from 1979 to 2004, and since then has been a professor in the Department of Communication Studies at Northwestern University. He also served as department chair at both institutions.
John Godfrey Morris was an American picture editor, author and journalist, and an important figure in the history of photojournalism.
Carl Perutz (1921-1981) was a New York photographer who was active from the 1930s through the 1970s covering a wide range of subject matter and in the genres of street photography, photojournalism, portraiture, fashion and advertising.
The Picture of the Last Man to Die is a black and white photograph taken by Robert Capa during the battle for Leipzig, depicting an American soldier, Raymond J. Bowman, aged 21 years old, after being killed by a German sniper, on 18 April 1945, shortly before the end of World War II in Europe. Germany would surrender two weeks later following the Battle of Berlin.
Death in the Making is a photographic book by Gerda Taro and Robert Capa that documents the Spanish Civil War. It was published by Covici-Friede while the conflict was still underway in 1938. It is dedicated to Taro, who died in the battlefield the year prior. The book also includes photographs by David Seymour and André Kertész. Though the photographs are credited to Robert Capa, Capa has written that the work was a collective project by both photographers and that the photographs “are interspersed and unattributed.” Taro is also thought to have been excluded from authorship for fear that publishers would take a female photographer less seriously. This book helped to cement Capa's and Taro's reputations as leading war photographers and pioneers in photojournalism.