It was a tough assignment for Hungarian refugee and war photographer Robert Capa. Under contract to LIFE magazine, he was one of only four individuals authorized by the Americans to take pictures of the actual D-Day invasion on June 6, 1944. This was a date prior to modern point-and-shoot automated cameras with a storage capacity of thousands of images. Capa had to manually focus, compute aperture settings, set shutter speeds, and reload film after every few pictures. However, unlike Civil War photographer Matthew Brady, Capa did not have the luxury of time to accomplish these tasks leisurely after the battle was over. It is hard enough taking pictures right after you have submerged your equipment and yourself in the surf; it is even harder when thousands of bullets and shells are directed at your general location and you see men blown to pieces on all sides of you.
Nonetheless, he managed to ply his trade and shoot four rolls of precious footage and send them, undeveloped, to his editor, John G. Morris, in London. Under intense deadline pressures, the editor ordered that the negatives be processed immediately and contact prints made. Under the same intense deadline pressures, the darkroom employee goofed and set the dryer too high. Morris and the employee stood horrified as they examined the first three rolls of film and saw that they were completely blank, as the emulsion had melted off. Some historians have speculated that profanities may have been uttered as a result of this event. Roll No. 4, however, yielded eleven powerful images. These were published and defined the chaos of the invasion for the American people and the world. Morris received hearty congratulations. He did not immediately mention to his superiors that many more pictures had been destroyed. Capa received well-deserved renown as one of the greatest, if not the greatest, war photographers in history. The photos themselves were dubbed "The Magnificent Eleven."
One of the images, The Face in the Surf (shown below), features the blurred visage of an American soldier struggling to reach shore. Capa obviously took this picture while on the beach with his back to the German fire. It quickly became the icon for the whole invasion.
Notwithstanding the loss of the majority of his pictures, Capa fared better than the other photographers and cinematographers who covered the landings. He personally took his negatives with him off of the beach. The other film artists entrusted their undeveloped images and movies to an Army colonel, who accidentally dropped them into the briny deep when he was boarding a transport ship back to England. Some historians have speculated that profanities may have been uttered as a result of this event.
To view The Magnificent Eleven as well as the story behind them, click on the TIME magazine website and watch the video.
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