The Robert Capa’s D-Day

How to make history with a photographic camera.

This is Robert Capa again with another legendary image.   This picture was made under extremely heavy fire on D-Day at Omaha Beach in France. On Tuesday, June 6, 1944, the largest armada ever assembled began landing on the northern coast of France. Those who know a little bit of The Second World War history, know the importance of this landing and also know that this was an extremely violent battlefield with a huge amount of casualties. A truly hell.  

 

“When LIFE published the photographs, a caption disingenuously explained that the ‘immense excitement of the moment made photographer Capa move his camera and blur his picture.'” (Aperture Magazine). We are talking about a veteran in war conditions, this was the fifth front of his third major war. In these unimaginable risky conditions, Robert Capa manage to shoot four roll films with a crucial importance for those days. Unfortunately almost all the frames were destroyed in the lab handling process (overheated in a drying cabinet), only eleven of them survived. (If you are curios enough, please read a testimony of the Life Magazine’s 1944 photo editor about this loose, here) But the eleven pictures were enough to make a legendary photographic story and to build up the Robert Capa’s legendary photographic career.