American soldiers landing on Omaha Beach, D-Day, Normandy
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Robert Capa
June 6, 1944

Although Capa’s D-Day photograph of a GI, Huston S. Riley, emerging from the surf did not 
win a Pulitzer Prize, it and the rest of Capa’s D-Day coverage was chosen by New York 
University’s journalism department as the twentieth-seventh most distinguished works of 
twentieth-century American journalism. This pictorial essay beat out Joe Rosenthal’s Iwo 
Jima photograph as well as Capa’s own Spanish Civil War images.

Capa, assigned to the U.S. 1st Infantry Division, was part of the second group of the first 
wave of landings on Omaha Beach. According to Richard Whelan, Capa’s biographer, the 
photographer was carrying three cameras on June 6, 1944—two Contaxes and a Rolleiflex. He 
used the 35mm Contaxes to capture images of the beach invasion and only used the Rollei to 
document the preparations and aftermath of the attack. The film from all three cameras, 
including four rolls of 35mm film, were sent to London to be cleared by Army censors and 
then sent on to the Life offices in London. Working under extreme pressure, the magazine’s 
editors wanted to get the images into the June 19 issue of Life. In the rush, the lab 
assistant put all four rolls of 35mm film in the drying cabinet and turned up the heat. 
Unfortunately, the lack of air circulation caused the emulsion to melt off three of the 
four rolls. Only eleven images from the fourth roll remained; the slightly melted emulsion 
blurred the images and also made some of the sprocket holes visible, as seen in the third 
image above. None of the Rollei images were destroyed.

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“One of the greatest photographers of the 20th century, Robert Capa was born in Budapest, 
on October 22, 1913, as Endre Erno Friedmann. He started to work as a photographer in the 
1930s, first as a correspondent of Dephot, a Berlin-based agency. In 1933 he moved to Paris, 
where he befriended André Kertész, Henri Cartier-Bresson and David Seymour (Chim), and met 
with the great love of his life, Gerda Taro, also a photographer. He changed his name to 
Robert Capa in 1935, and his pictures of the 1936-1937 Spanish civil war were already 
published under this nom de plume. He immigrated to the US in 1939. Between 1941 and 1945, 
he worked on the European scenes of the war for Life magazine. He was one of the founders 
of the Magnum Photos agency. He died in May 1954, when he stepped on a landmine in Vietnam.