6.06.2011

It's The 67th Anniversary Of D-Day


Although many of us envision what happened by thinking of the opening scenes of Saving Private Ryan, there were some photos taken during the invasion of Normandy. And although you may have heard the story of the photos of Robert Capa, it's still fascinating. From Wikipedia:

His most famous work occurred on June 6, 1944 (D-Day) when he swam ashore with the second assault wave on Omaha Beach. He was armed with two Contax II cameras mounted with 50 mm lenses and several rolls of spare film. Capa took 106 pictures in the first couple of hours of the invasion. However, a staff member at Life in London 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 eight frames in total were recovered. Capa never said a word to the London bureau chief about the loss of three and a half rolls of his D-Day landing film  . . . .  Life magazine printed some of the frames in its June 19, 1944 issue with captions that described the footage as "slightly out of focus", explaining that Capa's hands were shaking in the excitement of the moment (something that he denied). Capa used this phrase as the title of his autobiographical account of the war, Slightly Out of Focus.