The Magnificent Eleven

Soldiers push through the churning surf of Omaha Beach, their bodies bent forward against the water and the gunfire waiting ahead. Robert Capa, a Hungarian American photographer, was right there among them on the morning of June 6, 1944, wading through the same waves as the men he photographed. Bullets cut through the air and soldiers dropped around him, yet he kept pressing the shutter. The blur that makes this image so haunting came partly from his shaking hands and partly from a darkroom mishap that destroyed most of his film. Only a small number of frames survived.

Those surviving shots earned the nickname "The Magnificent Eleven," though historians still argue about whether the tale of the ruined negatives is fully true or partly legend. The grainy, unsteady look turns out to be the picture's greatest strength, pulling us into the confusion and terror of that moment in a way a crisp photo never could. Capa lived by a simple rule, saying that if your pictures were not good enough, you were not close enough, and no one got closer than he did on that beach. Decades later his work shaped the way filmmakers imagined war, most famously in the brutal opening scenes of Saving Private Ryan.