This picture has an aura and authority that may become harder and harder to appreciate. It was taken by Frank Capa, who went into Utah Beach with the first wave on D-Day, 6 June 1944. Utah Beach was, as it turned out, the most hellish sector of the invasion, where the most casualties occurred. Even before that became known, Capa would certainly have been aware that he was risking his life to record the moment on film, that there was a good chance he'd never return from France, even if he managed to get ashore there. But he knew how important the invasion was -- what a visual record of it would mean to everyone praying for its success, and to future generations.
In modern warfare, there would probably be video cameras attached to the landing craft, capable of transmitting live images to a command center somewhere, but in Capa's time a real live human being needed to be there with a camera to bring back pictures of the assault. A life had to be put on the line for it.
Capa could assume, too, that his pictures would have a built-in authority as proof of his witness. Today, in the era of Photoshop, when photographs can be faked almost beyond detection, the photographic medium has lost some of this authority. We have to think retrospectively to summon up what the image above and the one below meant to Capa and his contemporaries.
There was a tragic but somehow fitting end to Capa's experiences at Utah Beach. He survived but most of the photographs he took did not. A nervous lab assistant back in England tried to dry Capa's rolls of 35mm film too quickly -- and all but eleven of the images were destroyed. But this just served to make those eleven images more precious -- to remind us of all that was lost on D-Day, all the lives of young American soldiers that ended on the invasion beaches.
The eleven images that do survive are miraculous things. It's like having photographs of the last day at Thermopylae, of the battle on Bunker Hill, of the furthest advance of Pickett's charge. The visual records of future wars will be more extensive and more useful to military planners, but they won't have quite the human dimension, the spiritual dimension, of Capa's pictures. They may make us shudder but they won't make us cry -- as Capa's do, or should.
