Robert Capa's "D-Day, Omaha Beach, 1944"

In the June 19, 1944, issue of LIFE magazine, eleven of Robert Capa's images of the Normandy invasion were published. The picture below is one of them:

D-Day, Omaha Beach, 1944, Robert Capa picture (via LIFE)

As a little girl, I would listen to the gripping stories that my grandfather would tell about D-Day and his following years in the United States Army. It wasn't until I was older and saw this set of photographs, specifically the one above, that I felt even a small fraction of understanding of what it must have been like to go through an event like this. The blurred motion in the photograph gives me goosebumps, as I can imagine the sound and feeling of the earth shaking bombardments.

Robert Capa once said, "If your pictures aren't good enough, you're not close enough." Capa was killed after stepping on a landmine in Vietnam, while he was photographing French troops on a mission.  According to Sontag, " Photographs of mutilated bodies...may bring home, for a spell, a portion of its reality to those who have no experience of war at all."
 He also paved the way for other photographers to go into the fray. War photographers like Tim Hetherington, who died covering the civil war in Libya, earlier in 2012.

Sontag's "Looking at War" article also mentions Capa. Her article also talks about the desensitization of war through the pertinence of images. While I agree with this view, I do not think it pertained to this time period. Robert Capa made it possible for the American citizens at home to see what their troops abroad were experiencing.


Resources:
http://www.huffingtonpost.com/mobileweb/david-schonauer/hetherington-hondros-war-photojournalists_b_852546.html