The Magnificent Eleven

The Magnificent Eleven are a group of photos of D-Day taken by Robert Capa. Capa was with the first wave of troops landing on the American invasion beach, Omaha Beach, who faced heavy resistance from German troops in their bunkers within the Atlantic Wall. While under constant fire Capa took 106 pictures, all but eleven of which were destroyed in a processing accident in the Life magazine photo lab in London. The surviving photos have since been called the Magnificent Eleven. Steven Spielberg is said to have been inspired by these images when filming Saving Private Ryan.

Robert Capa (1913 – 1954) was a Hungarian combat photographer and photojournalist who before World War II covered the Spanish Civil War and the Second Sino-Japanese War. He came ashore with the men of the 16th Infantry Regiment of the 1st Infantry Division on 6 June 1944 (D-Day) in the second assault wave on Omaha Beach. He used two Contax II cameras mounted with 50 mm lenses and several rolls of spare film, and took 106 pictures in the first two hours of the invasion. Capa returned with the unprocessed films to London, where a staff member at Life 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 eleven 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.

Although a fifteen-year-old lab assistant named Dennis Banks was responsible for the accident, another account, now largely accepted as untrue, blamed Larry Burrows, who worked in the lab not as a technician but as a "tea-boy".

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