Former Associated Press photographer Max Desfor, whose photo of hundreds of Korean War refugees escaping Chinese troops in 1950 helped win him a Pulitzer Prize, died yesterday. He was 104.
I have written about Max here before, as I first met him when I was a reporter and photographer for my high school newspaper - The Falcon Crier - in the Philippines. He was the AP's Asia photo chief, on duty at Clark AFB there (my dad was in the Air Force) when the POW's were released at the end of the Vietnam War. I met him again decades later when he was the photo director at U.S. News & World Report.
Here are couple of very good links to see plenty of his photographs. Alan Taylor at the Atlantic compiled an excellent portfolio of forty-plus Max photos a few years ago.
And, as Max was turning 100 in 2013, New York Times reporter Ralph Blumenthal wrote about Max in the Times' Lens Blog.
Below is the Korean War photo that had particular meaning to him. The 1951 photo of a pair of bound hands in the snow at Yangji, Korea, reveals the presence of the body of a Korean civilian who had been shot by retreating Communists and left to be covered in snow. "I labeled that picture, later on, 'Futility,' because it's always been — I've always felt that it's the civilians caught in the crossfire, the civilians, the innocent civilians, how futile it is for war. That epitomized it to me," he said in an oral history for the Newseum a few years ago (it is no longer available on their site).