I first went to Normandy in 1974. I was a 27-year-old news photographer shooting the French presidential election, and my visit happened to coincide with the 30th anniversary of the D-Day landings. I was amazed that the French still welcomed American veterans as their liberators—a warm feeling between the countries that still exists today.
Since that trip, I’ve returned to the beaches nearly a dozen times in the past half century, with each visit observing those hallowed sands and bearing witness to how the past refuses to be erased. I’ve met countless veterans who at first seem perfectly ordinary, like the guys I grew up with who ran the hardware store or pharmacy. I’ve had to pull their extraordinary stories out of them—each one a remarkable memory of a pivotal moment.
I see my responsibility as bridging the gap with photography to help people, particularly young people, understand the importance of what happened there—not just the soldiers who died, but also how the Allied invasion of German-occupied France changed the world. I’ve always been a fan of Edward R. Murrow, the American radio correspondent who delivered nightly radio reports from London during World War II. I like to play his reports on my cell phone when I’m walking on Omaha Beach and take in the accounts of what happened there in June 1944.
History has a way of receding. Our recollections become secondhand, then thirdhand, and eventually just words in a history book. But I’m not sure the same fate awaits Normandy. I’ve never met anybody, young or old, who walked on Omaha Beach and didn’t feel the history of that place. There’s something very powerful about putting your feet on the sand.
