Carl Mydans, 97; Noted Life Magazine War Photographer

Carl Mydans, the much-honored Life magazine war photographer who took one of the most celebrated pictures of World War II -- a resolute Gen. Douglas MacArthur wading onto Luzon Island in the Philippines -- has died. He was 97.

Mydans died of heart failure Monday at his home in Larchmont, N.Y., according to his son, Seth.

During his more than 60-year career at America’s seminal photojournalism magazine, Mydans covered World War II and the Korean and Vietnam wars, as well as the Russian invasion of Finland and the Sino-Japanese conflict.

“Some people have asked me over the years, ‘Why did you spend as much of your time covering war?’ ” Mydans wrote in Mark Edward Harris’ “Faces of the Twentieth Century: Master Photographers and Their Work” (1998).

“War is not my delight,” Mydans said. “War was the event of my years.”

During his long and productive career, Mydans also photographed some of the most notable people of his time: President Harry S. Truman, British Prime Minister Winston Churchill, poet Ezra Pound, authors Gertrude Stein, William Faulkner and Thomas Mann, Soviet Premier Nikita Khrushchev, Prime Minister of India Indira Gandhi and actor Clark Gable.

During his pre-Life days working with the U.S. Farm Security Administration, he was part of an elite group of photographers, including Dorothea Lange and Walker Evans, who documented the effect of the Depression on rural inhabitants.

It was Roy Stryker, head of the agency’s Historical Section, who gave Mydans a valuable insight for taking photographs: that what happened to people during the Depression would be written on their faces. It was a lesson that would serve Mydans well as he covered war after war.

“No eye cast upon the hardships of those years could afterward decline into a tool for pretty picture-making,” Time magazine’s Richard Lacayo wrote of Mydans in 1985. “Mydans learned the moral dimension of photography.”

A native of the Boston area whose father was an oboist, Mydans received a bachelor’s degree from Boston University, where he had worked on the student newspaper. After graduation, while on the staff of American Banker magazine, he began to take photographs on the side. When one was published in Time magazine, he got a slot in the Farm Security Administration’s Depression project.

By 1936, Mydans had joined the staff of the just-launched weekly Life magazine, for which he traveled widely, juggling a mix of assignments that included taking photos of beekeepers and range riders and striking steelworkers.

Mydans met his wife, Life researcher and writer Shelley Smith, at a magazine Christmas party in 1937. They were married the next year, beginning a personal and professional partnership that took them to war-torn places around the world. When World War II began in 1939, the Mydans were sent to Europe as a photographer-reporter team.

For a time, Shelley Mydans was in Sweden while Carl Mydans was on the Russian-Finnish front, where it was so cold he had to alternate cameras, keeping one under his sheepskin coat so that he would always have one warm enough to use.

He said of this time: “Pictures lay at every glance, but never have I suffered more in getting them.” One of the notable photographs he shot then was of a frozen dead soldier.

By the time Pearl Harbor was bombed by the Japanese on Dec. 7, 1941, the Mydans had been posted to cover the war in Asia. Their article “Defenders of the Philippines” -- which Shelley Mydans researched and wrote and Carl photographed -- arrived by dispatch in New York on Pearl Harbor day.

Within a month, the Mydans had been interned with about 3,500 American and Allied nationals by the advancing Japanese forces at Santo Tomas University in Manila. They endured malnutrition and other hardships that Shelley Mydans later described in her novel, “The Open City.”

The next September, they and some other prisoners were transferred to Shanghai and released 15 months later in a prisoner exchange.

Back in the U.S., Carl Mydans resumed photographing for Life. One of his first assignments was a visual account of the Tule Lake relocation camp in Northern California, where Japanese Americans had been interned during the war. But he soon was dispatched to Europe -- first to Italy, traveling with the 5th Army in the Cassino fighting, and later to France -- and then sent back to the Pacific.

Mydans’ famed picture of MacArthur was taken Jan. 9, 1945, when Mydans was the only still photographer selected to go with the general when MacArthur returned to Luzon in the shank of the war.

MacArthur had left the Philippines in defeat in March 1942 with his famous vow: “I shall return.” In October 1944, American forces did return, finally overcoming the Japanese Navy in the Battle of Leyte Gulf and leaving the Japanese so weakened they could not resist further incursions.

Several months later, when the Americans landed on Luzon, everyone had expected MacArthur to go onto the island on pontoons that had been laid out for him so that the general could avoid getting his feet wet.

But as the landing craft neared the beach, it was put into reverse and then went down shore.

“Having spent a lot of time with MacArthur, it flashed on me what was happening,” Mydans said in “Life Photographers: What They Saw” (1998), which author John Loengard dedicated to Mydans. “He was avoiding the pontoons and was going to land in the water further down the beach.

“So I ran up those pontoons with cameras hanging on me and saw the [landing craft] straighten out and proceed parallel with the shoreline. I followed it, running along the shoreline, until, as I expected, the boat turned and headed in, and there I was standing in my dry shoes waiting for MacArthur to come ashore wading in the knee-deep water.”

The picture of MacArthur grimly walking onto the island -- wearing his signature aviator glasses and surrounded by about a dozen helmeted soldiers, with two troop ships in the background -- is one of the most recognizable of the war years.

Mydans later said of MacArthur, “No one I have ever known in public life had a better understanding of the drama and power of a picture.”

It was a great frustration to Mydans that many believed that MacArthur had come ashore a second time so that Mydans could get a better shot.

“He did it once,” Mydans told Loengard of the general, saying MacArthur was notorious for not cooperating with photographers. But, Mydans admitted resignedly, “I now realize the question will go on forever.”

Because of his many friends in MacArthur’s command, Mydans was allowed to take part in what he later called “the most important story of my life”: the freeing of Santo Tomas, where he and his wife had been imprisoned.

Mydans was with MacArthur on Sept. 2, 1945, when Japan formally surrendered aboard the Battleship Missouri in Tokyo harbor. Foreign Minister Mamoru Shigemitsu, who had a wooden leg as the result of an assassination attempt by a Korean assailant, was the first of the Japanese to sign the document. To capture a picture of the ceremony, Mydans was positioned on a gun turret behind and above MacArthur.

“I watched Shigemitsu limp forward, his wooden leg tapping out his progress in the silence.... “ Mydans told the Christian Science Monitor in 1995. “He leaned on his cane, took off his top hat and stripped off his gloves, and for an instant seemed confused.

“As I watched this man, at what for him must have been a terrible moment, I suddenly felt all my pent-up wartime anger drain away, and compassion filled my heart.”

After the war, Mydans spent four years as chief of the Time-Life bureau in Tokyo. In 1948, he was in Fukui, Japan, when a devastating 7.3-magnitude earthquake hit. Mydans managed to escape, but dashed back in to the still-rocking building for his cameras. He spent the night documenting the damage from the quake, which killed more than 5,000 people.

Besides the war coverage for which he was best known, Mydans covered many other news events. Although not in Dallas on Nov. 22, 1963, when President John F. Kennedy was assassinated, Mydans took one of the most memorable pictures of the day: commuters reading newspapers on a train from New York City to Stamford, Conn., in which the upper-case headlines told the story: “PRESIDENT SHOT DEAD.”

In 1996, the 60th anniversary issue of Life magazine -- which suspended publication in 1972 and resumed in 1978 as a monthly -- was dedicated to Mydans, who at that time was still listed on Life’s masthead as a contributing photographer.

He once said, “Long after I am gone, I want people to be able to see -- especially to feel -- what I have seen and felt.”

Shelley Mydans died in 2002. Besides his son, a foreign correspondent for the New York Times, Mydans is survived by a daughter, Shelley “Misty” Mydans, a lawyer in Sacramento; two grandchildren; two step-grandchildren and a step-great-grandchild.

A memorial service is planned for this fall.