Former AP photographer Max Desfor dies at 104

Former Associated Press photographer Max Desfor, whose photo of hundreds of Korean War refugees crawling across a damaged bridge in 1950 helped win him a Pulitzer Prize, died Monday. He was 104.

Desfor died at his apartment in Silver Spring, Maryland, where he’d been living in his retirement, said his son, Barry.

Desfor volunteered to cover the Korean War for the news service when the North invaded the South in June 1950. He parachuted into North Korea with U.S troops and retreated with them after forces from the North, joined by the Chinese, pushed south.

He was in a Jeep near the North Korean capital of Pyongyang when he spotted a bridge that had been hit by bombing along the Taedong River. Thousands of refugees were lined up on the north bank waiting their turn to cross the river.

Residents from Pyongyang, North Korea, and refugees from other areas crawl perilously over shattered girders of the city's bridge on Dec. 4, 1950, as they flee south across the Taedong River to escape the advance of Chinese Communist troops. (AP Photo/Max Desfor)

“We came across this incredible sight,” he recalled in 1997 for an AP oral history. “All of these people who are literally crawling through these broken-down girders of the bridge. They were in and out of it, on top, underneath, and just barely escaping the freezing water.”

Desfor climbed a 50-foot-high section of the bridge to photograph the refugees as they fled for their lives.

“My hands got so cold I could barely trip the shutter on my camera,” he remembered. “I couldn’t even finish a full pack of film. It was just that cold.”

AP photographer Max Desfor won the Pulitzer Prize for photography in 1951 for his coverage of the Korean War. In this video, Desfor describes capturing the well-known images of Koreans fleeing from advancing Chinese and North Korean troops.

The Pulitzer jury in 1951 determined that Desfor’s photos from Korea the previous year had “all the qualities which make for distinguished news photography — imagination, disregard for personal safety, perception of human interest and the ability to make the camera tell the whole story.” The Pulitzer board honored his overall coverage of the war, based on a portfolio of more than 50 photos, and cited the Taedong River bridge shot in particular.

A native of New York, Desfor was born in the Bronx on Nov. 8, 1913, and attended Brooklyn College. He joined the AP in 1933 as a messenger. After teaching himself the basics of photography and moonlighting as a baby photographer, he began shooting occasional assignments for the AP. He became a staff photographer in the Baltimore bureau in 1938 and moved to the Washington bureau a year later.

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During World War II, Desfor photographed the crew of the Enola Gay after the B-29 landed in Saipan from its mission to drop an atomic bomb on Hiroshima in August 1945. He was with the first wave of Marines at Tokyo Bay shortly after Japan’s surrender that month and photographed the official surrender ceremony aboard the USS Missouri on Sept. 2, 1945.

Desfor worked for the AP in the Philippines and in India, where he photographed Mahatma Gandhi and later covered the assassinated leader’s funeral in 1948. He also worked in the AP’s Rome bureau and was set to return to the U.S. when war broke out in Korea.

After the war Desfor served as supervising editor of Wide World Photos, the AP’s photo service, and returned to Asia in 1968 as photo chief for the region. He retired from the AP in 1978, then joined U.S. News & World Report as photo director.

Desfor and his wife, Clara, raised a son, Barry, of Wauconda, Illinois. She died in 2004.

In January 2012, when he was 98, Desfor and his longtime companion, Shirley Belasco, surprised guests at a party celebrating her 90th birthday by marrying in front of their guests. They had been friends since the 1980s when the Desfors and Ms. Belasco lived in the same Silver Spring apartment building and became a couple a few years after his wife’s death. Ms. Belasco died in 2015.

A photo Desfor took during his long career that had particular meaning to him also came from the Korean War. Walking near a field he spotted two hands, blue from cold, sticking up in the snow and photographed them. The hands, which had been bound, belonged to one of several civilians taken prisoner and executed, their bodies left to be covered by snowfall.

“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,” he said for the oral history. “That epitomized it to me.”

A pair of bound hands and a breathing hole in the snow at Yangji, Korea, Jan. 27, 1951 reveal the presence of the body of a Korean civilian shot and left to die by retreating Communists during the Korean War. (AP Photo/Max Desfor)

Paratrooper embraced by native after he hit ground in Sunchon, North Korea on Oct. 20, 1950. (AP Photo/Max Desfor)

Fatigue, not an enemy bullet, stopped this American marine who catches 40 winks on a Seoul Street unperturbed by his audience of young and old residents in Seoul, Sept. 28, 1950. (AP Photo/Max Desfor)

Demonstrators stone Japanese policemen at the height of the pro-Red May Day riots in downtown Tokyo on May 1, 1952. (AP Photo/Max Desfor)

Kneeling on the Capitol Plaza, a group of women in Washington who said they represent various mothers' organizations, prayed aloud against the pending British aid bill, Feb. 19, 1941. Previously they had marched back and forth in front of the Capitol until they were advised by a police sergeant that picketing the Capitol was forbidden. Woman in front with hand to hat is Elizabeth Dilling of Chicago, who was ejected from Capitol several days ago. In background is the Supreme Court building. (AP Photo/Max Desfor)

In this July 6, 1946, photo, a bespectacled Mohandas Gandhi, the Mahatma, who eventually led India to its independence, laughs with the man who was to be the nation's first prime minister, Jawaharlal Nehru, at the All-India Congress committee meeting in Bombay, India. Atleft is Madam Vijaya Lakshmi Pandit. (AP Photo/Max Desfor)

Police, the military and volunteer guards attempt to beat back the crowds as it surges forward towards the funeral pyre of Mohandas K. Gandhi, assassinated Indian spiritual leader, in New Delhi, Jan. 31, 1948. (AP Photo/Max Desfor)

Scene in the new market in Florence, March 16, 1950 where all Florentine products are available. On display are the famous straw-women baskets and hats and liner cloth. (AP Photo/Max Desfor)

Muslim women, wearing burkahs to keep strict purdah, await their turn to proceed to the polling rooms at the Griffis High School grounds, July 9, 1947 in Peshawar, where they will take part in the referendum voting. (AP Photo/Max Desfor)

A curious crowd of thousands of onlookers nervously watch John Ward, as he perched himself on a ledge on the 17th floor of the Gothan Hotel on Fifth Avenue in New York, threatening to jump, July 26, 1938. Several times spectators scurried backward as it appeared ward would leap from his precarious perch. (AP Photo/Max Desfor)

Members of the 18th Regimental Combat team round up North Koreans found in the jump area after mass paratrooper descent in the Sukchon-Sunchon sector to cut off Reds retreating from Pyongyang, Oct. 20, 1950. Villagers cheer paratropers after air drop. This is of a picture series made by Associated Press Staff Photographer Max Desfor, who jumped with the paratroopers. (AP Photo)

Fujiko Homma, wife of Lt. Gen. Masaharu Homma, accused war criminal now on trial for his life in Manila, Philippines, arrived in Manila on Jan. 17, 1946, to appear as a character witness for her husband. (AP Photo/Max Desfor)

Spectators and photographers use 16" gun turret in Japan, as vantage point on the USS Missouri. (AP Photo/Max Desfor)

U.S. paratroopers leave their planes in a mass drop behind enemy lines in the Sunchon area of North Korea on Oct. 25, 1950 during an operation designed to block the escape route of the retreating Chinese and to attempt to rescue American prisoners. Members of an advance party (foreground) watch the landing. (AP Photo/Max Desfor)

Princess Elizabeth and her husband, Philip, Duke of Edinburgh, are seen strolling in the gardens of the Villa Guardamangia, Malta on Nov. 23, 1949. The Princess is residing at the Villa during her stay in the island to visit her husband. The Duke of Edinburgh is First Lieutenant aboard the destroyer “Chequers” presently refitting at Malta. (AP Photo/Max Desfor)

The combination of two comparative novelties to Japanese audience, TV and American wrestling, bring out a tremendous crowd of fans watching the bouts on an outdoor screen in Tokyo, Japan on Feb. 21, 1954. NTV televised the bouts between visiting American wrestlers and Japanese opponents. The crowd that completely filed and jammed the street cheered, booed and applauded as if they were right at the ringside. (AP Photo/Max Desfor)

A Korean mother, bent over by pain, sobs as she halts with her child, unable to continue her flight from the fighting zone in the Osan area south of Seoul, South Korea, Jan. 14, 1951. (AP Photo/Max Desfor)

Weary from long duty, this U.S. soldier slumped down to rest alongside his machine gun dugout during the Korean War while Allied forces were guarding the small Pusan, Korea, perimeter, Aug. 9, 1950. (AP Photo/Max Desfor)

Cold winter sun creates a deceptively peaceful scene as it silhouettes an early morning patrol setting out over the Icy shore of a Korean stream in the Wonju area on Jan. 25, 1951. Allied patrols probing north of Wonju were finding little evidence of enemy concentrations. (AP Photo/Max Desfor)

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Text from the AP news story, Former AP photographer Max Desfor dies at 104, by Douglass K. Daniel.