Max Desfor

Max Desfor (November 8, 1913 – February 19, 2018) was an American photographer who received the Pulitzer Prize for his Korean War photograph, Flight of Refugees Across Wrecked Bridge in Korea, depicting Pyongyang residents and refugees crawling over a destroyed bridge across the Taedong River to escape the advancing Chinese Communist troops.

Desfor was born on November 8, 1913, in The Bronx, New York, the son of Jewish emigrants, his father from Russia and his mother from the Austro-Hungarian Empire.

[1] Soon after the United States entered World War II, Desfor tried to enlist in the Navy but was denied because of his age and his being his family's sole source of income.

[1][2] In 1950, covering the Korean War for the AP, he took the photograph that would earn him the Pulitzer Prize, Flight of Refugees Across Wrecked Bridge in Korea.

"All of these people who are literally crawling through these broken-down girders of the bridge," he said, "they were in and out of it, on top, underneath, and just barely escaping the freezing water.