Max Desfor, former AP photographer

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

Mr. Desfor covered the Korean War in June 1950. He parachuted into North Korea with U.S troops and was 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 waiting their turn to cross the river. “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.”

Mr. Desfor climbed a 50-foot-high section of the bridge to photograph the refugees. The Pulitzer jury in 1951 honored his overall coverage of the war and cited the Taedong River bridge shot in particular.

A native of New York, Mr. Desfor was born in the Bronx and attended Brooklyn College. He joined the AP in 1933 as a messenger and taught himself photography. He became a staff photographer in Baltimore in 1938 and moved to the Washington bureau a year later.

During World War II, he 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 Marines at Tokyo Bay shortly after Japan's surrender and photographed the surrender ceremony aboard the USS Missouri on Sept. 2, 1945.

He retired from the AP in 1978 and joined U.S. News & World Report as photo director.