Carl Mydans, who died Monday at age 97, was one of the inventors of photojournalism, an original staffer at Life, and was responsible for some of the most celebrated images of the 20th century, including that of General Douglas MacArthur wading ashore at the Philippines in 1945.

Committed to truth in journalism, Mydans always said that MacArthur had purposely avoided using a pontoon bridge that had been set up for him.

Mydans was perhaps best known for his World War II photos taken in China, Italy, France, England, and the Philippines. He also was the sole photographer on hand to record a devastating earthquake in Fukui, Japan, in 1948. He was one of the leading photographers of the Korean War. As a staff photographer at Life, his portraits ranged from baseball players to movie stars to world leaders, as well as the poor, farmers, travelers in exotic lands, and anybody else who crossed his path while on assignment.

Mydans grew up in Massachusetts, the son of an oboist. He studied journalism at Boston University and became an editor at American Banker. He taught himself photography in his spare time. By the mid-1930s, he was contributing items to the Boston Globe. One early snap was of a slightly frustrated photographer using an old-fashioned box camera to take the portrait of a toddler who is cheerfully trying to peek under the cloth drape. Mydans favored newfangled 35-mm portable cameras that would become the byword of photojournalists.

In 1935, he went to work documenting rural poverty for the federal Resettlement Administration. His photographs of impoverished Arkansas farmers brought him to the attention of the editors of Life, and he became the fledgling magazine’s fifth photographer, after Alfred Eisenstadt, Margaret Bourke-White, Thomas McAvoy, and Peter Stackpole. Early assignments included sailors in submarines, Mexican cattle ranches, and High Mass at St. Patrick’s Cathedral. Life magazine was determined to document everything in the world that was remotely photogenic.

At a Christmas Eve office party in 1937, Mydans met Shelley Smith, a researcher at Life. They were married six months later, and over the next few years the couple would often collaborate, not always by choice.

In 1939, they sailed for Europe to cover the outbreak of war for Life, stopping en route in Bermuda, where Mydans had an emergency appendectomy. Paris was quiet during the period known as the “phoney war.” Mydans ended up in Finland, where he spent 2 1 /2 months in sub-zero weather photographing the Russian invasion. “Pictures lay at every glance, but never have I suffered more in getting them,” Mydans later said.

The couple returned to Paris to cover the city’s preparations for surrender to the Germans, then with other Life staff fled toward the Spanish border ahead of the invaders.

Life next assigned the Mydans to rural Chungking, China, to cover the effects of Japanese bombing there. They wrote in Life, “It must cause consternation in Tokyo to realize that if a Chinese farmer’s house is destroyed by a bomb, and his horse and pig killed, the collected metal of the destructive missile will pay for a new home, horse, and pig, and set him up anew.”

In September 1941, they flew to Manila to document that nation’s defenses. After Manila fell to the Japanese in January, the Mydanses were taken prisoner and spent the next 22 months interned at Manila and Shanghai. Food was scarce, but their treatment was far better than routine prisoners of war received from the Japanese. In December 1943, they were repatriated to America with 1,400 other internees from America and Canada, to a burst of press coverage. Mydans said, “This is the first time I have ever been on the receiving end of this kind of business.” Shelley Mydans described conditions in the camps in her 1945 novel “The Open City.”

Mydans’s next assignment was to photograph the Tule Lake Segregation Camp in California, where people of Japanese descent were being interned for the duration of the war. Life then sent him as a correspondent to Italy, where he covered the 5th Army through fighting at Monte Cassino, and then north into France.

Flying back to the Pacific, he was one of three correspondents who traveled with MacArthur on his return to the Philippines. Following a motorized column, Mydans had the exquisite pleasure of helping to liberate the prison camp at which he had been interned in Manila.

In his final wartime assignment, Mydans was a pool photographer at the Japanese surrender aboard the battleship USS Missouri. Japan’s foreign minister, Mamoru Shigemitsu, wore tails and a top hat, adding a slightly giddy grace note to an otherwise momentous occasion.

Mydans was made Tokyo bureau chief after the war, and he often covered postwar recovery in Japan and elsewhere in Asia. In the early 1950s, he covered the Korean War, snapping more classic images of MacArthur, of whom Mydans said, “No one I have ever known in public life had a better understanding of the drama and power of a picture.”

Mydans in 1959 published a memoir, “More than Meets the Eye,” and later several books of photographs and, with Shelley Mydans, “The Violent Peace,” about the wars he had covered.

He stayed at Life through 1973, when the magazine folded. He continued to take freelance assignments into his 80s.At one point, he returned to the Philippines teamed with his son, a foreign correspondent.

He estimated he had taken a half-million photographs during his nearly seven-decade career. “I have been attracted all my life to important historical developments,” he once wrote. “Some were good, lots of them were not.”

Carl Mydans

Born March 20, 1907, in Boston; died August 16 at his home in Larchmont of heart failure; his wife, Shelley Smith, died in 2002; survived by his children, Seth Mydans and Misty Mydans, two grandchildren, two step grandchildren, and one step-great-grandchild.