Around nine o'clock on the evening of Wednesday June 7, 1944, a US Army motorcycle courier rushed into the London office of Life magazine and handed picture editor John Morris a packet of film. In it were four rolls of 35 mm film and a scrawled note from Robert Capa explaining that he had shot them while landing on Omaha beach in Normandy the day before  June 6, D-Day.

"Rush, rush, rush!" screamed Morris to the darkroom. It seemed like the whole world had been waiting for those pictures for more than a day now. Then came the cry "They're ruined!" In the excitement, the technician had overheated the films and melted the emulsion. Morris held the strips up to the light. Three were black, useless. But on the fourth roll were grainy images, dramatic blurs of infantrymen struggling through the surf.

"D-Day will always be known by those pictures," writes Morris in his recent memoir "Get The Picture: A Personal History of Photojournalism" (Random House). "Their grainy imperfection contributed to making them among the most dramatic battlefield pictures ever taken."

By D-Day, Morris had been with Life for four and a half years, having worked his way out of the mailroom to become a picture editor. In the 55 intervening years, he's done the same job for half a dozen major publications, including The New York Times, The Washington Post, National Geographic and Magnum, where he worked with mythical photographers like Henri Cartier-Bresson, W. Eugène Smith, and Elliot Erwitt. He chose many of the defining images of the century from their contact sheets.

Less obvious is his work for Ladies Home Journal, who hired him after the war to do "solid reporting on American family life." He soon expanded the brief with "People are People the World Over," 12 photo essays on daily life in 12 countries, which inspired Edward Steichen's famous "Family of Man" exhibition. Morris considers a 1948 LHJ cover piece, "Women and Children in Soviet Russia," 16 pages of photos by Capa with text by John Steinbeck, to be the best piece he ever did.

Morris moved to Paris in 1983, to take up a post with National Geographic. He and his wife, photographer Tana Hoban, have been "happily here ever since," living and working in a vast glass-ceilinged converted factory in the Marais, dominated by picture files and bookshelves.

He first came to the city as a Life war correspondent, arriving "five days after the Germans left town." In his book he describes the strange Liberation atmosphere of euphoria and horror, one minute drinking champagne with Hemingway and Marlène Dietrich, the next opening a package of pictures from a concentration camp.

"I was overwhelmed by the beauty of the city," he told me, "and I wrote home to my first wife, 'some day we've got to live in Paris.' Thirty-nine years and two wives later, I made it."

Though he left National Geographic in 1989, Morris has never really retired: "After all, I'm only 82." He has always been torn between journalism and politics, and had to keep his strong anti-war sentiments in check at the Post and the Times. Writing his memoirs helped him to resolve this conflict.

He points to the chapter on the Post's overblown coverage of the Tonkin Gulf "conflict," now known to be fabricated. "Washington newspapers have a terrible tendency to become government spokespersons," he says wryly. "I think the Post uncritically played a part in the enlargement of American involvement in the Vietnam war."

Living in Paris gave him more distance. As the Gulf War loomed, he led the Paris march of a group called Americans For Peace. "That was one of the greatest events of my life, marching under that banner and being applauded the entire route." The Free Voice ran the picture, but no American publication would touch it.

Morris has spent his whole life choosing photos, itself a form of censorship. He believes that the most powerful censorship occurs when photographers are prevented from taking pictures. "It's better to let the cameras roll, and then battle it out," he says. As he puts it in his book, "Untruth lies in the things unphotographed."

On the subject of photographers invading people's privacy, he agrees with Raymond Depardon, who said "all journalists are paparazzi." "They have to take pictures that are unposed to cover history," Morris insists. "The problem lies with the shallowness of public taste and with editors who pander to the lowest demoninator. It's a question of taste  the slow, painful education of public taste."

Asked for a list of favorite pictures, he laughs. "It's better to talk about important pictures... If I had only taken pictures more seriously as works of art in the early days, I would be a rich man today! When I think of all the Henri Cartier-Bresson prints I threw into the wastebin!"

So how does he choose pictures? The first element is journalistic: "What does the picture have to say, what story does it tell? The best picture is one that makes a point." The second element is aesthetics.

"People ask me who are the best photographers I have worked with, the most inspiring. From the journalistic point of view I say Capa, but from the point of view of aesthetics, Henri Cartier-Bresson. He taught me to judge a picture through its geometry, its focal point. A picture that pulls you in is one which captures the 'decisive moment,' as he described it in his famous book of that title. When form and content coincide, that's what makes the picture... Good photos do become an artform. But the journalist concentrates first on telling a story."

So when "Saving Private Ryan" sweeps the Oscars, remember that Stephen Spielberg says Capa's pictures inspired the incredible opening sequence. "I rushed to see the film," says Morris. "It gave me the feeling of what those lost pictures might have been. That's something that still haunts me."

 John Morris   will discuss "Get The Picture" Mar 17, 8pm at the American Library in Paris, 10, rue du Général Camou, 7e, Metro Ecole Militaire, tel: 01.53.59.12.60. The book is also available in a French edition, with six more photos, titled "Des Hommes d'Images: Une Vie de Photojournalisme" (de la Martinière). See Community Calendar for details of Tana Hoban's ongoing exhibition.