What was to become the D.D.D. enterprise began inauspiciously when Duncan’s sister gave him a surprise gift on his 18th birthday: a 39-cent Bakelite plastic camera. Born and raised in Kansas City, he was studying archeology at the University of Arizona at the time.

“It was 7:30 a.m., and I heard on the radio that the Congress Hotel in Tucson was burning. That might be interesting, I thought, so I ran down.”

Duncan shot some photos that day, none that were published, but he was struck by “a man in suspenders, middle-aged fellow” who convinced firemen to let him reenter the burning building to retrieve his suitcase. Duncan later learned that the man who’d caught his eye was John Dillinger, then America’s most notorious criminal.

“It was a tiny, tiny camera, just a toy,” Duncan remembers, “but it got me started.”

While study at the University of Arizona was boring for him, a transfer to the University of Miami offered paradise and adventure.

“We were diving off the Gulf Stream all the time” as part of his marine zoology class at UM, he remembers, and if Duncan was not getting his nose bloodied in Saturday night amateur fights on Miami Beach, he and his buddies were fleeing Hammock grapefruit groves, their pillowcases full of sweet stolen South Florida fruit. Duncan and the other 500 or so University of Miami students at the time attended classes in a three-story pink building, a converted Depression hotel. Most students were there on scholarship, but he eked out his tuition and $5 monthly rent with help from a job at the Pilkington Brothers portrait gallery on Coral Way. The owners imparted keen insight. “‘You have a natural eye, do it your own way,’ they told me.” He would hear that advice again.

The Overseas Highway to the Keys was completed in 1938, and on graduation day in his Ford Dreamwagon—100,000 miles plus—Duncan headed south. He was soon aboard an Adams Fish Company schooner and sailing off to the Cayman Islands, a place few had heard of at the time, then down to Nicaragua to shoot giant green turtles for National Geographic and for the Museum of Natural History. In 1940 he sold his first full picture essay to National Geographic of big game fishing in the Humboldt Current off the coast of Peru.

When the Japanese attacked Pearl Harbor in December 1941, Duncan was in Central America photographing for the Office of Inter-American Affairs. A civilian, he volunteered to photograph the Guatemalan coast to spot Nazi U-boats but then returned to the States to enlist as a photo officer with the U.S. Marine Corps. He went on to cover three major wars—World War II, the Korean War, and Vietnam.

When his South Pacific Air Transport Command unit began to deliver supplies to Fijian guerrillas behind Japanese enemy lines, Duncan convinced a pilot to let him snuggle into the pod affixed under the wing of an Army Air Forces P-38 fighter plane. This Plexiglas-nosed compartment, used to evacuate high- priority wounded soldiers, offered just enough space and the critical vantage point for Duncan to zoom in on fighting in Okinawa. While Duncan’s unconventional methodology granted him fame as a combat photographer, his bravery earned him the Legion of Merit, Distinguished Flying Cross, Air Medal, and Purple Heart. His hallmark is the ability to capture the atrocities of war and death without exposing faces of the deceased. “That’s a violation of human dignity at the most basic level,” he says.

n Photo Nomad, Duncan reserves one of the introductory pages for the words “My 20th Century,” and indeed, the tome gives the reader nearly a century of public images witnessed by millions intertwined with private moments available only to the most inquisitive of documentarians. The pages Duncan devotes to moments with Pablo Picasso reveal the true sanctity of the friendship and mutual professional respect that flourished between them.

Pablo Picasso welcomed Duncan into his home in 1956. Photographer colleague Robert Capa, who was shooting in Europe during World War II while Duncan covered the Pacific, told Duncan after the war that “if you’re in the south of France, visit Picasso.” Capa had befriended Picasso during his coverage of the Spanish Civil War, and Duncan used the calling card.

Picasso offered Duncan carte blanche access to photograph his paintings and art. At one late-night solitary session, Duncan examined a dusty cache of the master’s private paintings. Lift. Examine. Dust. Click. Lift. Examine. Dust. Click. Lift. Examine. Dust and…Duncan stopped, horrified to realize that he had “dusted,” and smeared, a charcoal drawing. Duncan disclosed his gaff to the master the next morning over breakfast. A stony silence followed the admission. Years later, Duncan jokes that the drawing hangs today in the Picasso Museum in Barcelona, the “only Duncan-Picasso in existence.”

Duncan later published four photographic essays of the Spanish artist, whom he credits with teaching him a “language beyond words.” With the same wild originality that Picasso approached his own art, he urged Duncan to “shoot your photographs your own way,” a mantra that continues to define the legend of D.D.D. and his prodigious body of work.