While this is in some ways a lifetime achievement award, it has been spurred specifically by A. D. Coleman’s extraordinary series of blog posts on his website Photocritic International that debunks the myth of Robert Capa’s “melted” D-Day negatives. Along with his collaborators on this series — J. Ross Baughman, Charles Herrick, and Rob McElroy — Coleman has shown how long-form scholarship on the web can be a powerful force for understanding. […]
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The most important points I took away from the weekend are these: To make anything happen with a private archive, you need to know what you have. Thus taking inventory, and thereby getting familiar with the materials so you can locate and retrieve them, becomes the necessary first step. Second, to borrow a concept from general systems theory, you have to convert it from a heap to a whole, establishing some kind of order. […] Without exception, the recipients of the 2014 Society of Professional Journalists Awards exemplify the real deal. On major and minor platforms, in print and broadcast and online media, as staff or freelance/independent, they pursued issues they considered important, undertook investigations that sometimes lasted for months, often made enemies, but challenged authority, separated hard fact from self-serving fiction, and spoke truth to power. The award to us takes it as a given that we belong among them, as equals and colleagues. Speaking for the team, we cherish that association above all. […] Most of us in the West — even Western Europeans — simply have no idea of what it has meant to be Eastern European in this century, for even those who lived there are only now able to acknowledge it. There’s a long period of reeducation ahead for all of us; and the paper trail we’ll have to follow is strewn not only with sheets bearing the written word but with photographs of all kinds, like these. […] |
 SPJ Research Award 2014All content of this publication is © copyright 2009, 2010, 2011, 2012, 2013, 2014, 2015, 2016, 2017 by A. D. Coleman unless otherwise noted. All materials contained on this site are protected by United States copyright law and may not be reproduced for commercial purposes without prior written permission. All photos copyright by the individual photographers. "Fair use" allows quotation of excerpts of textual material from this site for educational and other noncommercial purposes.
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All Greek to Me: APhF 2015
The diatribe of photographer and Magnum member Patrick Zachmann exemplified perfectly the knee-jerk defensiveness with which representatives of what I’ve come to call the Capa Consortium respond to any challenge to the Capa legend. One member of the audience asked me if I’d paid Zachmann to prove our point; I had to answer that he’d done so with no prompting from me. […]