All the evidence necessary to impeach the story that Morris and Capa and these others have told all these years, is presented as visual imagery in the brief TIME video from May 29, 2014. But it goes by too fast to analyze. You simply have to stop the flow of the video, freezing time by turning it into a set of still photographs, in order to read the images and words carefully. Then it becomes a confession. […]
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Robert Capa unquestionably had the skills required to make astonishing images at Omaha Beach on D-Day. He presented himself with his camera and lens at the historic setting from which he could have derived such images. But he pressed the shutter release a mere 11 times; that’s all he registered on his one roll of D-Day film. On this crucial occasion, the opportunity of a lifetime, he failed himself, his picture editor, his publisher, his public, and history itself. […] Film left in my darkroom drying cabinet for almost two hours at temperatures that ranged from 80°F to 150°F — and between 135°F-150°F for an hour — remained intact. So I feel confident in asserting that the emulsion of gelatin-silver film, in 1944 as today, did not and does not melt and run down its acetate backing after just a few minutes in a closed wooden cabinet heated even to 150°F by any simple, off-the-shelf heating unit. This is a fiction. […] Contrary to picture editor John Morris’s narrative, these “damaged” frames actually show us samples of film that has received proper development, fixing, and drying. They also appear to have suffered drastic in-camera overexposure. If they typify the three rolls that held Capa’s estimated 106 exposures from Omaha Beach, then all but the “Magnificent Eleven” frames arrived at LIFE‘s London offices irreversibly overexposed (by Capa himself) in their pupal or latent-image stage. […] |
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Guest Post 14: Q&A with John Morris (b)
In “Get the Picture” (1998) and in other accounts before and since, Morris asserts that “A scrawled note (from Capa) said that the action was all in the 35-millimeter, that things had been very rough, that he had come back to England unintentionally with wounded being evacuated, and that he was on his way back to Normandy.” Never reproduced, not even in Morris’s 2004 book D-Day: Robert Capa, which includes much other documentation, this note may be mythical. […]