Cynthia Young has a bad habit that’s fatal to credible scholarship: By dint of her position as the de facto world’s foremost Capa authority, she considers herself entitled to simply make up shit like this. […]
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All members of the Capa Consortium — ICP, Magnum, Time, Inc., John Morris — face the 75th anniversary of D-Day, coming up in June 2019, on which occasion Capa’s D-Day photos and the contextualizing tale thereof will once again have a central role — whether in its original and now discredited mythic form or in an updated, realistic, credible, fact-based version. […] Researchers should not have to jump through hoops, devious devious tactics, or resort to threats of adverse publicity in order to gain access to archival materials. That smacks more of some government agency requiring detailed, exact FOIA requests than it does of a responsible repository ostensibly welcoming scholars. […] The promulgation of a fictionalized version of Robert Capa’s actions on D-Day and the subsequent fate of his Omaha Beach negatives constitute the worm in the apple, the rot at the very core of the foundation myth of the International Center of Photography — the Center’s “original sin,” as it were, the first skeleton in its closet. Known to ICP’s founder, Cornell Capa, Robert’s younger brother, as far back as 1944, the truth got papered over long before ICP was even a gleam in Cornell’s eye. […] |
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Alternate History: Robert Capa and Magnum (1)
Magnum has straightforwardly become a privately owned capitalist venture, with the photographers as stakeholders. When Patrick Zachmann denounced me in Athens, therefore, he did so to protect his own investment and those of his business partners, as any elementary Marxian analysis would conclude. […]