However garbled we find Samuel Fuller’s version of what Capa told him, and no matter how far-fetched the specific detail of a “cocky German officer” seems, there’s no reason to doubt that the meeting between Capa and Fuller took place, nor that their conversation included an exchange about Capa’s D-Day experiences and the photographs he made that day. […]
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Morris’s various tellings of the saga of Capa’s films omitted entirely a vital matter, that of censorship by the Supreme Headquarters Allied Expeditionary Forces (SHAEF). Any undeveloped film coming in from correspondents at the front was assumed, as a minimum, to be classifiable as secret material, so the handling of Capa’s film would both begin and end on the censors’ desk. […] For those die-hards who cling to Capa’s “First Wave With Company E” myth, Fuller’s inaccuracies have become sacred truths. The fact that Capa himself affirmed he was on the Chase, not the Henrico, has had no effect on their delusions. […] This makes the Capa portions of Landing on the Edge of Eternity a sorry display of little more than copying and pasting that masquerades as historical research and analysis. […] So TIME/LIFE has made a slow-motion but dramatic about-face, going from studiously ignoring the myth of the London darkroom disaster at its public birthing in Charles Wertenbaker’s 1944 book and Capa’s certifying it in his 1947 memoir to enthusiastically promulgating it seven decades later. […] |
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