It is now about 57 years since Bob admitted to me that he had “taken a swing” at the guy [John Morris], so I am really hazy about this. Bob never went into details and although this loss [of his D-Day film] was obviously an event he would never forget, his philosophy was that “Life is too short to hate anyone or bear a grudge.” […]
|
|
[My late husband Bob Landry made no published] comment … about the Normandy invasion. He did tell me that his film had been lost through the incompetence of a guy in the London office who was supposed to make secure arrangements for its delivery to London. [This would have been John Morris, then assistant picture editor in LIFE’s London darkroom. — A. D. C.] […] From the evidence we can draw a clear conclusion: Partners in the Capa Consortium, including Magnum’s members and its administrators, do not scruple to contaminate the record with misinformation, outright lies, falsified “evidence,” and whatever fanciful elaborations they feel like making up concerning Robert Capa’s D-Day experiences and the subsequent fate of his negatives. […] Staking Out the Claim In his unauthorized, workmanlike 2003 biography Blood and Champagne: The Life and Times of Robert Capa, Alex Kershaw, describing the motives behind the founding of Magnum Photos, wrote as follows: “Since 1945, Capa had been active in the American Society of Magazine Photographers. He had eloquently […] 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. […] |
 SPJ Research Award 2014 |