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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Capa resigned his lucrative staff position at LIFE in January 1947 to go freelance once more. He may have made that choice in part so as not to bite the hand that fed him when his fictionalized memoir, “Slightly Out of Focus,” came out that fall, with its first formal, on-the-record claim directly from him that the magazine’s London staff had ruined his D-Day films. […] Gabriel Coutagne’s diatribe in Le Monde pretends to engage with the evidence of our Capa D-Day investigation, but misrepresents and/or misunderstands almost all of it. His elementary mistakes suggest that he either (a) didn’t read large chunks of our research, or Patrick Peccatte’s excellent summary thereof, or (b) read it too hastily and misconstrued it, or (c) has difficulty understanding written English. […] As for the assertion by Morris’s business partner Robert Pledge that this world-famous picture editor who spent much of his working life talking daily with professional photographers and custom printers and darkroom staffers, handling prints and negatives, his offices just a few steps away from professional darkrooms, has absolutely no idea what goes on in those oh-so-mysterious places — risible, no? […] Hiding in the surf behind the disabled assault vehicle as Capa did represented just one option at that juncture. The battle had already begun to move off the beach and up the ridge; Capa could have followed the action and gone along. After all, that’s why LIFE had given him this highly coveted front seat. […] |
 SPJ Research Award 2014 |