On June 6, 2018, the aptly named website Artsy.net published “Photographer Robert Capa Risked It All to Capture D-Day — then Nearly All His Images Were Lost,” by Haley Weiss, under its “Visual Culture” rubric. It consists, in its entirety, of a rehash of the Capa D-Day myth, simply rewritten from one or more of the standard versions that our research project has thoroughly refuted. […]
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Collectively, Arbus, Friedlander, and Winogrand revised the ways in which photographers used their cameras, which changed the look of the resulting photographs, and that they made the photographer’s participatory role in the photographic event a foregrounded given, which transformed both the behavior of photographers and the way we interpret their work. […] This non-political, anti-theoretical posture denies categorically and consistently that such photographs are in any way about their literal subject matter, insisting instead that photographs are entirely about themselves and in no way concerned with either the photographer’s inner life or whatever took place in front of the lens at the moment of exposure. As a stance, it became not just widespread but almost mandatory among practitioners of this genre of photography. […] We were about defending and expanding interpretive multiplicity beyond the ideological vanishing point to a place where all sides of the conflict became visible — combatants and civilians caught in the crossfire. The more coverage the better. To me there was no such thing as too many pictures. […] At many agencies, Magnum included, photographers became specialists in particular conflict zones. They learned appropriate languages, earned the camaraderie of local journalists and fixers, purchased vehicles, and in some cases even took apartments in the capital city. To the mainstream media it was a form of branding. […] |
 SPJ Research Award 2014 |