Since Capa himself provided no notes for his D-Day images, captioning them was left to those who had never witnessed an amphibious assault, much less the Omaha Beach landings. When LIFE’s editors added a caption that was accurate in the macro sense — but wholly inaccurate for that particular scene — they condemned this photo to misreading for decades to come. […]
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There is no evidence whatsoever to support the claim that Capa’s surviving negatives from D-Day were ever the subject of any emulsion sliding or melting. The slight image displacement on Capa’s film resulted from a mechanical problem commonly experienced in that era: Kodak’s shorter film cassettes caused the film to get transported slightly lower in the camera — exposing the emulsion around the lower edges of the top sprocket holes as they passed over the film gate. […] If Whelan or Young had done their due diligence by consulting photography experts to learn why the image area of Capa’s negatives had encroached on the sprocket holes on one side of the film, they never would have floated such an easily disprovable theory in public. The real reason the sprocket holes along one edge of Capa’s ten D-Day negatives became partially exposed had nothing to do with any supposed emulsion slide from when the film was processed and dried. The cassettes containing the film caused the problem. […] In the best kinds of journalism today, I always hope that a well-seasoned writer will help his subjects’ points of view to shine through it all. Unfortunately, in this latest exercise from the National Press Photographers Association, Bruce Young and Donald Winslow concentrated too much on their own preconceptions. […] I provided the National Press Photographers Association with timelines and an A-to-Z list of Capa’s D-Day offenses, expecting that these would be effectively condensed in what editor Donald Winslow described as a major feature story for the very next issue of the magazine. Several of my points survive in the nine-page story they created, certainly one of the longest articles I’ve ever seen the magazine publish during my 40 years as a professional photojournalist. Of course I was deeply disappointed when the thrust of my discoveries was diluted, scattered, and dismissed. […] |
 SPJ Research Award 2014 |