The Mercedes Baptiste Halliday narrative legitimised Gian Butturini’s detractors, and kept them respectable. On paper, it superficially resembled a clear, ideological position, fuelled by a defiance of racial injustice. In actuality, it was a subterfuge, a mere foil – albeit one cut from noble principles – to hide the pettiest and basest of motives: the green-eyed monster of professional jealousy. […]
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For all of Moritz Neumüller’s profuse appeals to impartiality and critical objectivity, the very notion that Gian Butturini’s book LONDON had not only offended, but offended widely — indeed, globally — remains an untested one, founded not upon documentary evidence, but on faith, or magical thinking, alone. […] Exuding an exhaustive scholarliness and an air of academic authority, Neumüller’s textual apparatus thus becomes unstable on close inspection, at its worst incomplete, misleading, and factually inaccurate. … Parr and Butturini’s social media detractors, very limited in number and audience, never put forward a case to support their claims that Butturini’s London was a racist text. […] So when did Capa board LCI(L)-94? I believe it was at the end of the ship’s first beaching, before it shifted 100 yards down the beach. But that would have been a far less dramatic tale, so he crafted a hodge-podge story based on details he later observed around the ship and inserted himself into it. […] Capa had transferred from LCI(L)-94 to the attack transport ship USS Samuel Chase (APA-26), and there he took at least one photo of LCI(L)-85 as it was moored alongside the Chase, transferring off wounded shortly before it sank. It seems Capa appropriated events that he had seen others experience, and wove them into his own story as though they had happened to him. […] |
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