Between Charles Hangsterfer inaccurately placing his D-Day landing time at least an hour too early — an extremely common tendency in later oral histories — and his assertion that he saw Capa still behind a tank on the beach, his story has helped distort and confuse the Capa timeline. […]
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The difference between a graphic artist such as Robert Rauschenberg, who incorporates photographic images in his work, and a photographer such as Scott Hyde, who employs silk-screen techniques in producing his final picture, is one that I do not care to define. […] Kershaw in this 1984 book reproduces the first nine of Capa’s ten Omaha Beach 35mm images, commenting on each one in turn. Unfortunately, those annotations do not reflect well on Kershaw’s knowledge of photography or military equipment, nor on his ability to pay close attention to the evidentiary data encoded in photographs. […] Though it did not center around Capa’s D-Day photos and the related myths, this book’s author felt it necessary to address our research, if only to dismiss it. When even the author of a bit of Capa trivia finds it necessary to engage with our deconstruction of the Capa D-Day legend, that’s progress, and it augurs well for the future of Capa studies. […] Lavoie does not intend to contribute to or assess the actual substance of Capa-related research, merely to comment on its semantics. He contents himself with analyzing the language in which that research gets conducted, in order to show that it contains aspects of forensic and juridical rhetoric. Therefore … what, exactly? […] |
 SPJ Research Award 2014 |