This makes the Capa portions of Landing on the Edge of Eternity a sorry display of little more than copying and pasting that masquerades as historical research and analysis. […]
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A bit further on (and, in a historian, this is unforgivable), Robert Kershaw actually changes Capa’s own words to conform Capa’s account to the misleading version concocted by Richard Whelan, Capa’s official biographer. … That’s not revisionist historianship; it’s corrupt historianship, inexcusable. […] Cynthia Young has a bad habit that’s fatal to credible scholarship: By dint of her position as the de facto world’s foremost Capa authority, she considers herself entitled to simply make up shit like this. […] Szarkowski’s patronage practices tread ever closer to cronyism, in effect if not by intent. His esthetic, insufficient to the medium’s current stage of evolution, verges on stagnation. His tenure at MoMA, which has been distinguished in many ways, now runs the risk of ending in increasingly acrimonious confrontation with practitioners of that very medium to which he has committed so much of his life. […] The question is hardly whether or not John Szarkowski chooses to “consider himself to be an influential force.” He is one, de facto and de jure. He knows he is one; to believe otherwise is to impute to him a naiveté bordering on the moronic. And he exercises his influence regularly and consistently, in a variety of ways, to support the photographers he favors. […] |
 SPJ Research Award 2014 |