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. […]
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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. […] 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. […] |
 SPJ Research Award 2014 |