Clearly, we still have much work to do if we hope to dislodge this fable from the mythology of photojournalism and photo history — not to mention the larger D-Day into which it has become so thoroughly woven. Yet there’s grounds for hope, that “thing with feathers.” […]
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I know dozens of photographers over fifty years old who never got their due and are beginning to realize that they may never get it. After three or four or five decades of work, they begin to wonder if, in the current public feasting on photography, there are any scraps for them. […] Sam Wagstaff told Clarence John Laughlin that if he bought something he owned it. He could hang it on his own wall, stick it in a box under his bed, use it as a coaster, scale it out the window — it was his, to do with as he pleased. […] Robert Capa’s habit of self-invention proved contagious for John Morris, his self-styled “adopted brother,” both of them prone to the condition Steven Colbert named “truthiness,” which he formally defined as “the belief in what you feel to be true rather than what the facts will support.” […] Clearly, Capa fudged the truth and even lied outright whenever it served his purposes, telling multiple versions of his anecdotes and choosing his sometimes extreme variations according to how he gauged his listeners and the professional consequences of his disclosures. For reasons of his own, John Morris still chooses — at least publicly — not to see it that way. […] |
 SPJ Research Award 2014 |