Capa’s two photos have become iconic images symbolizing inertia, fear and even the failure of nerve of the common soldier on the beaches of Normandy. What a travesty that these men who made decisive contributions to the success of the campaign, despite every danger and hindrance, should have become poster boys for lack of resolve under fire. And all as the result of a caption that told the wrong story. […]
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Since Capa himself provided no notes for his D-Day images, captioning them was left to those who had never witnessed an amphibious assault, much less the Omaha Beach landings. When LIFE’s editors added a caption that was accurate in the macro sense — but wholly inaccurate for that particular scene — they condemned this photo to misreading for decades to come. […] Fundamentally, Mark functions as a portraitist, fascinated by facial expression, body language, and costume. She treats her subjects, implicitly, as collaborators. […] There is no evidence whatsoever to support the claim that Capa’s surviving negatives from D-Day were ever the subject of any emulsion sliding or melting. The slight image displacement on Capa’s film resulted from a mechanical problem commonly experienced in that era: Kodak’s shorter film cassettes caused the film to get transported slightly lower in the camera — exposing the emulsion around the lower edges of the top sprocket holes as they passed over the film gate. […] If Whelan or Young had done their due diligence by consulting photography experts to learn why the image area of Capa’s negatives had encroached on the sprocket holes on one side of the film, they never would have floated such an easily disprovable theory in public. The real reason the sprocket holes along one edge of Capa’s ten D-Day negatives became partially exposed had nothing to do with any supposed emulsion slide from when the film was processed and dried. The cassettes containing the film caused the problem. […] |
 SPJ Research Award 2014 |