From the evidence we can draw a clear conclusion: Partners in the Capa Consortium, including Magnum’s members and its administrators, do not scruple to contaminate the record with misinformation, outright lies, falsified “evidence,” and whatever fanciful elaborations they feel like making up concerning Robert Capa’s D-Day experiences and the subsequent fate of his negatives. […]
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Staking Out the Claim In his unauthorized, workmanlike 2003 biography Blood and Champagne: The Life and Times of Robert Capa, Alex Kershaw, describing the motives behind the founding of Magnum Photos, wrote as follows: “Since 1945, Capa had been active in the American Society of Magazine Photographers. He had eloquently […] The recent incident in which a disgruntled self-described “stoner high school student” accessed the personal email account of the director of the U.S. Central Intelligence Agency provides sufficient proof that it takes nothing more than a teenage degree of cleverness and determination to access just about anything put into digital form. Given that fact, you will perhaps appreciate my standard question to the “internet everywhere” advocates I meet during this fall’s round of new-tech expos: Is it hackable? […] While this is in some ways a lifetime achievement award, it has been spurred specifically by A. D. Coleman’s extraordinary series of blog posts on his website Photocritic International that debunks the myth of Robert Capa’s “melted” D-Day negatives. Along with his collaborators on this series — J. Ross Baughman, Charles Herrick, and Rob McElroy — Coleman has shown how long-form scholarship on the web can be a powerful force for understanding. […] |
 SPJ Research Award 2014 |
Alternate History: Robert Capa and Magnum (1)
Magnum has straightforwardly become a privately owned capitalist venture, with the photographers as stakeholders. When Patrick Zachmann denounced me in Athens, therefore, he did so to protect his own investment and those of his business partners, as any elementary Marxian analysis would conclude. […]