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Year-End Ends and Odds

For a lad still a tad, who had passed through and adapted himself to three linguistic environments — Manhattan, southern France, London, and then back to Manhattan — in three years, this came as music to the ears. That Joycean play with language, in a form accessible even to a sprat like me, heightened my consciousness in relation to the spoken and written word by making the very act of reading — not the experience of following a story line, but the savoring of language itself, its slipperiness and mutabiity, its multivalent possibilities — fun. […]

Birthday Musings 12/19/15

I left the country just once this year, for the Athens Photo Festival in early June. Aside from that, I left New York City only twice, both times to receive awards — the first at the Society of Professional Journalists dinner at the National Press Club in Washington, DC, on the evening of June 26, for our team’s Capa D-Day project, the second to Philadelphia on November 7 for The Photo Review Award 2015. […]

Alternate History: Robert Capa and Magnum (3)

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. […]

Alternate History: Robert Capa and Magnum (2)

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 […]

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. […]