Bruce Young’s “theory” of Capa’s boils down to the faith-based notion that if you take a mix of amateur psychoanalysis, “fog of war” uncertainty, and a tolerance of truthiness, and then you turn yourself around and you shake it all about, you can “more or less” reconcile the discrepancies, fabrications, misdirections, errors of fact, elisions, improbabilities, inconsistencies, and inherent contradictions embedded within Robert Capa’s and John Morris’s various divergent accounts. […]
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Thus a 7200-word article premised on a research project largely conducted by me incorporates a total of 75 words — slightly over one percent of its content — drawn from my portion of that research and my emails responding to Young’s questions about that project. […] I can only describe the National Press Photographers Association’s Donald Winslow and Bruce Young, the writer to whom he assigned the magazine’s report on this blog’s investigation of Robert Capa’s actions on D-Day and the subsequent fate of his images, as severely compromised from the outset of their coverage of our research relating to Capa and his picture editor at the time, John Morris. […] Donald Winslow’s motives for requiring Young’s adherence to the “he said, she said” structure seem clear: He had the NPPA’s commitments to the reputations of Capa and Morris to protect, not to mention its long-term involvement with Morris. No other approach could sidestep the obligation of judgment, enable Morris to retain a shred of credibility on this subject, and otherwise minimize the damage. […] |
 SPJ Research Award 2014 |
Time Capsule 1974: Collier’s Encyclopedia Yearbook
I took the assignment of writing this annual round-up of events in the photo world as an opportunity to create a time capsule of sorts for users of Collier’s Encyclopedia. I just came across the one that appeared 40 years ago in the 1975 edition of the Yearbook, synopsizing the year 1974 (and the last months of of 1973). Here it is. […]