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Alternate History: Robert Capa on D-Day, 20

Morris has told this story hundreds of times since 1947, almost word for word every time (to judge by the dozens of such performances on record in print, audio, and video formats). Suddenly, at the age of 98, he conveniently recalls a crucial new detail for the very first time. I find it impossible to take seriously Morris’s recovered memory of the purported “advance packet” he now claims to have received on June 7, 1944 containing Capa’s pre-invasion films. […]

Cabin Fever 2015: Bits & Pieces (1)

Casting as I do a wide net in my efforts to understand visual communication, and the ways in which lens-derived imagery fits into that larger puzzle, and thus the issues that criticism of such imagery must needs address, I find myself pondering all kinds of “floating things.” Forinstance, the perplexing fact that, apparently, men and women see colors differently — which would suggest that women make color photographs differently than men do, and, as viewers, react to them differently than men do. […]

Back on Track

The blog’s RSS feed, which send my posts to your email inbox, got broken by an update to its Wordpress theme. As a result, several posts went online without any notification. It took some poking around to figure out the problem, but if you receive this post the the blog is back on track. […]

Alternate History: Robert Capa on D-Day, 19

The chances of Capa finding any way to get his pre-invasion films from the Chase, a Coast Guard ship, to Scherman’s Navy LST and into Scherman’s hands in that vast armada are slim to none. That’s without even asking why Capa would put Coast Guard and Navy and Army personnel to all that trouble simply to transfer to Scherman only his 35mm rolls (rather than his entire take) of what Morris has acknowledged were merely stock shots. […]

What Makes One Photo Worth $2.9 Million? (2007)

[Checking the news this past December 12, I learned from Forbes that “On December 9 PRNewswire announced that Australian photographer Peter Lik sold a photograph entitled ‘Phantom’ for a record-setting $6.5 million. ‘Phantom,’ now the world’s most expensive photograph ever sold, was shot in a subterranean cavern in Arizona’s Antelope Canyon.” (See Rachel Hennessey’s report, […]