Looking at John Szarkowski’s photographs and Cornell Capa’s, asking myself — based on that early evidence of personal tendency and taste — which of the two had surprised me most as advocates for photography by transcending the narrow-mindedness to which performers in any medium are prone in order to create an institutional environment with an atmosphere of tolerance and encouragement for all, the unequivocal answer that came was Cornell Capa. […]
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It’s at once sad and comical to watch Morris and his coterie scrambling to find rationales, no matter how unlikely and absurd, for the impossibilities and contradictions in the various versions of Capa’s D-Day actions and the fate of his negatives that they’ve peddled over the past seven decades. Right now they’re making it up as they go along — and making fools of themselves as they do so. […] 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. […] 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. […] |
 SPJ Research Award 2014 |
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. […]