How seriously are we to take the droppings of a gluttonous voyeur who spent the last seven years of his life producing a third of a million negatives without bothering to look at any of them, much less analyze them critically? This was not a photographer; this was a shooter, afflicted with a textbook case of terminal distraction, the quintessence if not the prototype of the dreaded “Hand With Five Fingers” you have surely seen in camera ads on TV. […]
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[Editor’s note: Following up on my analysis, in an earlier post, of the timing of Robert Capa’s arrival at and departure from Omaha Beach on the morning of D-Day, June 6, 1944, photojournalist and author J. Ross Baughman brings his experience as a combat photographer to bear on a frame-by-frame analysis of the 10 remaining […] Capa is still standing atop the landing ramp of the Higgins boat, shifting his camera slightly more to the left. He can now see a living timeline of the invasion’s progress spread out in front of him. The very first American soldiers hit Omaha Beach at 06:30 a.m., and at least 18 are shown after they struggled across the 300 yards to a steep incline of sand nicknamed The Shingle. […] In his own account of boarding the LCI which took him away from Omaha Beach, Capa describes an explosion that takes place moments after he came aboard, killing several crew members. Based on Lewis’s diary entry, that happened just minutes after they disembarked their troops — somewhere around 0750. If these details add up, then, Capa reached Omaha Beach at 0725 at the very earliest, and clambered into the relative safety of the LCI at 0750, just 25 minutes later. That boat departed Omaha Beach at at 0837. So Capa was at Omaha Beach for a maximum of 72 minutes, following the second-wave troops and photographing them for less than half an hour. […] |
 SPJ Research Award 2014 |
Bad Day in Vevey (1)
Never underestimate the long-term havoc that determined arts-education careerists can wreak in a short time, or the permanent damage (including financial damage) such rampaging functionaries can do to students, faculties, programs, and even entire schools. […]