Richard Whelan’s work on all matters related to the subjects of Robert and Cornell Capa should be considered fatally compromised and entirely unreliable, except when their overall narratives and specific claims can be verified by credible outside sources. It will take decades to undo the contamination of the literature on Robert Capa that traces directly to Whelan’s efforts on Cornell Capa’s behalf. […]
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Taken in tandem with Richard Whelan’s acknowledgment that he, Cornell Capa, and John G. Morris had effectively buried the Hansel Mieth letter about Robert Capa’s staging of “Falling Soldier” for 35 years, I view this as a confession of abject failure to fulfill the ethical obligations of biographer and historian. […] As our research has made clear, ICP has to this day assiduously avoided even the most elementary investigation of Capa’s D-Day materials. Eschewing such inquiry effectively constitutes a passive obstruction of research. But Cornell Capa also took an active, aggressive approach to that same end. […] After Robert Capa’s death, Cornell Capa took physical possession of his negatives, handling licensing rights for Robert’s photos and writings, including passages from Slightly Out of Focus. This ensured that the string of subsequent Capa books, and books in which Capa’s images appeared — whether or not published directly through Cornell — frequently reiterated the D-Day myth. […] The promulgation of a fictionalized version of Robert Capa’s actions on D-Day and the subsequent fate of his Omaha Beach negatives constitute the worm in the apple, the rot at the very core of the foundation myth of the International Center of Photography — the Center’s “original sin,” as it were, the first skeleton in its closet. Known to ICP’s founder, Cornell Capa, Robert’s younger brother, as far back as 1944, the truth got papered over long before ICP was even a gleam in Cornell’s eye. […] |
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