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. […]
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Unexpectedly, the dismantling of the myth of Robert Capa’s adventures on Omaha Beach on D-Day, June 6, 1944, and the subsequent fate of his negatives became the year’s main project at this blog. I also took up the collapsing market value of post-secondary degrees in studio art and photography; the willful, mindless destruction of an excellent example of such a program in Vevey, Switzerland, which I witnessed firsthand; the photographic strategies and style(s) of Shelby Lee Adams vs. his claim to documentarian status; and the insidious agenda of the “internet everwhere” tendency. […] Professionally speaking, this past year proved unusually uneventful, even by recent standards. Travel no longer holds much attraction for me (been there, done that), so I welcomed the chance to spend most of the year here at home, enjoying the changes of the seasons and our daily routines. […] Ironically, Robert Capa’s life and work — committed, above all, to the fight against fascism — has ended up, by his own doing, enmeshed in its very own “big lie,” which, repeated often enough (as that strategy’s progenitor predicted), has become what people believe. An object lesson in how “the big lie” functions. We’ve had 70 years of that lie — surely enough. It ends here. […] The recently published interview, “Rearview Mirror: John G. Morris: Normandy, 1944,” makes it clear that Morris no longer “stand[s] by [his] account of what happened in the London office of Life magazine on June 7, 1944 as first published in [his] book Get the Picture.” The research and evidence presented at this blog over the past six months have forced Morris to make significant revisions to and recantations of his narrative of the past 70 years re Capa’s D-Day pictures and their fate. […] |
 SPJ Research Award 2014 |