This “lost film” tale centers on Utah Beach. In brief, the D-Day film from that beach was supposedly entrusted to a courier who then accidentally dropped it into the ocean while climbing aboard a ship. This seems to be merely a miasma of self-reinforcing rumors with no factual basis. […]
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The evidence, then, suggests that while his connection to Robert Capa mattered deeply to Morris on both personally and professionally, for Capa the relationship on those levels proved more peripheral — at least until the brief year between his hiring of Morris for Magnum and his death in Vietnam. Not a two-way street, in short, though Morris takes pains to intimate otherwise. […] We can date John Morris’s active involvement in generating the Capa D-Day myth to sometime during the summer or fall of 1954, when, as Executive Editor of Magnum Photos, he wrote the captions for a posthumous Capa portfolio that would appear in the 1955 edition of U.S. Camera Annual. […] In place of the established myth, with its enticing melodrama, I supplied an alternative tale with its own attractions, a complex skein of personal and interpersonal motivations: camaraderie, fear, failure, guilt, self-protection, white lies. No less rewarding, I’d like to think, just in a different way. […] The fact that this roll, along with the other films most likely classified top secret, got developed in LIFE‘s darkroom under the supervision of not just darkroom chief H. C. “Braddy” Bradshaw and LIFE staff photographer Hans Wild but also a SHAEF custody officer, precludes any possibility of some fatal neglect during processing. […] |
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