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Staking Out the Claim In his unauthorized, workmanlike 2003 biography Blood and Champagne: The Life and Times of Robert Capa, Alex Kershaw, describing the motives behind the founding of Magnum Photos, wrote as follows: “Since 1945, Capa had been active in the American Society of Magazine Photographers. He had eloquently […] We agreed to meet Morris for lunch once, him and his “bodyguards.” His issue was in fact our lack of “tact” in the way we cast light on the “Falling Soldier” story. He listened to our arguments. I must say I got a little frustrated, saying that we would fight to the end … my producer was wiser, and conceded. […] Cornell Capa’s intervention, as well as that of ICP’s lawyers, was rather brutal. They sent us threatening injunctions. We soon understood they would do whatever it took to stop us from making the movie. […] So TIME/LIFE has made a slow-motion but dramatic about-face, going from studiously ignoring the myth of the London darkroom disaster at its public birthing in Charles Wertenbaker’s 1944 book and Capa’s certifying it in his 1947 memoir to enthusiastically promulgating it seven decades later. […] Capa resigned his lucrative staff position at LIFE in January 1947 to go freelance once more. He may have made that choice in part so as not to bite the hand that fed him when his fictionalized memoir, “Slightly Out of Focus,” came out that fall, with its first formal, on-the-record claim directly from him that the magazine’s London staff had ruined his D-Day films. […] |
 SPJ Research Award 2014 |
