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. […]
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One morning Magnum’s Paris bureau chief Natasha Chassagne walked into the office to discover that she had been officially locked out. Richard Kalvar appeared like a jack-in-the-box and gave her fifteen minutes to vacate her desk and leave the building. It must have been brutal for her; from a distance it looked awful. The prevailing atmosphere at the following annual meeting was a lot of people congratulating themselves for having done this dirty deed. And the way mobsters always eliminate eyewitnesses, they were already targeting Jimmy Fox. […] Magnum is a kind of party in the political, not the fun, sense, a bankrupt Communist party riddled with conspiracy, lack of resolve, cut-throat egotism, secrecy, character assassinations and rumor-mongering, teetering on the edge of collapse from inefficiency. […] In short, we have clear evidence of a pattern of intimidation and obstruction of independent Capa research by individuals at the very top of the ICP chain of command, going back to the institution’s origins. This does not bode well for the future of Capa scholarship, nor for the future of ICP. Moreover, it raises serious questions about ICP’s claim to credible status as a research institution. […] 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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