Charles Herrick, who has provided most of the military-related analysis published here as part of the Capa D-Day project, has distilled that material into a new book, Back into Focus: The Real Story of Robert Capa’s D-Day. […]
Charles Herrick, who has provided most of the military-related analysis published here as part of the Capa D-Day project, has distilled that material into a new book, Back into Focus: The Real Story of Robert Capa’s D-Day. […] In the end, it seems fittingly ironic that the Occam’s-Razor explanation for all of Capa’s missing D-Day negatives turns out to be the scissors of the censor. The legend of the lost negatives resulted from nothing more or less than the needs of Capa’s outsize ego. […] It’s been my unhappy experience to discover that the majority of first-person D-Day stories are to some degree inaccurate. Often this is because the individual experienced such a narrow view of the massive operation that he misinterpreted what he saw. In other cases, it is a result of fading memory or unintentional exaggeration. And then there are the cases in which people alter the facts to enhance their reports or their reputations. […] However garbled we find Samuel Fuller’s version of what Capa told him, and no matter how far-fetched the specific detail of a “cocky German officer” seems, there’s no reason to doubt that the meeting between Capa and Fuller took place, nor that their conversation included an exchange about Capa’s D-Day experiences and the photographs he made that day. […] In my opinion, da Cunha’s work constitutes not only an exemplary achievement in the context of the Capa D-Day investigation but a major contribution to the forensic analysis of photographic materials, one that sets a benchmark for future inquiries. […] |