Intermittent enemy artillery fire covered the area of the “Roman ruins” on the Easy Read sector of Omaha Beach, where Capa landed, but it primarily targeted larger landing craft, and was not capable of stopping an infantry advance. The area of the ruins was in fact a seam in the enemy defenses, one that would prove fatal to the Germans and a godsend to the Americans. […]
|
|
Most significant in his response to my review of his 1985 Robert Capa biography is Richard Whelan’s refusal here to consider, or reconsider, the technical implausibility of the London darkroom explanation, a mistake he inexplicably continued to compound right up to 2007. […] Gabriel Coutagne’s diatribe in Le Monde pretends to engage with the evidence of our Capa D-Day investigation, but misrepresents and/or misunderstands almost all of it. His elementary mistakes suggest that he either (a) didn’t read large chunks of our research, or Patrick Peccatte’s excellent summary thereof, or (b) read it too hastily and misconstrued it, or (c) has difficulty understanding written English. […] As for the assertion by Morris’s business partner Robert Pledge that this world-famous picture editor who spent much of his working life talking daily with professional photographers and custom printers and darkroom staffers, handling prints and negatives, his offices just a few steps away from professional darkrooms, has absolutely no idea what goes on in those oh-so-mysterious places — risible, no? […] |
 SPJ Research Award 2014 |
All Greek to Me: APhF 2015
The diatribe of photographer and Magnum member Patrick Zachmann exemplified perfectly the knee-jerk defensiveness with which representatives of what I’ve come to call the Capa Consortium respond to any challenge to the Capa legend. One member of the audience asked me if I’d paid Zachmann to prove our point; I had to answer that he’d done so with no prompting from me. […]