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. […]
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I have come to believe that Capa’s actions on D-Day resulted from considered planning and calculated risks. He knew that he would have only a short time on the beach. He knew that he had to get back quickly to some ship — preferably the Chase, but if not another — in the convoy scheduled to depart at noon for the English coast. That represented his only hope of getting his films to LIFE on time. […] In this project we have made and continue to make a collective argument in support of a radical deconstruction of an enduring media myth — arguably the most high-profile myth of photojournalism, one of the most familiar in photo history, and one that has infiltrated the wider territory of cultural history. We have as our goal the presentation of sufficient contextualized evidence and reasoning to persuade even the most skeptical. Toward that end we use every tool at our disposal, with thoroughness and attention to detail prominent among those. […] This note in Peter Caddick-Adams’s massive study, “Sand and Steel: The D-Day Invasions and the Liberation of France,” provides evidence that our research has begun to affect the field of military history as well. […] With Operation Fortitude South in mind, should we consider the possibility that SHAEF’s system-within-a-system for retrieval of civilian press coverage of the D-Day invasion did not in fact fail, but instead operated exactly as it was intended to do? […] |
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