{"id":20745,"date":"2014-06-10T23:56:32","date_gmt":"2014-06-11T03:56:32","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.nearbycafe.com\/artandphoto\/photocritic\/?p=20745"},"modified":"2014-12-08T11:58:15","modified_gmt":"2014-12-08T16:58:15","slug":"alternate-history-robert-capa-on-d-day-1","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.nearbycafe.com\/artandphoto\/photocritic\/2014\/06\/10\/alternate-history-robert-capa-on-d-day-1\/","title":{"rendered":"Alternate History: Robert Capa on D-Day (1)"},"content":{"rendered":"

\"A.As I edited and sourced and fact-checked J. Ross Baughman’s bold and thoughtful analysis<\/a> of Robert Capa’s brief D-Day experience on Omaha Beach on June 6, 1944 and the resulting images for publication here, two radically different narratives began running simultaneously in my mind’s eye.<\/p>\n

The first, inevitably, reprised the legend<\/a>: Heroic Robert Capa, cool under fire, making four rolls’ worth of 35mm exposures during the landing and the battle \u2014 unwittingly ruining one with saltwater damage in the process, leaving some 106 latent images \u2014 and shipping them via\u00a0courier to London. There a harried, inexperienced teenage lab assistant ruins all but 11 of the remaining pictures by closing the door of a drying cabinet after they’re developed, so the film strips overheat and the emulsions melt. LIFE<\/em>‘s London picture editor John Morris and Capa magnanimously forgive the well-intentioned “darkroom lad” for his awful mistake, and the surviving images becoming iconic\u00a0as the “Magnificent Eleven.”<\/a><\/p>\n

\"Robert

Robert Capa holding his 35mm Contax on a Japanese tank captured at the Battle of Taierzhuang, Xuzhou Front, China, April 1938. Photographer unknown.<\/p><\/div>\n

The second account not only has more nuances but constitutes, in fact, an almost entirely different story. Its main protagonist, Capa, already an international star in the world of photojournalism, has an untypical panic attack during the landing, mishandles his equipment in such a way that he overexposes most of his film, and runs away from the battleground after 30 minutes or less.<\/p>\n

When the film gets processed in London, Morris discovers, to his horror, that LIFE<\/em>‘s star photojournalist (and Morris’s close friend) blew his\u00a0assignment, arguably the biggest story of the war to date. A major embarrassment for Capa, for Morris, for LIFE<\/em>,\u00a0for Time-Life, and for the profession for which Capa has become the poster boy \u2014 touted at that moment as “the greatest war photographer in the world.” So Morris concocts a tale of botched processing by a kid, covering the asses of all concerned, and turning Capa’s 11 correct exposures into splinters from the true cross instead of the paltry results of a terrified bumbler.<\/p>\n

The Making of A Myth<\/strong><\/p>\n

\"Robert

Robert Capa, “Slightly Out of Focus” (1947), cover.<\/p><\/div>\n

There’s no denying that Capa experienced a failure of nerve at Omaha Beach and hightailed it out of there as fast as he could. He says as much himself, in his 1947 memoir of World War II, Slightly Out of Focus<\/em>. And the timeline of his trip to and from the front, as indicated by assorted documents, bears this out.<\/p>\n

As someone who’s never gone to war, I can’t imagine what it feels like to set foot on ground where bullets and cannon and mortar shells fly, and people die in horrible ways. Omaha Beach that day was a meatgrinder: the official estimate of casualties hovers at 2000. So I don’t fault\u00a0Capa for running away in that “red badge of courage” moment. It pertains only because his reputation for daring, on which he traded both personally and professionally, would have suffered hugely if that image of him as less than brave had circulated widely. To his credit, he confessed it discreetly in various ways thereafter.<\/p>\n

Since\u00a0it involves what we would have to call a conspiracy, the tale of\u00a0the negatives’ subsequent processing and supposed destruction proves more perplexing.<\/a><\/p>\n

In multiple\u00a0accounts, Morris tells us the following:<\/p>\n

\"Robert

* Robert Capa, spoiled frames from D-Day, June 6, 1944. Courtesy Wikimedia Commons.<\/p><\/div>\n

    \n
  1. It took Capa’s films an inexplicable 12\u00a0hours to travel the mere 140\u00a0miles from Weymouth to London via courier.<\/li>\n
  2. Immediately upon their arrival at Time-Life’s offices in London’s Soho district, Capa’s films got sent to the darkroom for developing. Presumably all four rolls of 35mm b&w film would have gotten processed with the same pre-mixed batches of developer, stop bath, and fix, to save time.<\/li>\n
  3. As indicated on the surviving frames, the 35mm rolls were Kodak Super-X Panchromatic Safety film,\u00a0introduced as a movie film in March 1935, rated at\u00a0ASA 50 and preferred for its relatively soft, low-grain, low-contrast look. In April 1945\u00a0Popular Photography<\/em>\u00a0described it as “A\u00a0film\u00a0which can be used in all types of outdoor light and indoors under favorable conditions.”<\/li>\n
  4. Dennis Banks, a 15-year-old\u00a0lab assistant, youngest of the five darkroom staffers, did\u00a0the developing and fixing, then\u00a0transported the developed film strips from the lab to the drying cabinet.<\/li>\n
  5. So\u00a0Banks would have seen the film strips, and presumably would have noticed if three of them, and most of the fourth, were blank.<\/li>\n
  6. Another LIFE<\/em> photographer, Hans Wild, surely adept at reading negatives, looked at them while still wet \u2014 just after development\u00a0\u2014 and pronounced them “Fabulous!”<\/li>\n
  7. The makeshift drying cabinet actually consisted of an unventilated wooden clothes locker with a “heating coil” on its bottom, whose doors they normally kept open.<\/li>\n
  8. Having been instructed by Morris to hurry\u00a0the drying of the films so that prints could get made\u00a0(“We need contacts \u2014\u00a0rush, rush, rush!”), Banks closed the doors of the wooden locker, with the result that, after “only a few minutes,” the cabinet had become so heated that the emulsions on all but a third\u00a0of one strip had melted into “pea soup.” A tragic loss, especially after Capa had risked so much to make those other, now forever vanished exposures.<\/li>\n
  9. Fortunately, 11 exposures remained intact, and those got printed and published, becoming iconic overnight.<\/li>\n
  10. In the haste and preoccupation of the moment Morris discarded the ruined film strips, later regretting not keeping them because they too would have functioned “iconically.”<\/li>\n<\/ol>\n
    \"John

    John Morris, “Get the Picture” (1998), cover.<\/p><\/div>\n

    <\/a><\/p>\n

    For a sampling of Morris’s multiple\u00a0variations on this tale, see this extract from his 1998 memoir\u00a0Get the Picture: A Personal History of Photojournalism<\/em><\/a>; a June 5, 2004 recap for the\u00a0New York Times<\/em><\/a>;\u00a0the brief 2010 documentary film “Eleven Frames,”<\/a> directed by Douglas Sloan; an interview with Fran\u00e7ois Picard<\/a> for France24 TV on June 6, 2011; this video interview from July 2, 2012<\/a>; the May 3, 2013 interview by Alessia Glaviano<\/a> for Italian Vogue<\/em>, with its accompanying video; this May 31, 2013 interview\/profile<\/a> from the\u00a0Financial Times<\/em>; “The Story Behind Robert Capa\u2019s Pictures of D-Day”<\/a> by Cynthia Young, ICP Curator of the Capa Archives, from June 6, 2013; Get the Picture<\/a>, a feature-length film on Morris from 2013, directed by Cathy Pearson;\u00a0“Behind the Photo: Robert Capa\u2019s D-Day,”<\/a>\u00a0a brief TIME video from May 29, 2014; and\u00a0“Robert Capa\u2019s Longest Day,”<\/a>\u00a0by Marie Brenner for\u00a0Vanity Fair<\/em>, June 2014.<\/p>\n

    In all its\u00a0versions, what\u00a0a dramatic tale. By this time Morris knows it by heart.<\/p>\n

    My problem: I bought this story when I first heard it, in the late 1960s, and have accepted it as true ever since. But I no longer believe it.<\/p>\n

    The Dog Ate Capa’s Homework<\/strong><\/p>\n

    To begin with, why would\u00a0LIFE<\/em> magazine\u00a0\u2014\u00a0famous for its lavish budgets and spare-no-expense relation to equipment and supplies\u00a0\u2014\u00a0rely on a makeshift film-drying cabinet with no air circulation, cobbled together from a wooden clothes locker and an electric “heating coil”? Surely, if a standard state-of-the-art drying cabinet proved unavailable for some reason, they could have afforded a custom-built one for the photo-processing area of their long-established and otherwise well-appointed offices at 2-4 Dean Street, in the film district of London’s Soho district.<\/p>\n

    \"Robert

    Robert Capa, D-Day frames from 6 June 1944. Courtesy Wikimedia Commons.<\/p><\/div>\n

    Next, I find it implausible that Morris would receive those precious, anxiously awaited, historic, irreplaceable four rolls of film by Capa (arguably the world’s highest-profile war photographer at that juncture, and one of just two LIFE<\/em> contract photographers going in with the first wave\u00a0of infantry) only to turn them over to a 15-year-old lab assistant for developing, when, according to Morris, “The darkroom staff \u2014 all five of them \u2014 had been standing by idly” for a day and a half.<\/p>\n

    Finally, are we to believe that, having just seen to the successful development of three full rolls of what he knows everyone considers the most important negatives of the battle, with John Morris howling for contact prints, Dennis Banks hangs them in the drying cabinet, closes the doors thereof to speed the drying \u2014 but, instead of hovering over them and checking on them minute by minute, does \u2026 what, exactly? Steps out for a smoke? Calls his girlfriend? Answers a prolonged call of nature? And the four other “idle” members of the darkroom staff have better things to do than keeping their eyes on these films?<\/p>\n

    God Said to Abraham, Kill Me a Son<\/strong><\/p>\n

    \"Richard

    Richard Whelan, “Robert Capa: A Biography” (1994), cover.<\/p><\/div>\n

    Worth noting that Dennis Banks conveniently disappears after D-Day. He’s not mentioned by name in any early account of the loss of Capa’s films, and a brief unsourced quote from Capa <\/a>magnanimously forgiving him appears apocryphal: “I would never have worked for\u00a0LIFE\u00a0<\/span>again if they had fired Dennis Banks for ruining my negatives.” (Intriguingly, Richard Whelan’s authorized biography<\/a> of Capa from 1994 gives his name as Dennis Sanders, but I don’t find that repeated\u00a0anywhere else.)<\/p>\n

    Indeed, scuttlebutt for years put the blame for the loss of Capa’s negatives on photojournalist Larry Burrows. Burrows, then 18, was indeed there that day; but most accounts, including Morris’s, have him as a “tea-boy” or\u00a0gofer, without any involvement with darkroom activities. (In the 2010 “Eleven Frames”<\/a> film Morris\u00a0exonerates Burrows explicitly, though his\u00a0June 6, 2011 France24 interview<\/a> puts Burrows\u00a0on the darkroom staff.) I’ll hazard a guess that Burrows’s age and presence in or around the lab led to the rumor of his involvement with the Capa fiasco during the years\u00a0when the story in circulation didn’t mention Banks by name, but only an unnamed teenager.<\/p>\n

    \""Behind

    * “Behind the Photo: Robert Capa’s D-Day” (2014), screenshot<\/p><\/div>\n

    The first mention I find of Banks as the culprit comes in\u00a0Morris’s memoir\u00a0Get the Picture: A Personal History of Photojournalism<\/em> (New York: Random House, 1998).\u00a0By the time that got published Banks had\u00a0long since vanished from all radar screens; Burrows, shot down over Laos, had died in 1971; and Hans Wild, the only other person who could corroborate Morris’s claim that three of Capa’s four rolls contained a full complement of\u00a0normal exposures, had died in 1969.<\/p>\n

    In short, no one alive can corroborate Morris’s account \u2014 or contradict it with direct eyewitness testimony. We have only that narrative, and the remaining fragments of physical evidence, and some verifiable facts to go on in confirming or disproving it. On that basis, let’s proceed.<\/p>\n

    \u2022<\/p>\n

    (For an index of links to all posts in this series,\u00a0click here<\/a>.)<\/p>\n

    [Note: Subsequent\u00a0research by Rob McElroy<\/a>\u00a0revealed that all supposed examples of Capa’s “damaged” D-Day negatives published in the May 29, 2014\u00a0<\/em>TIME\u00a0video, such as the ones above (*), were forgeries produced by Magnum in collusion with the International Center of Photography. While this renders irrelevant the above analysis of those frames, it does not\u00a0undermine\u00a0my\u00a0broader<\/em><\/em>\u00a0challenge to the “melted emulsion” narrative. \u2014 A. D. C.]<\/em><\/p>\n

    \u2022<\/p>\n

    John Morris will participate in\u00a0a conversation with Robert Pledge<\/a>, founder and director of Contact Press Images, at the\u00a0International Center of Photography on June 24, 2014. They’ll stream it, so you can\u00a0watch it\u00a0live online at\u00a0www.icp.org\/live<\/a>. Clicking on that link will enable you to submit a question in advance.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

    When the film gets processed in London, LIFE Picture Editor John Morris discovers, to his horror, that LIFE’s star photojournalist (and Morris’s close friend) blew his assignment, arguably the biggest story of the war to date. A major embarrassment for Capa, for Morris, for LIFE, for Time-Life, and for the profession for which Capa has become the poster boy. So Morris concocts a tale of botched processing by a kid, covering the asses of all concerned, and turning Capa’s 11 correct exposures into splinters from the true cross instead of the paltry results of a terrified bumbler. […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"nf_dc_page":"","footnotes":""},"categories":[788,15,945,946],"tags":[939,944,938,917,937,940],"class_list":["post-20745","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-analog-photography-2","category-news-commentary","category-photo-history","category-photojournalism-2","tag-d-day","tag-dennis-banks","tag-john-morris","tag-life-magazine","tag-robert-capa","tag-time-life","odd"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.nearbycafe.com\/artandphoto\/photocritic\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/20745","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.nearbycafe.com\/artandphoto\/photocritic\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.nearbycafe.com\/artandphoto\/photocritic\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.nearbycafe.com\/artandphoto\/photocritic\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.nearbycafe.com\/artandphoto\/photocritic\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=20745"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.nearbycafe.com\/artandphoto\/photocritic\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/20745\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.nearbycafe.com\/artandphoto\/photocritic\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=20745"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.nearbycafe.com\/artandphoto\/photocritic\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=20745"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.nearbycafe.com\/artandphoto\/photocritic\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=20745"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}