{"id":20914,"date":"2014-06-12T23:56:26","date_gmt":"2014-06-13T03:56:26","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.nearbycafe.com\/artandphoto\/photocritic\/?p=20914"},"modified":"2014-06-28T10:29:43","modified_gmt":"2014-06-28T14:29:43","slug":"alternate-history-robert-capa-on-d-day-2","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.nearbycafe.com\/artandphoto\/photocritic\/2014\/06\/12\/alternate-history-robert-capa-on-d-day-2\/","title":{"rendered":"Alternate History: Robert Capa on D-Day (2)"},"content":{"rendered":"

\"A.<\/p>\n

Seconding That Emulsion<\/strong><\/p>\n

As Ross Baughman argued in his Guest Post<\/a> here, and as I began to elaborate in my own extension of Baughman’s inquiry<\/a>, the story that former LIFE<\/i>\u00a0picture editor John Morris has told for 70 years\u00a0about the ruining of Robert Capa’s D-Day negatives<\/a> by an overzealous teenage darkroom assistant who mistakenly closed the doors of\u00a0a heated, unventilated film-drying cabinet begins to fall apart as soon as one examines the remaining physical evidence and pays attention to the physics and chemistry involved.<\/p>\n

It mortifies me to admit that I accepted this fable uncritically for almost half a century. In my defense, I’ve never worked as a photographer, though I have some darkroom experience and some understanding of cameras and films. So it astonishes me that no one with expertise in photography has challenged this myth until now. Consider my posting of Baughman’s essay, and these comments of mine, as penance.<\/p>\n

Just the Facts, Ma’am<\/strong><\/p>\n

Since\u00a0the surviving exposures were made while Capa was still aboard the landing craft\u00a0that brought him to the battlefield, then while he made his way to shore, and then from the shore looking seaward, I would tend to\u00a0assume that they came at the beginning of a roll, though Capa indicates that the last of them came at the end of a roll.\u00a0One way or another, they\u00a0would have hung at either the top or the bottom of the cabinet when put there to dry after development.<\/p>\n

\""Behind

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

Viewing the samples of the purportedly heat-damaged films that appear in the short video “Behind the Photo: Robert Capa’s D-Day,”<\/a>\u00a0the first time I’ve had the opportunity to see them, I can’t help but notice that there’s emulsion distributed evenly in the rectangles where the exposed image would normally appear \u2014 apparently undamaged emulsion, albeit uniformly overexposed, with no trace of any image anywhere. At the same time, there’s no emulsion between those rectangles, and no emulsion between the borders of the image areas and the outer edges of the film strip with\u00a0the socket holes.<\/p>\n

Emulsion simply doesn’t melt and run that selectively on hanging strips of film. If it actually melted, it would appear thinner in some areas, thicker in others, and, like warm Jell-O, would ooze indiscriminately right over the previously cleared gaps between exposures and the areas at the edges of the film strips. Some fragments of dissolved imagery, even if grossly distorted, would appear therein. As Baughman points out<\/a>, this looks not like heat-damaged emulsion but like film subjected to severe overexposure while in the camera, due to some faulty setting or jamming of the shutter and\/or shutter release.<\/p>\n

So, contrary to Morris’s narrative, these “damaged” frames actually show us samples of film that has received proper development, fixing, and drying. They\u00a0also appear to have suffered drastic in-camera overexposure. If they typify the three rolls that held Capa’s estimated 106 exposures from Omaha Beach, then all but the “Magnificent Eleven” frames arrived at LIFE<\/em>‘s London offices irreversibly overexposed (by Capa himself) in their pupal or latent-image\u00a0stage.<\/p>\n

The fact that Capa returned to Normandy from England early the next\u00a0day with the same two Contax II cameras, continuing to use them daily\u00a0for the next month as he followed the Allies through France, indicates that camera malfunction or equipment failure played no part in the overexposure of his Omaha Beach negatives. This was a case of operator error, plain and simple.<\/p>\n

I’ll Stop the World and Melt with You<\/strong><\/p>\n

\"icp_logo\"“The Story Behind Robert Capa\u2019s Pictures of D-Day,”<\/a>\u00a0the brief 2013 retelling of Morris\u2019s version\u00a0by Cynthia Young, Curator of the Capa Archives at the International Center of Photography in New York,\u00a0seems intended in large part to explain away those contrary facts and deflect attention from the actual evidence. The 15-year-old darkroom assistant, Dennis Banks, Young\u00a0writes, “had put the 35mm negatives in the drying cabinet with the heat on high and closed the door. With no air circulating, the film emulsion had melted.” She continues,<\/p>\n

Although ten of the 35mm negatives were usable, the emulsion on them had melted just enough so that it slid a bit over the surface of the film. Consequently, sprocket holes \u2014 which would normally punctuate the unexposed margin of the film \u2014 cut into the lower portion of the images themselves. Ironically, the blurring of the surviving images may actually have strengthened their dramatic impact, for it imbues them with an almost tangible sense of urgency and explosive reverberation.<\/em><\/p>\n

\""Behind

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

But roll film gets hung to dry lengthwise \u2014 that is, with one end of the roll suspended from the top of the drying cabinet and the other end hanging weighted at the bottom. Young asks us us to believe that, in this situation, melting emulsion slid not directly downward, as gravity would have it, or even diagonally down, but horizontally\u00a0\u2014\u00a0neatly and exactly the same fraction of an inch sideways in every existing frame. Either Young\u00a0does not understand basic physics and the mechanics of the 35mm camera and film or she takes her readers for fools.<\/p>\n

As Ross Baughman points out<\/a>, the sprocket holes’ overlapping of the frames resulted not from Young’s fanciful post-development lateral “emulsion slide” but from Capa’s misloading of that 35mm film canister into his Contax \u2014 or, if indeed bulk-loaded, some minor misalignment of the unexposed film within the Contax cassette. (In an email to me, Baughman wrote, “I find it very odd that even the ruined pictures show the kind of edge notches that instruct the darkroom which pictures to print. I wonder why these disastrous exposures were even marked that way, but one possibility is that there is some faint shadow detail preserved on the negatives that we can’t see on a video of an old proof sheet, already less able to show everything we might detect from hand inspection.”<\/p>\n

Moreover, if Young’s proposed minimal shift of the emulsion happened on this one section of one roll while leaving the negative image largely intact, how does she explain the complete disappearance of the negative images on the remaining frames of that roll (as seen in the samples) and, presumably, on the other two\u00a0discarded rolls?<\/p>\n

\"Richard

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

If the emulsion didn\u2019t slide in the fashion Young imagines, then that movement\u00a0didn\u2019t “ironically” enhance these images by blurring them and thus “imbu[ing] them with an almost tangible sense of urgency and explosive reverberation.” Pretty to think so, as Hemingway (no slouch at irony) would say.<\/p>\n

Tellingly, Young plagiarized that last sentence<\/a> from page 214 of Richard Whelan\u2019s 1994 book Robert Capa: A Biography<\/em>. Copy-pasting it in immediately after the\u00a0sentence about “emulsion slide” without crediting its source deliberately implies a connection between the two. This apparently led “investigative journalist” Marie Brenner<\/a> to conflate them without fact-checking in\u00a0her hagiographic June 2014 paean<\/a> for\u00a0Vanity Fair<\/em>: “The blurring from the drying cabinet had imbued the images with seismic drama.”<\/p>\n

\"Cynthia<\/a>

Cynthia Young, “The Story Behind Robert Capa\u2019s Pictures of D-Day,” June 6, 2013, screenshot from ICP website 2014-06-12 at 11.38.23 AM.<\/p><\/div>\n

\"From<\/a>

From Richard Whelan, \u201cRobert Capa: A Biography\u201d (1994), p. 214.<\/p><\/div>\n

Young and Brenner need to take deep breaths, learn a little about photography, and keep Occam’s razor\u00a0in mind. The blurring happened during exposure, not after development.<\/p>\n

\"Cin\u00e9-Kodak

Cin\u00e9-Kodak Super-X film package<\/p><\/div>\n

Compare the 50 ASA speed rating of Capa\u2019s Cin\u00e9-Kodak Super-X to the 400 ASA rating of Kodak Tri-X<\/a> (not introduced by Kodak until 1954) or Kodak’s more recent 400 ASA T-Max<\/a> and we need no arcane\u00a0explanation for the blurriness of Capa\u2019s 11 exposures \u2014 made by a frightened man while standing in\u00a0a rocking boat, wading through\u00a0the surf toward the shore, or crouching wet and shivering on a chilly beach under bombardment at dawn on an overcast day. Even Kodak’s current T-Max 100<\/a>, billed as “The world’s finest-grained 100-speed black-and-white film,” is twice as fast as Super-X.<\/p>\n

(There\u2019s other nonsense in Young\u2019s story. For example, she asserts that Capa “remained photographing on the beach for about an hour and a half that morning until his film was used up.” You\u00a0can take this to the bank: Robert\u00a0Capa didn\u2019t go to Omaha Beach on D-Day with a mere four rolls of 36-exposure Super-X film. Capa stayed on Omaha Beach for only 30 minutes at most because he got scared and ran away. He had plenty of film left. According to his memoir, he reloaded both his Contax II 35mm cameras as soon as he got onto the evacuation boat.<\/em>)<\/p>\n

D-Day S’mores, Anyone?<\/strong><\/p>\n

The trouble with stories like this one of the magic melting emulsion is that they take on a life of their own.<\/p>\n

\"ImagingFor example, you’d think that a site intended mainly as an information source for photographers, such as\u00a0The Imaging Resource<\/a>, would bring some photographic savvy\u00a0and common sense to bear on such a legend. Instead, they go off the deep end with an elaboration of the received version of the emulsion tale:\u00a0“[A]n excited darkroom assistant, while drying the negatives had used on too much heat causing the film emulsion to melt before his eyes, running down the hanging strips before he could do anything,” Steve Meltzer wrote in a 68th anniversary story<\/a> on June 6, 2012. I’m surprised he didn’t have LIFE’<\/em>s\u00a0darkroom crew making D-Day S’mores with the stuff.<\/p>\n

To counterbalance this mindless, uninformed, misleading blather, some facts:<\/p>\n