{"id":32042,"date":"2016-06-22T23:45:44","date_gmt":"2016-06-23T03:45:44","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.nearbycafe.com\/artandphoto\/photocritic\/?p=32042"},"modified":"2017-07-10T10:36:50","modified_gmt":"2017-07-10T14:36:50","slug":"alternate-history-robert-capa-and-icp-2","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.nearbycafe.com\/artandphoto\/photocritic\/2016\/06\/22\/alternate-history-robert-capa-and-icp-2\/","title":{"rendered":"Alternate History: Robert Capa and ICP (2)"},"content":{"rendered":"

Testing the Waters
\n<\/strong><\/p>\n

\"ASMP<\/a>Some backstory.<\/p>\n

In 1955, Capa, along with Werner Bischof, received a Special Posthumous Award from the American Society of Magazine Photographers \u2014 the first such awards that ASMP had made. Capa had been an ASMP member, and his brother Cornell was one at that time. The inauguration of this category, which ASMP would use only three more times in the next six decades<\/a>, suggests special attention to Capa and Magnum.<\/p>\n

\"Overseas<\/a>That same year, the Overseas Press Club inaugurated the Robert Capa Gold Medal Award<\/a> for photojournalism, a signal honor for that specialty, sponsored by Time<\/em> magazine. It seems reasonable to assume that John Morris,\u00a0an OPC member, instigated this tribute, and that the Capa estate endorsed it.<\/p>\n

\"Robert<\/a>

Robert Capa medal, Overseas Press Club<\/p><\/div>\n

The first winner thereof was Howard Sochurek, for a LIFE<\/em> magazine story that came to him through Magnum Photos. Presumably no one intended the obvious ironies: Magnum’s chief architect and co-founder died in French Indochina (later Vietnam) while fulfilling a LIFE<\/em> assignment for Sochurek that Capa took over so that Sochurek could attend to a family crisis in the States. (Click here for a PDF file of the recipients through 2014<\/a>.)<\/p>\n

At that time no one had raised any questions about any of Capa’s work; the controversy over “Falling Soldier” wouldn’t start until the 1975 publication of Phillip Knightley’s book The First Casualty: The War Correspondent as Hero and Myth-Maker from the Crimea to Iraq<\/em>, and our investigation of the D-Day story didn’t begin until 2014. So OPC had no reason to suspect upon this award’s inception that anything in the future might conceivably taint it.<\/p>\n

The Show Must Go On
\n<\/strong><\/p>\n

Then, on February 3, 1960, a museum-scale 150-print traveling exhibition titled “Robert Capa: War Photographs” premiered at the TIME\/LIFE Reception Hall, 9 Rockefeller Plaza, in New York City. This first Capa retrospective toured under the auspices of the Smithsonian Institution Traveling Exhibition Service (SITES) in the U.S. and Canada. It came accompanied by a catalogue whose last page states, “This exhibition was produced by MAGNUM PHOTOS with the cooperation of LIFE magazine.”<\/p>\n

As I wrote in a previous post<\/a>,<\/p>\n

“At Capa’s invitation, Morris had become Magnum’s first executive director in January 1953. … Capa’s younger brother Cornell, comfortable until then in a staff position at <\/em>LIFE, left shortly after Robert\u2019s death to join Magnum, in part to help preserve his elder sibling’s archive and legacy. Cornell Capa became acting president of Magnum in 1957. Morris left in January 1962; thus he and Cornell Capa worked closely together for five years [including the period in which this exhibition took shape and got launched]. By then the Robert Capa legend, including the D-Day myth, had consolidated, becoming the meme that we have today.”<\/em><\/p>\n

With this project, the individuals and institutions that would compose the Capa Consortium came together, for the very first time, to collaborate on furthering the Capa myth. Even by today’s supersize-it standards, a 150-print show qualifies as hefty; for 1960, it must have seemed massive.<\/p>\n

\""Robert<\/a>

“Robert Capa: War Photographs,” catalog (1960), front cover<\/p><\/div>\n

A small 32-page saddle-stitched paperback pamphlet served as the catalogue for the domestic and overseas editions of this show. (For a PDF file see download links, below.) As a central component of ICP’s foundation myth, the legend of Capa’s actions on D-Day made its first formal estate-approved appearance in those pamphlets and on the three panels dedicated to his images of the invasion. (The brief text block in the catalogue, accompanying a reproduction of “The Face in the Surf,” consists of a two-paragraph excerpt from Capa’s Slightly Out of Focus<\/em> about the D-Day landing; it does not mention the fate of his negatives. However, the text blocks on the exhibition panel for his D-Day images may well have included the emulsion-melt fiction.)<\/p>\n

Unquestionably, Cornell Capa (as executor of Robert’s estate and president of Magnum) organized this show in collaboration with Magnum’s executive director, John Morris. Doing so would have made clear to Cornell the utility of an institutional infrastructure in furthering such projects.<\/p>\n

\"Robert<\/a>

Robert Capa, “Menschen im Krieg,” installation at Kunstgewerbemuseum Z\u00fcrich, 1961<\/p><\/div>\n

I have come across no reference to that show or its accompanying pamphlet (the latter by definition ephemeral) in the literature on Capa, making the combination the equivalent of a trial balloon. Details on how many visitors the show attracted, how many catalogs the Smithsonian printed and distributed, press response thereto, etc., have become scarce. (From the documentation, which indicates that 25 copies of the catalog came with each rental, I’d estimate a total press run of 2000-2500 copies for the catalog.)<\/p>\n

But, by any standards, it proved an overwhelming success. The show \u2014 comprising 159 photos mounted on 72 aluminum panels, with a rental fee ranging between $75 and $225, according to\u00a0Smithsonian records \u2014 toured in two sets through 1969, with stops at no fewer than 80 venues: museums, college and university galleries and student unions, high schools, banks, churches, public libraries, even county fairs. (Somewhere in late 1964 or early 1965 the show’s title changed to “Images of War: Robert Capa,” presumably to reflect and accommodate the 1964 publication of the monograph by that title.)<\/p>\n

\"Smithsonian<\/a>Tad Bennicoff, Archivist at the Smithsonian Institution Archives, located the materials I have cited in their files, for which effort I thank him. (I suspect I’m the only researcher ever to have sought them out.) With the permission of the Smithsonian, I’m posting them here as PDF files, for download by other researchers. Please observe the Smithsonian’s protocols for citation of these materials, use of them as illustrations, and publication of any of them in part or in whole. (Click here to contact Mr. Bennicoff with any questions about usage.<\/a>)<\/p>\n