{"id":48186,"date":"2026-06-09T23:45:50","date_gmt":"2026-06-10T03:45:50","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.nearbycafe.com\/artandphoto\/photocritic\/?p=48186"},"modified":"2026-06-10T11:10:12","modified_gmt":"2026-06-10T15:10:12","slug":"alternate-history-timothy-floyd-saves-the-appearances-1b","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.nearbycafe.com\/artandphoto\/photocritic\/2026\/06\/09\/alternate-history-timothy-floyd-saves-the-appearances-1b\/","title":{"rendered":"Alternate History: Timothy Floyd Saves the Appearances (1b)"},"content":{"rendered":"

\"A.Floyd Post 24: “The Darkroom Myth” (continued)
\n<\/strong><\/p>\n

In my previous post<\/a> I took apart Timothy Floyd’s claim that the absence of hardeners in the emulsion of Robert Capa’s D-Day films somehow contributed to and explained the mythic “darkroom disaster” that Capa and LIFE<\/em> assistant picture editor John Morris claimed to have destroyed almost four rolls of Capa’s D-Day coverage.<\/p>\n

Floyd makes these assertions in two places: the website L’Oeil de la Photographie (The Eye of Photography)<\/em>, which on June 5, 2026 published an article Floyd wrote summarizing his research<\/a>, and Floyd’s blog at his own website, Aid and Comfort to the Enemy: A Surgeon\u2019s View of the War in Iraq, and Other Essays<\/a>. <\/em>To date, this blog consists entirely of a lengthy series of posts disputing the research and conclusions that we have presented in “Alternate History: Robert Capa on D-Day.” He titles his series “Robert Capa Focus Hocus-Pocus.”<\/a><\/p>\n

With the exception of the April 14, 2026 post he titles “The Darkroom Myth,”<\/a> all previous posts in Floyd’s series are now offline and inaccessible. The article at L’Oeil de la Photographie<\/em> appeared online with free access only through the D-Day weekend 2026; unfortunately, according to Floyd it is scheduled to sit behind a paywall. For those reasons, my response concentrates on the source that readers can easily and dependably access, Floyd’s April 14 blog post.<\/p>\n

\u2022<\/p>\n

\"Tristan

Tristan da Cunha, “Robert Capa and the mystery of the lost-photos” (2022), title screen (English)<\/p><\/div>\n

In my previous post I also detailed the flawed premises of tests Floyd conducted<\/a>, using present-day artisanal 35mm films coated with an emulsion whose non-Kodak recipe its maker resurrected from a 1925 formulary. Floyd desperately wants his readers to believe that his “small oven” test with this contemporary film somehow parallels, equates to, and disproves Tristan da Cunha’s rigorous and thoroughly documented tests<\/a> using a custom-built drying cabinet, electronic temperature monitoring, real-time video recording, and vintage rolls of unexposed Kodak 35mm Super-XX film dating from 1943-44 \u2014 the very same film make and type that Capa used on June 6, 1944, manufactured during the same time period.<\/p>\n

Based on these amateurish tests with their questionable premises and methodology, and parroting the Capa-Morris account, Floyd eventually proposes that his specious experiment somehow lends credibility to Morris’s version of events, asserting that “an inexperienced darkroom assistant took it upon himself to dry the wet film under hotter than usual temperatures under orders from John Morris to ‘rush, rush, rush<\/em>!’ because of a tight deadline.”<\/p>\n

Some correctives:<\/p>\n

\u2022 We have no evidence that any member of LIFE<\/em>‘s London darkroom staff was “inexperienced” \u2014 to the contrary, they all had been training for this very occasion for months, if not years. Insofar as darkroom know-how went, the most inexperienced person in this situation, by far, was John Morris himself, who admittedly knew nothing about processing film.<\/p>\n

\"John

John Morris, LIFE office, London, 1944. Photo: David Scherman.<\/p><\/div>\n

\u2022 We have no evidence that the darkroom’s makeshift film-drying cabinet \u2014 according to Morris, a repurposed wooden gym locker with a small electric heating coil on its bottom \u2014 could reach temperatures sufficient to damage film “in a matter of minutes.”<\/p>\n

\u2022 According to Morris, the darkroom assistant increased the heat in this cabinet dramatically and quickly by closing its doors, “which normally were kept open.” We do know that this film-drying cabinet, like every film-drying cabinet in every darkroom worldwide, was meant to be used with its doors firmly closed \u2014 because that’s the only reason to have a film-drying cabinet in the first place, as every photographer with darkroom experience can affirm.<\/p>\n

\u2022 The simple reason for this: Immediately after processing, the wet gelatin-based emulsion of b&w film is soft and sticky (even when treated with hardeners) until completely dry. That makes it extremely vulnerable to physical damage such as accidental scratches and fingerprints, which will show up on positive prints from such negatives as gray or black marks. Wet\/damp emulsion is also vulnerable to particulate matter (dust, for example) in the air, which can adhere to the emulsion surface. If it does, then once the film dries that embedded material will show up as a distracting white spot on any and all prints made from the negative. Removing those spots from prints involves tedious, time-consuming handwork.<\/p>\n

\"John

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

\u2022 Darkrooms have film-drying cabinets \u2014 and film-drying cabinets have doors \u2014 to minimize such damage, thereby saving time, labor, and expense. It should go without saying that film-drying cabinets work most effectively toward that end when one closes their doors. The probability, then, that the doors of the film-drying cabinet in LIFE<\/em>‘s London darkroom “were normally kept open” is slim to none. Ignorant as he was of basic darkroom procedures, John Morris didn’t know that when he constructed his version of the fable.<\/p>\n

\u2022 We can safely assume that the London darkroom of LIFE<\/em> magazine \u2014 the internationally recognized flagship of what was then known collectively as the “picture press” \u2014 included no equipment or setup that could by momentary inadvertence jeopardize and even destroy the films it processed.<\/p>\n

\u2022 We also know that there is no other instance on record in this period of notable films getting ruined by brief exposure to heat in drying cabinets.<\/p>\n

\u2022 Due to SHAEF censorship protocols, John Morris was not allowed into the LIFE<\/em> darkroom during the processing of the D-Day films \u2014 he had to wait in his office for the return of the censored results from SHAEF’s Ministry of Information headquarters. Thus he was in no position to directly order any darkroom worker to “rush, rush, rush<\/em>!'”<\/p>\n

\"Hans

Hans Wild, bio note, LIFE magazine, February 8, 1943.<\/p><\/div>\n

\u2022 Any such order to the darkroom assistants would have come from either LIFE<\/em> darkroom chief H. C. “Braddy” Bradshaw or his second-in-command that night, LIFE<\/em> staff photographer Hans Wild, who had preceded Bradshaw in that position. The odds are slim to none that a darkroom assistant working under their watchful eyes would have “[taken] it upon himself” to override his superiors’ established protocols and drastically increase the heat level in the film-drying cabinet unannounced \u2014 and would have had the opportunity to do so unobserved and uncorrected.<\/p>\n

\u2022 Such an order to expedite the processing would have been unnecessary in any case, since the entire darkroom staff \u2014 keenly aware of the imminent deadline and the urgency of the situation \u2014 was operating at top speed and top efficiency, as they had rehearsed many times.<\/p>\n

\"John

John Loengard, Cornell Capa’s hands with Robert Capa D-Day negatives (1993), screenshot<\/p><\/div>\n

\u2022 Floyd, himself an experienced photographer, somehow neglects to mention that, in processing roll film, the film is usually fed onto the developing reel starting with the first exposure. When removed from the reel after processing, it then comes off starting with the last exposure, and is therefore normally hung up to dry with a clip attached to the film’s end, not its beginning. That places the last exposures on the roll near the top of the film-drying cabinet.<\/p>\n

\u2022 Capa’s ten Easy Red negatives bear numbers from 29 through 38. Therefore they come at the end of that roll.<\/p>\n

\u2022 Heat rises. As a result, the temperature at the top of a heated cabinet is inevitably greater than the temperature lower down. This makes it implausible that, in a cabinet supposedly hot enough to turn the emulsions on four rolls of Capa’s film to “grey mud,” ten of Capa’s negatives positioned at the very top of that cabinet \u2014 its hottest point \u2014 escaped entirely undamaged.<\/p>\n

\u2022 True, sometimes film gets hung to dry with the first negative on the roll at the top, in which case Capa’s Easy Red exposures would be at the bottom of that vertical strip, thus closest to the heat source in that overheated cabinet. This also wouldn’t explain how those negatives remained intact, nor how they escaped getting smothered by “the emulsions [that] had melted and run down before the eyes of the London office,” as Capa described it.<\/p>\n

\"Kodak\u2022 As I confirmed in earlier posts<\/a>, the Capa Archives of the International Center of Photography hold other negatives from the four (or possibly five) rolls of Kodak 36-exposure 35mm Super-XX film that Capa sent to London for processing as part of his D-Day coverage. The frame numbers on those negatives range from low to high, which indicates that during drying they were positioned at a variety of levels within the same cabinet as the roll that held Capa’s Easy Red exposure. None of those negatives show any sign of heat damage.<\/p>\n

\u2022 Floyd also neglects to mention that LIFE<\/em> staff photographer David Scherman’s invasion films arrived at the same time as Capa’s, got processed along with Capa’s, and got dried \u2014 without incident \u2014 in the same drying cabinet.<\/p>\n

\u2022<\/p>\n

In sum, this is a variously evasive and duplicitous account of a slipshod experiment on Floyd’s part, laughably inept in comparison with the strictly controlled tests conducted by Tristan da Cunha<\/a>, whose protocols and documentation Floyd’s effort doesn’t come close to matching. Da Cunha demonstrated that vintage 1943-44 Kodak Super-XX film will not experience emulsion melt after exposure to heat of 130\u00b0C (266\u00b0F) for 30 minutes. For all his flummery, Floyd’s test proves only that a completely different modern-day artisanal film, using a post-1951 film base (cellulose triacetate or polyester \u2014 Capa’s film had a cellulose diacetate base) and coated with an emulsion made according to a non-Kodak 1925 formula, will experience emulsion melt when exposed to heat of 120\u00b0F for two minutes. Apples and lemons.<\/p>\n

And if, as Floyd claims re da Cunha’s tests, “The results using antique film cannot be extrapolated to represent fresh film in 1944,” he automatically impeaches his own tests, since his results using fresh film made with a completely different “antique” emulsion formula dating from 1925 and coated on a different film base cannot logically be extrapolated to represent fresh film in 1944.<\/p>\n

Thus Floyd’s conclusion that his experiment successfully challenges da Cunha’s and thereby validates the implausible fable peddled by Capa and Morris has no basis in fact. From the standpoint of scholarship, Floyd’s work here ranks as embarrassing and disqualifying \u2014 a textbook example of ill-conceived, deceitful, and fatally flawed research, irrelevant to the issues at stake and with no probative value whatsoever.<\/p>\n

In a comment on the first part of this post, Floyd states, “My findings are an alternate history to your alternate history.” Yet it’s nothing remotely akin to a third version of the narrative. In fact, “doing his own research” has simply led Floyd to pledge allegiance to every single component of the original Capa D-Day myth, no matter how far-fetched.<\/p>\n

Why does Floyd do this? In a comment he added to part 1 of this post, Floyd says the quiet part out loud:<\/p>\n

… My purpose is not to venerate or vindicate Capa. Rather my goal is to address your accusations that three D-Day veterans independently lied to their families about their experience Omaha Beach early in the morning on D-Day. I don\u2019t believe they did and that is what drove me to initially reach out to you, to do my own research when your team failed to respond to my emails, and to make my findings public. …<\/em><\/p>\n

In other words, Floyd’s not looking for the truth. He’s on a crusade, intent on vindicating three Army vets whose honor he believes we have sullied by challenging the credibility of their recollections. Can you say “confirmation bias,” boys and girls? (To read his comment, click here for the post<\/a> and then scroll down to the bottom of the screen.)<\/p>\n

To repeat what I said earlier: Publishing easily disprovable material like Floyd’s \u2014 replete with claims that any experienced photographer or knowledgeable photo-historian immediately recognizes as spurious \u2014 without even rudimentary fact-checking does the reputation of the editorial staff of L’Oeil de la Photographie<\/em> no service.<\/p>\n

\u2022<\/p>\n

There is, nonetheless, a useful nugget of informational gold unintentionally buried in this pile of misdirection and falsification from Floyd:<\/p>\n

… I learned that [Capa’s] fellow LIFE photographer George Rodger had trouble with his emulsion melting when he developed film in Baghdad, where the ambient temperature reached 130-degrees and he could not cool his water below 100-degrees. In his book, <\/em>Desert Journey, Rodger said he added chrome alum to his solutions as a hardener to prevent the emulsion from melting off while in the warm solutions. …<\/em><\/p>\n

Robert Capa and George Rodger knew each other well. Well enough that Capa’s nickname for him was “Old Goat,” a reference to Rodger’s body odor when they first met in Naples, Italy. (Rodger claimed he hadn’t had a chance to bathe for three weeks.) Certainly well enough that Capa brought Rodger in as the fourth “co-founder” of Magnum in 1947.<\/p>\n

\"Life

Life magazine, D-Day photographers, 6-26-44, p. 13 (detail). Photo by Herbert Bregstein.<\/p><\/div>\n

\u2022<\/p>\n

\"\"

George Rodger, Desert Journey (1944), cover<\/p><\/div>\n

Rodger’s memoir was published in \u200e London by The Cresset Press in January 1944. No doubt he recounted his experiences in the Middle East conversationally with his friends and colleagues in London, and then shared copies of his book with them when it came out. So, certainly, Capa would have read therein and\/or heard, straight from the horse’s mouth, the story of Rodger’s emulsion melting off its acetate backing in overheated water in Iran. An anecdote with gripping potential as a visual image. Which, like so many other bits and pieces, Capa with his magpie sensibility felt free to appropriate and embellish in spinning his own subsequent yarn.<\/p>\n

I’d read the Rodger anecdote along the way, but never put it together with Capa’s D-Day myth until Floyd incorporated it into his hypothesis. So I thank him for inadvertently bringing this possible source for Capa’s self-mythification to my attention.<\/p>\n

\u2022<\/p>\n

In connection with this, I recall too that a post of mine from December 2014<\/a>, published shortly after this investigation began, included the following:<\/p>\n

… In a chapter on Capa in a book for young people, … Extra! U.S. War Correspondents in Action<\/em> (Plainview, NY: Books for Libraries Press, 1945), John McNamara wrote:<\/p>\n

“[Capa] had taken nearly a hundred pictures of the desperate fighting on the beaches, most of them during the first terrible hour of the battle, when he was virtually the only photographer on the scene. But only seven of them were ever reproduced. The man in the darkroom in London, by using, in his haste, developing fluids of improper temperature, had ruined all the rest. A darkroom man can often make or break a photographer, and in this case he nearly broke Capa.” (P. 213. McNamara credits Cornell Capa as his source, indicating that Cornell took a lead role in the cover-up early on.)<\/em><\/p>\n

\"John

John McNamara, “Extra!” (1945), cover<\/p><\/div>\n

“[D]eveloping fluids of improper temperature”? That has a familiar ring to it \u2014 traceable directly to George Rodger’s book. Clearly, Robert and Cornell were trying various options for the darkroom disaster on for size at the outset of their myth-making, before Robert eventually settled on the overheated drying-cabinet version for his 1947 memoir.<\/p>\n

Presumably he chose that for its visual potency: “[T]he excited darkroom assistant, while drying the negatives, had turned on too much heat and the emulsions had melted and run down before the eyes of the London office,” as he puts it in Slightly Out of Focus<\/em>, has more cinematic oomph than the George Rodger overheated-water alternative, which offers only a boom-camera overhead view of a developing tank full of emulsion sludge. A less than exciting closing shot for this key scene in the yet-unwritten memoir Capa already had his literary agent shopping<\/a>, intended as a treatment for a Hollywood movie based on his WWII adventures, both real and imagined.<\/p>\n

(Part 1<\/a> I 2)<\/p>\n

\u2022<\/p>\n

This post sponsored by a donation from photographer Mark Minard<\/a>.<\/p>\n

\u2022<\/p>\n

\"Allan<\/p>\n

Special offer:<\/strong> If you want me to either continue pursuing a particular subject or give you a break and (for one post) write on a topic \u2014 my choice \u2014 other than the current main story, make a donation of $50 via the PayPal widget below<\/strong>, indicating your preference in a note accompanying your donation. I’ll credit you as that new post’s sponsor, and link to a website of your choosing.<\/p>\n

And, as a bonus, I’ll send you a signed copy of my new book, poetic license \/ poetic justice<\/em> \u2014 published under my full name, Allan Douglass Coleman, which I use for my creative writing.<\/p>\n

[donateplus]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

This is a variously evasive and duplicitous account of a slipshod experiment on Timothy Floyd\u2019s part, laughably inept in comparison with the strictly controlled tests conducted by Tristan da Cunha, whose protocols and documentation Floyd\u2019s effort doesn\u2019t come close to matching. […]<\/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":[788,945,946],"tags":[999,1461,1378,1382,1018,938,1784],"class_list":["post-48186","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-analog-photography-2","category-photo-history","category-photojournalism-2","tag-cornell-capa","tag-george-rodger","tag-h-c-braddy-bradshaw","tag-hans-wild","tag-john-mcnamara","tag-john-morris","tag-slightly-out-of-focus","odd"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.nearbycafe.com\/artandphoto\/photocritic\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/48186","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=48186"}],"version-history":[{"count":41,"href":"https:\/\/www.nearbycafe.com\/artandphoto\/photocritic\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/48186\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":48290,"href":"https:\/\/www.nearbycafe.com\/artandphoto\/photocritic\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/48186\/revisions\/48290"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.nearbycafe.com\/artandphoto\/photocritic\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=48186"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.nearbycafe.com\/artandphoto\/photocritic\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=48186"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.nearbycafe.com\/artandphoto\/photocritic\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=48186"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}