Capa Enters the Public Domain

Here’s a good reason to celebrate, on this date, the 81st anniversary of D-Day and the eleventh anniversary of this Capa D-Day research project:

January 1 of any given year, including this one, is Public Domain Day. On that date, the copyright of many works of art automatically expires. They thereby enter the public domain, which means that they become freely available for reuse for any purpose by anyone. In 2025, for the United States, this release includes works published in 1929, as well as creations by artists who passed away in 1954 for all countries with a copyright term of “life plus 70 years” (which also applies to the U.S.).

Robert Capa numbers among the visual artists and writers who died in 1954. Consequently, all of his formerly copyrighted images, as well as any texts by him (including his heavily fictionalized memoir, Slightly Out of Focus), have become free for all to reproduce, republish, quote from extensively, and otherwise repurpose.

As a lifelong content producer myself. I don’t consider it contradictory on my part to support both the protection of content creators afforded by the copyright law and the public interest served by the statutory expiration thereof. So I tip my hat respectfully to a system that works as its should, to the benefit of all.

•

Fruits of Our Labors: Charles Herrick’s New Book

More cause for celebration: Charles Herrick, who has provided most of the military-related analysis published here as part of the Capa D-Day project, has pulled together that material and distilled it into a new book, Back into Focus: The Real Story of Robert Capa’s D-Day. (London and New York: Casemate Publishers, 2024, $39.95). You’ll find information about it — including a link to Amazon for purchasing copies — at Herrick’s new website.

Full disclosure: Following an email exchange over some of our early posts in this series, I invited Herrick to join our Capa D-Day investigative team. I line-edited and copy-edited all of his subsequent posts, which involved asking questions about unresolved issues and making some editorial suggestions. In several cases, we collaborated on the research itself, as Herrick acknowledges in his text. And, of course, starting exactly ten years ago I began to publish what was in effect an early draft of this book.

The contents of the book, much of which Herrick has derived from those posts, necessarily reflect some of our editorial work and joint research. However, beyond that I had no hand in the editorial production of this book.

I also provided the following statement for its back jacket:

No military historian has ever subjected a set of war photographs to a forensic analysis comparable to what Charles Herrick achieves in Back into Focus. He brings to the project a combat veteran’s experience, a dedicated researcher’s commitment to excavating the truth, an ability to navigate military archives and decipher military documents, and the writing skills necessary to make all that he has uncovered accessible and fascinating to even a lay reader. Nothing like this exists in the literature of photography, photojournalism, or military history; it sets a very high bar.

So I’m not an impartial or neutral reviewer of this book. On the contrary. At the same time, I’ve probably spent more time poring over this material than anyone save its author, which gives me a unique perspective on the book version.

•

Speaking as a scholar whose research intertwines with Herrick’s, I consider this book an invaluable contribution. First and foremost, it gives coherent shape to research that, due to the nature of our team’s online journal of its investigation, appears in discrete installments, interspersed with posts by others concerned with different aspects of the Capa D-Day myth. Second, it organizes its analysis chronologically, tracking Capa and his films step by step as he and his output move to and through D-Day and beyond. Third, it distills and improves on the earlier versions, adding new information and insights to what the original blog posts offered.

Having all that material available in one print publication makes it a ready reference point, not just for myself but for any future scholar, in any discipline, addressing Capa’s output during World War II. Its deep dive into the military archives exceeds by far any previous inquiry, including the biographies by Richard Whelan and Alex Kershaw. Herrick’s results inevitably involve some most-likely-case speculations, but he always supports these with extensive documentation, clearly distinguishing between educated guesses and firm conclusions.

Herrick joining our team freed me from the obligation to navigate the military archives and attempt to decipher documents for whose interpretation I have no qualifications whatsoever. My own book project, a work in progress, emphasizes the seeding and proliferation of the Capa D-Day myth up through the present day. Herrick’s book stands on its own, but will serve as a companion piece to mine; now I can simply synopsize his findings and refer my readers to his work for further details.

•

With that said, I disagree with a few aspects of Back into Focus. My main quarrels:

• Starting with his introduction, Herrick refers to John Morris as Capa’s “boss.” As I’ve made clear, LIFE‘s masthead gives Morris’s position as “assistant picture editor,” specifically in lower-case letters when all other masthead positions are capitalized, to emphasize his subservient position. Morris had not hired any of the LIFE photographers, had not trained any of them, and had no authority to fire or discipline any of them. Same goes for the London darkroom staff. He had no say over any of their assignments, including their disposition for the invasion. He did no actual picture editing on any LIFE story during his wartime European stay. His job involved typing up caption notes, assembling sets of the photographers’ prints for the photo pool and LIFE‘s New York office, obtaining the censors’ final approval of those batches, and getting those shipments to the designated courier on time. He did not hold the position of captain of what he referred to in his memoir as “my team”; rather, he served them as something closer to bat boy or (in British terms) kit man. Identifying him as having any leadership role in LIFE‘s London office grossly exaggerates his place in the magazine’s hierarchy and its D-Day project.

• Based on the half-dozen 4×5″ negatives in Capa’s pre-D-Day invasion coverage, Herrick proposes that this photojournalist owned a Speed Graphic camera, brought it along as part of his kit for the D-Day assignment, used it during the channel crossing aboard the USS Samuel Chase, left it behind for the landing on Omaha Beach — and then, implicitly, took it back to England with him and, starting immediately thereafter, shlepped it through France for a month without ever using it again up through the end of the war. No other 4×5 negatives appear in Capa’s 1944 output either before or after his D-Day assigment. Yet for reasons unexplained, Herrick eschews the Occam’s Razor alternative: that Capa borrowed a Speed Graphic for a few minutes from one of the other press and/or Signal Corps photographers aboard the Chase, and mooched a pack of 4×5″ film from same. (This chapter of the book, “Camera Confusion,” would benefit greatly from a simple explanation of why photojournalists of the period carried cameras of different formats, their advantages and disadvantages in various photo situations, editorial preferences re negative sizes, etc.)

• In a cursory chapter toward the end in which Herrick sketches the evolution of the Capa D-Day myth, he proposes that it did not effectively take root in public consciousness until the 1985 publication of Richard Whelan’s official biography of Capa. As I’ve demonstrated at length, the myth first circulated widely starting in 1960 as part of a nationally and internationally touring exhibition and a concurrent monograph. From then on it got repeated endlessly in many languages in exhibition wall labels and catalogs, monographs and histories of photography, films and videos and TV interviews, newspaper and magazine articles, and other forms. By the time Whelan’s biography appeared it had already become fixed in the public mind.

•

The book also has a few shortcomings, perhaps rectifiable in a second edition:

• While it includes most of Herrick’s contributions to our online series, it omits several that I consider extremely important. Those include his deconstruction of the various individual claims of being “The Face in the Surf”; his critiques of various claims to have seen Capa on Omaha Beach; his examination of the myth of a bag of still and movie films lost when dropped into the ocean by a clumsy courier; and his analysis of LIFE staffer Bob Landry’s role in the press pool’s D-Day coverage. All of these pertain directly to the Capa D-Day myth, and I think merit preservation in print — even as small-type appendices to this book.

• The book’s illustrations, in single-run halftone on uncoated stock, sometimes appear murky — so much so that one has to take on faith what the accompanying texts and captions assert they show. Perhaps a folio reproducing them larger, printed on coated stock, would make them more useful as evidence.

• An index, even a minimal one (just names and places and vessel IDs) would help researchers navigate the text.

•

These constitute minor cavils. They pale by comparison with what Herrick has achieved here. For me, its most provocative new idea comes in the form of a suggestion that the claim of a “darkroom accident” destroying his films, introduced into Capa’s account just a few months after D-Day, may have originated as a coded way of referring to the SHAEF Ministry of Information’s rigorous censorship system, any public mention of which was forbidden.

While I recommend Back into Focus highly, I should add that, for anyone who has followed our investigation from the beginning, it primarily covers familiar ground. On the other hand, if for any reason you’ve held off digging into the specifics of Capa’s trip to and from Omaha Beach, and/or want to go through it from start to finish, you couldn’t ask for a better guide than Herrick.

•

Capa’s D-Day Meets AI

If you don’t care to immerse yourself in carefully researched, closely reasoned, fact-based history, perhaps you’d enjoy something completely different.

Phillip Toledano, a British photographer and conceptual artist living and working in New York City, has put together a package based on images envisioning Capa’s supposedly “lost” D-Day photos, generated by artificial intelligence. (Inevitable, I suppose; should have seen it coming.)

Toledano’s contributions to our cultural understanding of the significance of D-Day and Capa’s role therein come as components of a multi-part set titled We Are At War, whose publisher describes itself thus:

“L’Artiere Edizioni is a young publishing house specialised in photography books characterised by the high quality of its products. The publishing house was founded in 2013 from an idea by Gianluca and Gianmarco Gamberini.”

The product includes a 20-page simulated newspaper special, a contact sheet, a V-mail letter, and a 21 x 29 cm box — duotone printing, published in English, in a first edition of 750 copies. Priced at 55 euros (USD $63).

•

Why Toledano’s fictitious newspaper would run a scare headline proclaiming that “WE ARE AT WAR” two and a half years after the U.S. entered WWII goes unexplained. Instead, we get prose like this:

The very existence of AI has rendered both history and facts infinitely elastic. Simultaneously, everything is true, and nothing is true.

We are at a cultural turning point – our relationship with the image, and the idea of image as truth – has fundamentally changed.

What better way to illustrate this than by convincingly reinventing one of the most significant moments of our own near history ?

June 6th, 1944. D day.

Amongst the thousands of soldiers landing that day were  photographers. To name a few: The Army Film and Photographic Unit, covering the landings at sword, Juno and gold beaches. Richard Taylor, a sergeant in the US signal corps who filmed the assault. And at Omaha beach, the photographer Robert Capa.

Capa shot approximately 4 rolls of film, and sent them to London to be developed, but due to a lab mishap, only 11 images survived.

Capa created an empty pocket of history – a pocket that can be filled with ai – what images might have been on those lost rolls of film ?

‘We are at war’ is part of my continued exploration of historical surrealism – working with ai, I imagine one of capa’s lost roll of 36 images – and in doing so, demonstrate how utterly convincing invented history can be.

If we can rewrite the past, imagine what we can do with the present. — Phillip Toledano

•

•

Did you know that a warplane crashed on Easy Red during Capa’s short time there? No one did. In all the excitement, Capa forgot to mention it. But that’s “historical surrealism” for you. And who can resist a good plane crash on a battlefield? As Toledano says, “If we can rewrite the past, imagine what we can do with the present.”

My comment posted at Toledano’s Instagram page:

Amusingly, the very premise of Mr. Toledano’s project is itself a fiction, though clearly he’s unaware of that fact. He writes, “… at Omaha beach, the photographer Robert capa. Capa shot approximately 4 rolls of film, and sent them to London to be developed, but due to a lab mishap, only 11 images survived.” Not a word of that is true, as those of us involved in the Capa D-Day Project have demonstrated and documented over the past ten years.

Interestingly, the AI-generated images don’t look stylistically much like Capa’s images. In fact, they appear more like panels from a graphic novel. Makes me wonder what AI scraped on its own, or what Toledano prompted it to scrape, to generate these simulacra.

Even had a darkroom accident actually ruined almost four rolls of Capa’s film, this strikes me as an exceedingly thin “concept.” If it seeks to make the point that Capa’s purported lost rolls of film would have contained only generic images of combat, that hardly seems worth the effort. The preceding sentence would have sufficed for that purpose.

Toledano’s publisher notes,

“The project We Are at War was born and realized during Phillip Toledano’s residency in Deauville invited by the photography festival Planches Contact, in June 2024 and will be exhibited during the 15th edition of the festival, at the Le Franciscaines complex in Deauville from October 19th to January 5th.”

So generating the prototype of this product took Toledano a month. In my opinion, its elaborate production in finished form aspires to mask its ideational laziness. And does not succeed. Time flies, and I can’t spare more on imaginary versions of photographs that never existed in the first place, hawked by people who didn’t bother to do their basic research.

Click here to view all the images in the set. And click here for “Reimagining History with Artificial Intelligence: A Conversation with Phillip Toledano,” sponsored by The VII Foundation.

•

This post sponsored by a donation from Carlyle T.

•

Special offer: If you want me to either continue pursuing a particular subject or give you a break and (for one post) write on a topic — my choice — other than the current main story, make a donation of $50 via the PayPal widget below, 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.

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

Donation Amount:
(Currency: USD)