Alternate History: Robert Capa on D-Day (39)

I’m back. I’ll explain my three-month hiatus and play catch-up with my usual end-of-year posts over the next month or so. But, with the 75th anniversary of D-Day coming up on June 6, 2019, I’ve just realized that I’m likely to feel compelled to correct an endless stream of repetitions of the Capa D-Day myth, which has so permeated our culture that this investigation has barely begun to dislodge it. So I will kick off the new year with one of what will almost surely become a series of chastisements.

The Incorrigible Cynthia Young

The Girl Can’t Help It Dep’t: Cynthia Young, curator of the Robert Capa and Cornell Capa Archive at the International Center of Photography in New York, recently published a short article titled “Les deux icônes de Capa” (Capa’s two iconic photos) in an October 2018 special supplement to the French newspaper Le Monde, titled 50 images qui ont marqué l’histoire (50 images that have marked history). The images in question are Capa’s Spanish Civil War “Falling Soldier” from 1937 and “The Face in the Surf” from his 1944 D-Day reportage.

After repeating — and thereby endorsing — the myth of Capa’s having caught this Loyalist militiaman at the moment of his death, Young briefly acknowledges the existence of contrary opinions based on research of a kind she herself has never conducted. Here’s what she concludes about “Falling Soldier”:

“Les autres images de cette journée s’ajoutant au récit de ce qui s’est passé avant ou après la prise de cette photographie ont permis à un chercheur espagnol de localiser la colline près du village andalou d’Espejo, en 2009. Mais le scénario exact n’a jamais été clair, et ne le sera sans doute jamais.”

(“The other images [Capa] made that day, in addition to the story of what happened before and after the taking of this photograph, allowed a Spanish researcher to locate the hill near the Andalusian village of Espejo, in 2009. But the exact scenario has never been clear, and will probably never be.” My translation.)

Cynthia Young, “Morning Joe,” MSNBC, 6-13-14, screenshot

This conveniently ignores entirely the subsequent published research of the unnamed “Spanish researcher,” José Manuel Susperregui, Associate Professor, Audiovisual Communication and Advertising Department, University of the Basque Country, Spain. Susperregui’s 2016 update of his research, “The location of Robert Capa’s Falling Soldier” (available online at the website of the journal Communication & Society, and thus readily accessible by Young), not only identifies the exact location at which Capa made this image and the others from that same day but also proves that Capa staged all the imaged in this series, and that none of the participants in these theatrics died from enemy fire during that process.

In point of fact, therefore, Young notwithstanding, the “Falling Soldier” scenario has become reasonably clear.

Cynthia Young, “Les deux icônes de Capa,” Le Monde Hors-Série, 50 images qui ont marqué l’histoire, October 2018, pp. 78-79

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Concerning the Omaha beach exposure, Young writes:

“Capa, entouré d’explosions de bombes et de rafales de mitrailleuses, a pris des clichés dans l’eau pendant un court instant. … Il s’attendait à ce que ses pellicules aient été endommagées par l’eau – il était accroupi dans la mer, troublée et agitée, teintée de sang. Quelques semaines plus tard, il a appris que toutes les images, sauf dix, avaient été détruites dans la chambre noire ou pendant la prise de vue.”

(“Capa, surrounded by explosions of bombs and bursts of machine guns, took photos in the water for a short while. … He expected his films to have been damaged by the water — he was squatting in the sea, troubled and agitated, tinged with blood. A few weeks later, he learned that all but ten images had been destroyed in the darkroom or during the shooting.” My translation.)

As our research has demonstrated, Capa landed at Colleville-sur-mer, a relatively lightly defended sector of the beach where enemy fire proved ineffective. No “bombs” were dropping there, since the Germans had no available aircraft with the capacity to bomb the invading troops. Young has at best a shaky grasp of military matters; perhaps she means shells from German cannon. But Capa’s images show no shell explosions, nor any bullet splashes. (Indeed, the absence of strong German resistance at this precise spot enabled the 1st Division troops to break through to the bluffs a short time after Capa left the beach.)

Capa detail: CS frame 1, neg. 29 – Robert Capa at Omaha Beach on D-Day, 6 June 1944.

Capa’s images also make it clear that the water level where he landed was only knee-high, as we see in his very first frame, shot from the front of the Higgins boat that brought him to Easy Red, the troops with whom he arrived just a few yards ahead of him. No evidence in any of the ten exposures he made there images indicates that the water there was “tinged with blood,” nor that Capa was ever “squatting in the sea”; all of his Easy Red pictures appear to have been made from the eye level of a standing man.

Le Monde Hors-Série, 50 images qui ont marqué l’histoire, October 2018, cover

As a result, Capa would have had no reason to “expect his films to have been damaged by the water.” He carried a waterproof oilskin pouch to protect both his supply of unexposed film and his finished rolls of exposed film. His cameras never got wet; we know this because, upon reaching the English coast the next day and turning his D-Day films over to a courier, he returned immediately to Normandy and resumed his coverage of the invasion, using the same cameras with which he’d arrived — an impossibility had they gotten drenched with salt water.

Finally, of course, our research has proven that Young’s claim that “A few weeks later, [Capa] learned that all but ten images had been destroyed in the darkroom or during the shooting” constitutes an outright lie. No such “destruction” of Capa’s films occurred in either situation. Even John Morris, assistant picture editor in Life’s London bureau during the invasion and one of the primary promulgators of the darkroom-disaster myth, confessed at the end of his life that he never saw any damaged films, and that Capa’s ten Easy Red exposures are probably the only exposures he made on the beach that day.

It’s worth noting, for the record, that when our project went viral in France in the summer of 2015 the French media conglomerate La Vie-Le Monde Group attacked our project not once but twice: first via one of its most popular magazines, Télérama, and then in its major publication, the newspaper Le Monde. That followed an earlier Télérama profile of John Morris in which Arts Editor Yasmine Youssi encouraged him to repeat the myth yet again. No surprise, then, that they would endorse Young’s elaborately filigreed version of the fable even now. (Plus ça change, plus c’est la même chose.)

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Cynthia Young has a bad habit that’s fatal to credible scholarship: By dint of her position as the de facto world’s foremost Capa authority, she considers herself entitled to simply make up shit like this — not just ignoring contrary evidence and doubling down on the myth but actually adding spurious details to it, as did her predecessor in that role, the late Richard Whelan. The present instance is not the first time I have called her out for that lamentable tendency. She needs to stop making shit up; and, if she doesn’t do that voluntarily, then her boss at ICP, Mark Lubell, needs to put a stop to it.

The corruption of Capa scholarship that permeates everything Capa-related that ICP touches, from that institution’s origins till today, does serious and perhaps permanent damage to its reputation. And that’s really, really bad for the brand — a fact that Lubell, with his expertise in marketing, must surely understand. (Before he got into the photo-specific end of the arts-management game, he handled the promotion of Greg Norman golf videos)

(Thanks to Patrick Peccatte for bringing this article by Young to my attention.)

Liar’s Club

Prepping materials for the world premiere of the Capa show in St. Louis last fall, about which I’ll write sometime soon, I came across this from Celebrating the Negative, by John Loengard (New York: Arcade Publishing, 1994). The book includes Loengard’s photograph of Cornell Capa’s hands above a lightbox displaying Robert Capa’s eight surviving D-Day negatives.

John Loengard on Capa’s D-Day negatives, L’oeil de la photographie, screenshot

From Loengard’s accompanying text (p. 42):

“… When Capa film from D-day’s [sic] bloodiest shore reached London the next evening, Hans Wild (like Capa, a Life photographer) saw the negatives fresh from the hypo. He told John Morris, Life’s London picture editor, that Capa’s were the ‘best pictures of the invasion.'” [Ridiculous on the face of it, since at that point Wild could not have seen any other invasion images with which to compare them in order to make such a judgment. — A.D.C.]

 “… Pressured by the picture editor to dry the film quickly and make contact prints for the press pool, the [darkroom assistant] had closed the door of the negative drying cabinet, sending the heat inside so high that the emulsion on Capa’s film melted. ‘I held the film in my hand, and it [the emulsion] just ran … like pea soup,’ says Morris, who still feels somehow responsible.” [More nonsense; like Cornell Capa, Loengard, himself an experienced photographer, surely knows that b&w film emulsion doesn’t melt in drying cabinets, whose doors are always closed when holding wet film. — A.D.C.]

John Loengard, Celebrating the Negative (1994), cover

So here you have two renowned photojournalists with extensive hands-on experience with black & white film processing shamelessly colluding on a fabulation that any professional photographer should dismiss out of hand. This tells us all we need to know about their integrity and commitment to truth.

Most importantly, though, this is the only currently known instance of Morris recounting this fable in which Morris actually asserts that he physically held the damaged film as the emulsion dripped off it. In later versions, including an email q&a published at this blog, he would claim that he never actually laid eyes on the supposedly damaged film, but simply believed what the assistant purportedly told him.

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Finally, for a bit of comic relief: “British Design for D-Day Stamp Gets Address Wrong by 8,000 Miles,” by Palko Karasz, New York Times, Dec. 29, 2018.

British stamp intended to commemorate 75th anniversary of D-Day landing instead shows U.S. troops in Dutch New Guinea

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(For an index of links to all posts in this series, click here.)

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