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Guest Post 22: Doreen Landry Millichip on Bob Landry (a)

[My late husband Bob Landry made no published] comment … about the Normandy invasion. He did tell me that his film had been lost through the incompetence of a guy in the London office who was supposed to make secure arrangements for its delivery to London. [This would have been John Morris, then assistant picture editor in LIFE’s London darkroom. — A. D. C.] […]

Alternate History: Robert Capa and Magnum (3)

From the evidence we can draw a clear conclusion: Partners in the Capa Consortium, including Magnum’s members and its administrators, do not scruple to contaminate the record with misinformation, outright lies, falsified “evidence,” and whatever fanciful elaborations they feel like making up concerning Robert Capa’s D-Day experiences and the subsequent fate of his negatives. […]

Alternate History: Robert Capa and Magnum (2)

Staking Out the Claim

In his unauthorized, workmanlike 2003 biography Blood and Champagne: The Life and Times of Robert Capa, Alex Kershaw, describing the motives behind the founding of Magnum Photos, wrote as follows:

“Since 1945, Capa had been active in the American Society of Magazine Photographers. He had eloquently […]

Alternate History: Robert Capa and Time/Life (2)

So TIME/LIFE has made a slow-motion but dramatic about-face, going from studiously ignoring the myth of the London darkroom disaster at its public birthing in Charles Wertenbaker’s 1944 book and Capa’s certifying it in his 1947 memoir to enthusiastically promulgating it seven decades later. […]

Alternate History: Robert Capa and Time/Life (1)

Capa resigned his lucrative staff position at LIFE in January 1947 to go freelance once more. He may have made that choice in part so as not to bite the hand that fed him when his fictionalized memoir, “Slightly Out of Focus,” came out that fall, with its first formal, on-the-record claim directly from him that the magazine’s London staff had ruined his D-Day films. […]