In the best kinds of journalism today, I always hope that a well-seasoned writer will help his subjects’ points of view to shine through it all. Unfortunately, in this latest exercise from the National Press Photographers Association, Bruce Young and Donald Winslow concentrated too much on their own preconceptions. […]
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I provided the National Press Photographers Association with timelines and an A-to-Z list of Capa’s D-Day offenses, expecting that these would be effectively condensed in what editor Donald Winslow described as a major feature story for the very next issue of the magazine. Several of my points survive in the nine-page story they created, certainly one of the longest articles I’ve ever seen the magazine publish during my 40 years as a professional photojournalist. Of course I was deeply disappointed when the thrust of my discoveries was diluted, scattered, and dismissed. […] The surrealist photocollages of Allen A. Dutton began to circulate in the 1960s, linking him to a cohort in photography that, collectively, challenged the photo establishment’s dictates regarding acceptable subject matter and content while, simultaneously, extending the range of approved craft practices. This put him in the company of Jerry Uelsmann, Les Krims, Arthur Tress, Bea Nettles, and other transgressive spirits expanding the definition of photography. […] Bruce Young’s “theory” of Capa’s boils down to the faith-based notion that if you take a mix of amateur psychoanalysis, “fog of war” uncertainty, and a tolerance of truthiness, and then you turn yourself around and you shake it all about, you can “more or less” reconcile the discrepancies, fabrications, misdirections, errors of fact, elisions, improbabilities, inconsistencies, and inherent contradictions embedded within Robert Capa’s and John Morris’s various divergent accounts. […] Thus a 7200-word article premised on a research project largely conducted by me incorporates a total of 75 words — slightly over one percent of its content — drawn from my portion of that research and my emails responding to Young’s questions about that project. […] |
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