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Year-End Ends and Odds

Kim Kardashian, intent on extending her 15 minutes of fame indefinitely (or at least milking it for all it’s worth), will release a book of selfies next April. This gives a whole new meaning to the term “vanity publishing.” Titled “Selfish,” priced at $19.95, under the prestigious imprint of Rizzoli International Publications, it will run 352 pages and include more than 1,000 selfies — surely as redundant an act as one could conceive for someone whose image has become inescapable. […]

Alternate History: Robert Capa on D-Day (18)

Ironically, Robert Capa’s life and work — committed, above all, to the fight against fascism — has ended up, by his own doing, enmeshed in its very own “big lie,” which, repeated often enough (as that strategy’s progenitor predicted), has become what people believe. An object lesson in how “the big lie” functions. We’ve had 70 years of that lie — surely enough. It ends here. […]

Alternate History: Robert Capa on D-Day (17)

The recently published interview, “Rearview Mirror: John G. Morris: Normandy, 1944,” makes it clear that Morris no longer “stand[s] by [his] account of what happened in the London office of Life magazine on June 7, 1944 as first published in [his] book Get the Picture.” The research and evidence presented at this blog over the past six months have forced Morris to make significant revisions to and recantations of his narrative of the past 70 years re Capa’s D-Day pictures and their fate. […]

After the Kodak Century (2)

The irony, of course, is that instead of getting devastated by the digital evolution the Eastman Kodak Corporation could have owned it. The very first digital camera, after all, got born in one of Kodak’s own labs, the invention of one of its engineers, Steven Sasson, in 1975. […]

After the Kodak Century (1)

In September 2013, just months before I wrote this, Kodak emerged from bankruptcy, much diminished as a consequence of having sold off most of its patents, downsized and reconfigured now as a new-tech company concentrating on developing commercial and consumer digital printers and inks for the publishing, packaging, and advertising sectors. An enterprise that for almost a hundred years ruled as the undisputed alpha dog of its industry has fallen abruptly back into the pack. […]