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Alternate History: Robert Capa on D-Day (12)

My investigation of the circumstances surrounding Robert Capa’s images of Omaha Beach on D-Day, June 6, 1944, and the subsequent fate of his negatives, continues apace. I will publish some major findings at the end of this month. In the meantime, I’ll fill in some of the blanks in the story so far.

I’ve taken […]

What Happened in Vegas (2)

What is striking about current work is its diversity of style and mood, its attention to the sensuous and tactile, and its insistence on encompassing not only a wide range of sexual behaviors but also a full spectrum of sexual moods. This collective accomplishment unquestionably denotes a raising of the bar for what David Steinberg calls “sexual photography” — an embrace of the true complexity of sex at the present-day intersection of sex and photography. […]

What Happened in Vegas (1)

People here in the United States pursue in growing numbers what I call the photo-erotic, by which I mean the specific act of putting erotic behaviors on the visual record, playing them out in front of a lensed instrument loaded with light-sensitive materials or digital sensors, registering on film or in pixels our erotic inclinations — not just for our private delectation but also for wide distribution. […]

Guest Post 14: Q&A with John Morris (c)

Here is the third and final part of an email exchange between myself and former LIFE picture editor John G. Morris, who assigned photojournalist Robert Capa to cover the D-Day invasion on Omaha Beach, delegated the development of the films he sent back and the making of prints therefrom, and shipped the results to New […]

Guest Post 14: Q&A with John Morris (b)

In “Get the Picture” (1998) and in other accounts before and since, Morris asserts that “A scrawled note (from Capa) said that the action was all in the 35-millimeter, that things had been very rough, that he had come back to England unintentionally with wounded being evacuated, and that he was on his way back to Normandy.” Never reproduced, not even in Morris’s 2004 book D-Day: Robert Capa, which includes much other documentation, this note may be mythical. […]