Richard Whelan’s work on all matters related to the subjects of Robert and Cornell Capa should be considered fatally compromised and entirely unreliable, except when their overall narratives and specific claims can be verified by credible outside sources. It will take decades to undo the contamination of the literature on Robert Capa that traces directly to Whelan’s efforts on Cornell Capa’s behalf. […]
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Taken in tandem with Richard Whelan’s acknowledgment that he, Cornell Capa, and John G. Morris had effectively buried the Hansel Mieth letter about Robert Capa’s staging of “Falling Soldier” for 35 years, I view this as a confession of abject failure to fulfill the ethical obligations of biographer and historian. […] One morning Magnum’s Paris bureau chief Natasha Chassagne walked into the office to discover that she had been officially locked out. Richard Kalvar appeared like a jack-in-the-box and gave her fifteen minutes to vacate her desk and leave the building. It must have been brutal for her; from a distance it looked awful. The prevailing atmosphere at the following annual meeting was a lot of people congratulating themselves for having done this dirty deed. And the way mobsters always eliminate eyewitnesses, they were already targeting Jimmy Fox. […] One of the first things they tried when they hired me at Magnum was to set me against the staff. They explained who they liked, and who they didn’t like, put me up to such plots as firing staff members, or conspiring against them. I admit to having participated in some of that out of my own inexperience. […] Magnum is a kind of party in the political, not the fun, sense, a bankrupt Communist party riddled with conspiracy, lack of resolve, cut-throat egotism, secrecy, character assassinations and rumor-mongering, teetering on the edge of collapse from inefficiency. […] |
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