Film that did make it off the beach and back to London had to face two additional obstacles. First, would the censors pass it? The second obstacle was perhaps the most daunting: would anyone care about the images? […]
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It is clear that the legend of a duffel bag full of D-Day still and motion-picture film “dropped overboard” is a fable. There is absolutely no evidence to substantiate it, and much to disprove it. […] This “lost film” tale centers on Utah Beach. In brief, the D-Day film from that beach was supposedly entrusted to a courier who then accidentally dropped it into the ocean while climbing aboard a ship. This seems to be merely a miasma of self-reinforcing rumors with no factual basis. […] The evidence, then, suggests that while his connection to Robert Capa mattered deeply to Morris on both personally and professionally, for Capa the relationship on those levels proved more peripheral — at least until the brief year between his hiring of Morris for Magnum and his death in Vietnam. Not a two-way street, in short, though Morris takes pains to intimate otherwise. […] We can date John Morris’s active involvement in generating the Capa D-Day myth to sometime during the summer or fall of 1954, when, as Executive Editor of Magnum Photos, he wrote the captions for a posthumous Capa portfolio that would appear in the 1955 edition of U.S. Camera Annual. […] |
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