The Mercedes Baptiste Halliday narrative legitimised Gian Butturini’s detractors, and kept them respectable. On paper, it superficially resembled a clear, ideological position, fuelled by a defiance of racial injustice. In actuality, it was a subterfuge, a mere foil – albeit one cut from noble principles – to hide the pettiest and basest of motives: the green-eyed monster of professional jealousy. […]
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For all of Moritz Neumüller’s profuse appeals to impartiality and critical objectivity, the very notion that Gian Butturini’s book LONDON had not only offended, but offended widely — indeed, globally — remains an untested one, founded not upon documentary evidence, but on faith, or magical thinking, alone. […] Exuding an exhaustive scholarliness and an air of academic authority, Neumüller’s textual apparatus thus becomes unstable on close inspection, at its worst incomplete, misleading, and factually inaccurate. … Parr and Butturini’s social media detractors, very limited in number and audience, never put forward a case to support their claims that Butturini’s London was a racist text. […] If anything describes my condition at this juncture, and for some years back, there you have it: I stubbornly cling to a dying profession, or, more accurately, my own eccentric mélange of such — criticism, historianship, investigative journalism, informed cultural reportage. […] However garbled we find Samuel Fuller’s version of what Capa told him, and no matter how far-fetched the specific detail of a “cocky German officer” seems, there’s no reason to doubt that the meeting between Capa and Fuller took place, nor that their conversation included an exchange about Capa’s D-Day experiences and the photographs he made that day. […] |
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