The Capa D-Day myth persists, as we can see from recent reiterations thereof. It will take time to dislodge it, and that may never happen completely; it’s become a meme, viral even before the web. But our efforts have borne fruit, as a result of which those who do repeat it from now on will brand themselves as lazy and irresponsible in the minds of more knowledgeable people. […]
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Capa’s surviving photos gave no evidence of the onslaught that had hit the beaches, and instead would raise doubt about the strength and significance of the landings. In short, they were precisely the kind of images the Allies wanted the Germans to see. And there’s small chance that was a matter of coincidence. […] Morris’s various tellings of the saga of Capa’s films omitted entirely a vital matter, that of censorship by the Supreme Headquarters Allied Expeditionary Forces (SHAEF). Any undeveloped film coming in from correspondents at the front was assumed, as a minimum, to be classifiable as secret material, so the handling of Capa’s film would both begin and end on the censors’ desk. […] This sequence of events partially explains the mystery of why it took 15 hours after the Chase anchored in Weymouth Bay for Capa’s film to reach LIFE’s assistant picture editor John Morris in London. Seven to eight of those hours were consumed by the simple challenge of Capa getting off the USS Samuel Chase and getting his film to the press message center. […] We are the “illiterates of the future” Moholy warned us about; and our children will be the illiterates of an even more hopeless future unless we transcend our current fantasies about photography education and align them at last with the higher realities of our time and place. […] |
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