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Alternate History: Robert Capa, John Morris, and the NPPA (3)

I can only describe the National Press Photographers Association’s Donald Winslow and Bruce Young, the writer to whom he assigned the magazine’s report on this blog’s investigation of Robert Capa’s actions on D-Day and the subsequent fate of his images, as severely compromised from the outset of their coverage of our research relating to Capa and his picture editor at the time, John Morris. […]

Alternate History: Robert Capa on D-Day, 21

It’s at once sad and comical to watch Morris and his coterie scrambling to find rationales, no matter how unlikely and absurd, for the impossibilities and contradictions in the various versions of Capa’s D-Day actions and the fate of his negatives that they’ve peddled over the past seven decades. Right now they’re making it up as they go along — and making fools of themselves as they do so. […]

Alternate History: Robert Capa on D-Day, 20

Morris has told this story hundreds of times since 1947, almost word for word every time (to judge by the dozens of such performances on record in print, audio, and video formats). Suddenly, at the age of 98, he conveniently recalls a crucial new detail for the very first time. I find it impossible to take seriously Morris’s recovered memory of the purported “advance packet” he now claims to have received on June 7, 1944 containing Capa’s pre-invasion films. […]

Alternate History: Robert Capa on D-Day, 19

The chances of Capa finding any way to get his pre-invasion films from the Chase, a Coast Guard ship, to Scherman’s Navy LST and into Scherman’s hands in that vast armada are slim to none. That’s without even asking why Capa would put Coast Guard and Navy and Army personnel to all that trouble simply to transfer to Scherman only his 35mm rolls (rather than his entire take) of what Morris has acknowledged were merely stock shots. […]