This document proves that John Morris was fully aware of, and an active participant in, that SHAEF/MoI censorship system, which fact he conveniently failed to mention in all of his subsequent accounts of the fictional darkroom disaster that supposedly “ruined” Capa’s D-Day films. […]
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In the end, it seems fittingly ironic that the Occam’s-Razor explanation for all of Capa’s missing D-Day negatives turns out to be the scissors of the censor. The legend of the lost negatives resulted from nothing more or less than the needs of Capa’s outsize ego. […] In place of the established myth, with its enticing melodrama, I supplied an alternative tale with its own attractions, a complex skein of personal and interpersonal motivations: camaraderie, fear, failure, guilt, self-protection, white lies. No less rewarding, I’d like to think, just in a different way. […] The fact that this roll, along with the other films most likely classified top secret, got developed in LIFE‘s darkroom under the supervision of not just darkroom chief H. C. “Braddy” Bradshaw and LIFE staff photographer Hans Wild but also a SHAEF custody officer, precludes any possibility of some fatal neglect during processing. […] Nothing about this time-consuming yet vital censorship process was included in Morris’s version of the film saga. It is Morris’s deliberate avoidance or trivialization of the topic that raises suspicion that there must have been much more than he was willing to discuss. […] |
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