Robert Capa’s missing and supposedly destroyed D-Day negatives — the ones he shipped to London from Weymouth on the morning of June 7, the ones purportedly destroyed in a freak darkroom accident that night — sit today, intact and available for study, where they’ve sat for years: in the Robert Capa and Cornell Capa Archive at the International Center of Photography in New York. […]
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Here is the third and final part of an email exchange between myself and former LIFE picture editor John G. Morris, who assigned photojournalist Robert Capa to cover the D-Day invasion on Omaha Beach, delegated the development of the films he sent back and the making of prints therefrom, and shipped the results to New […] In “Get the Picture” (1998) and in other accounts before and since, Morris asserts that “A scrawled note (from Capa) said that the action was all in the 35-millimeter, that things had been very rough, that he had come back to England unintentionally with wounded being evacuated, and that he was on his way back to Normandy.” Never reproduced, not even in Morris’s 2004 book D-Day: Robert Capa, which includes much other documentation, this note may be mythical. […] The first of Capa’s Omaha Beach exposures shows the troops disembarking from the LCI on which Capa arrived. The next to last shows Pfc. Huston Riley, who recalls that immediately after helping to rescue him Capa ran for an outgoing LCI. In his memoir “Slightly Out of Focus,” Capa himself states that after he reached that LCI he made no more images of the battle. Thus the “magnificent eleven” constitute not just what Morris managed to “save” but the entirety of Capa’s take from Omaha Beach. […] |
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Alternate History: Robert Capa on D-Day (14)
These negatives in the Capa Archive at the International Center of Photography constitute portions of the rolls sent by Robert Capa to John Morris, LIFE magazine’s London picture editor, upon docking at Weymouth, England on the morning of June 7 — in other words, they represent the negatives supposedly “ruined” in the demonstrably mythical darkroom mishap caused by the possibly mythical “darkroom lad” Dennis Banks. […]