All the evidence necessary to impeach the story that Morris and Capa and these others have told all these years, is presented as visual imagery in the brief TIME video from May 29, 2014. But it goes by too fast to analyze. You simply have to stop the flow of the video, freezing time by turning it into a set of still photographs, in order to read the images and words carefully. Then it becomes a confession. […]
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Robert Capa unquestionably had the skills required to make astonishing images at Omaha Beach on D-Day. He presented himself with his camera and lens at the historic setting from which he could have derived such images. But he pressed the shutter release a mere 11 times; that’s all he registered on his one roll of D-Day film. On this crucial occasion, the opportunity of a lifetime, he failed himself, his picture editor, his publisher, his public, and history itself. […] What pictures, existing and merely reported by the photographer and others, did Robert Capa make at Omaha Beach on June 6, 1944, and what do they have to tell us? We know (from the caption notes he sent to John Morris in London with his films that he returned from Normandy) that three of the four 35mm rolls he sent he’d actually made on shipboard the night before. That leaves only one roll of images from the landing itself. […] Despite the claims by John Morris, Robert Capa, and others that he made 106 exposures at Omaha Beach on June 6, 1944, the actual evidence — the negatives themselves, and Capa’s own caption notes — verifies that he exposed only one roll there before running away, making a maximum of 36 exposures, of which only 11 were successful and survived. The rest of his D-Day take constituted nothing more than pre-battle stock shots with negligible historic value, generically replicated by every photographer on every ship heading to Normany that night. […] |
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Guest Post 12: Rob McElroy on Robert Capa
The TIME video shows all of Capa’s original black & white negatives from June 6, 1944 (only nine of which have actually survived as original camera negatives), plus nine negatives that are purported to be some of the Capa negatives that were supposedly spoiled during development. The trouble is, the negatives TIME displays in this video, which supposedly show some of the spoiled Capa negatives, are totally faked. These negatives are a complete fabrication — and nowhere in the video do the producers explain what they did, how they did it, or why. […]