Looking at John Szarkowski’s photographs and Cornell Capa’s, asking myself — based on that early evidence of personal tendency and taste — which of the two had surprised me most as advocates for photography by transcending the narrow-mindedness to which performers in any medium are prone in order to create an institutional environment with an atmosphere of tolerance and encouragement for all, the unequivocal answer that came was Cornell Capa. […]
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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. […] 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. […] 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. […] Unexpectedly, the dismantling of the myth of Robert Capa’s adventures on Omaha Beach on D-Day, June 6, 1944, and the subsequent fate of his negatives became the year’s main project at this blog. I also took up the collapsing market value of post-secondary degrees in studio art and photography; the willful, mindless destruction of an excellent example of such a program in Vevey, Switzerland, which I witnessed firsthand; the photographic strategies and style(s) of Shelby Lee Adams vs. his claim to documentarian status; and the insidious agenda of the “internet everwhere” tendency. […] |
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