These represent the types of pointed questions that you’d get asked by a serious interviewer who’d done his research — not someone kissing up to you, like Bob Pledge at the ICP, and not someone invested in feeding the Capa legend, like his biographer or the curator of his archive. […]
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[Editor’s note: Following up on my analysis, in an earlier post, of the timing of Robert Capa’s arrival at and departure from Omaha Beach on the morning of D-Day, June 6, 1944, photojournalist and author J. Ross Baughman brings his experience as a combat photographer to bear on a frame-by-frame analysis of the 10 remaining […] Capa is still standing atop the landing ramp of the Higgins boat, shifting his camera slightly more to the left. He can now see a living timeline of the invasion’s progress spread out in front of him. The very first American soldiers hit Omaha Beach at 06:30 a.m., and at least 18 are shown after they struggled across the 300 yards to a steep incline of sand nicknamed The Shingle. […] In his own account of boarding the LCI which took him away from Omaha Beach, Capa describes an explosion that takes place moments after he came aboard, killing several crew members. Based on Lewis’s diary entry, that happened just minutes after they disembarked their troops — somewhere around 0750. If these details add up, then, Capa reached Omaha Beach at 0725 at the very earliest, and clambered into the relative safety of the LCI at 0750, just 25 minutes later. That boat departed Omaha Beach at at 0837. So Capa was at Omaha Beach for a maximum of 72 minutes, following the second-wave troops and photographing them for less than half an hour. […] |
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Guest Post 14: Q&A with John Morris (a)
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. […]